etrailer | Thule AeroBlade Edge Crossbar Installation - 2020 Audi Q7

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-install-t...
John: Hey guys, John here from etrailer.com. Today we have our 2020 Audi Q seven. We're going to be taking a look at the Thule AeroBlade Edge roof rack. This is a very sleek design that looks like an OEM crossbar system, the crossbars end in the legs. And so it just looks very sleek, very aerodynamic, and it's a great fit for this vehicle. It's designed to help get cargo up out of our vehicle and up on our roof to give us more room and to load larger things like a kayak or maybe a bike, the AeroBlade Edge crossbars have a nice aerodynamic design.

So it's a little bit bigger than the front but then tapers off at the end. It has an aluminum construction. So we don't have to worry about any rusting or corroding, but we still retain the 165-pound weight capacity that standard for roof racks, this rubber strip on top covers our T-track.So we're able to use accessories that clamp around our crossbar as well as one's of the insert into the T track. But this rubber strip also helps to eliminate wind noise. That might be going through the T-track.

Here we'll remove the cover. I'll show you what it looks like inside. We have just a single bolt that holds each leg. So it's a very easy installation. And then here's the T slot that we mentioned.

So it really helps to make our whole system look nice and sleek when we use this to mount our accessories. Plus if we upgrade to the locking core, that locks the cover onto our leg, which then locks our whole crossbar system and any T mounted accessories to our vehicle.One of the most common questions we get is when someone has a moonroof or a sunroof on their vehicle, they want to know if there's going to be enough clearance between the crossbars and the glass. With this setup and on the Q seven, we do have enough room with, roof rack installed, from our glass to the bottom of the crossbars is right about three inches. I don't see us having any accessories that are going to use a mounting system. That's, that thick that it's going to make contact.

However, when we do open up the moonroof, we will have reduced clearance. Here we have our moon roof opened. We're going to measurement here at the back of the crossbar from the glass to the bottom of the crossbar is right about two and a half inches. So it does reduce our overall clearance here. Now, even if we do have enough clearance to mount an accessory on the crossbar system, it's important to note that with the roof rack installed, even though this is a high end roof rack, that really does a great job at reducing wind noise and drag.If we open up the moon roof, we're going to be creating a different kind of aerodynamic system. And we'll probably be hearing some noise. Now that we've gone over some of the features, let's go ahead and install it together. So we've already installed the front bar for our system. We'll head and install the rear. And what I recommend doing when we get our kits is to open up all the boxes, lay out the hardware out, make sure everything's accounted for before you get started, you're going to insert the plastic core into our cover. So you'll locked and unlocked. We're going to make sure that the line is going in the unlocked position, place it, press it in place like that. Now these are plastic and these basically to serve as a way to keep the cover in place. We can upgrade these two metal lock cores to actually physically lock the covers and our roof rack to our system, to our vehicle. And then next, we will insert the rubber strip into the T track of our crossbar.And it has like these two grooves. And so what I do when I install it is I basically take this one groove and kind of feed it in first. And the other side presses down pretty easily. So go the length of the crossbar. You might need to work it back and forth a little bit. If you're having , if you're having problems, getting it to sit properly with the rubber strip installed, we're now ready to start assembly in our hardware. These pieces here are what we're going to use to attach our roof rack to our factory rails on our vehicle. So we're going to set these aside for when we go to put our roof rack on the vehicle, we'll grab the rest of our fit kit. We'll take the rubber pad. And then these metal brackets are going to make sure that the single hole is going to go down on the rubber piece, the dual holes, those are going to be butted up against the legs on our crossbar system. So do that for both sides.Now we ready to attach these to the legs on our crossbar. So we mentioned making sure that we have the two holes for the fit kit. And what that d