etrailer | Swagman E-Spec Electric Bike Rack Review

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Zach: Hey guys, Zach here at etrailer.com. And today we're going to be showing you the Swagman E-Spec two bike platform style bike rack. This is going to be a really nice way to carry your electric bikes. As you can see here, I have a traditional mountain bikes, so it carries regular bikes as well. And my favorite part about it is, it's so versatile. So I have it on the back of this SUV here today, but it's also going to work out with your RVs, your bumper pull campers, fifth wheels, and even flat tow setups.

If you're doing it with a flat tow setup, we recommend putting it on the back of the vehicle that's being flat towed, and not between the two, even if you do have the double hitch back there. And it just creates maybe too close of a contact area, where if you're making a tight turn, that your bike rack may interfere with your towed vehicle.If you have an E-Bike, you know they're heavy. So you need a bike rack that's going to hold up to that. This has a weight capacity of 70 pounds per bike. So, even this bigger one that we have here today is still well underneath that do remove the battery though.

That's not only going to save you weight, but it's going to save a lot of stress when you're going down the road. And when it comes to carrying that much weight on the back of your vehicle, and especially like your motor home or a fifth wheel, you want it to be solid. And this bike rack is pretty solid, you can see there's a little bit of movement right there, but that's just because this bike rack can tilt up against the vehicle. So, there is definitely going to be a little bit of play there, but that's going to be an every bike rack out there. If it moves at all, it's going to have a little bit of play there but over than that, customers love how solid this bike rack is.This is a really solid metal rack.

It has a few plastic pieces like these knobs here, and a couple of customers have commented about it, they don't feel super confident with that. We've never had any issues of those coming undone. They eventually over time may wear out, but you can pick up replacement parts for this bike rack. But I think it's going to hold up for a long time. And if you're worried about those sliding around like those customers, there is a little screw in the bottom here, so it doesn't allow these cradles to fall off gone going down the road.

But even the cradle, this metal has really durable straps to hold it in place. I think this is going to do a really good job of holding your bikes.This is a frame out design and what that means is that these hooks up top, grab onto that tap tube, and hold it in place and then it rests down in those wheel cradles that we we're talking about earlier and then we have those nice straps holding it in place. Now, with this style bike rack, it's not really recommended to put a carbon fiber bike on here, but if you're buying this bike rack, you're looking for something that's heavy duty. It's going to carry a lot of heavy style bikes, like our E-bike and this mountain bike doesn't weigh a lot, but it's definitely a little bit easier than a carbon bike. Now, if you're wanting to carry fat tire bikes, this isn't equipped out of the box where it, you can't pick up an adapter and basically you're just going to get some wider trays and a longer strap, but it's still going to be capable of holding fat bikes if you pick up that wheel set.And when it comes to holding our bike down into the cradles, I like this style strap. It has a really nice pad there on it. Kind of has a little bit of give to it that is going to protect our wheels so we don't have to worry about those getting scratched up. You can see it just kind of moves they're in place to get a better fit. And then it holds on and those metal cradles. Now, these are going to only work with tires up to three inches in width. If you have something that's wider than that, that's when you'd pick up that Swagman fat bike adapter kit that we have.Now, when it comes to how these hooks go on, they're just clamped down, they have these releases right here and they just slide in place. So, they're making contact with your bike. You can see this bike rack here is pretty scratched up. This one's an older one. It's seen some abuse in its days, but when we get that down, that padding right there is going to do a good job of holding it in place, but also protect it. It may scuff it, but it's not going to scratch it like you see on here.And what I se