etrailer | Saris Door County 2 Electric Bike Rack Review

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-review-sa...
Hi everyone. My name is Evangeline here at etrailer. And today we're gonna be taking a look at our Saris Door County 2-Bike Rack. This is an electric bike rack, and I like to call it the elevator bike rack. We're gonna take a look at this right here at etrailer. Now, this is a unique bike rack.

And it's not gonna be a fit for every vehicle or every bike. That's just how our different bike racks work. So, we're gonna take a look in this video at some different stats and different tips, some different guides and things that I learned while working with this bike rack, just to see if it's the right fit for you, your vehicle and your bicycles. What we have here is our Acura MDX with an aftermarket wiring harness. We actually install that right here at etrailer.

And this is probably the perfect location and perfect setup for wiring for our Door County. We have a seven-way wiring right near our hitch and it's easily accessible. So, we'll take a look at how that works and how to figure out if you have the right wiring. And if you don't, how to get one. So, let's see what a seven-way connection looks like.

So, here is the plug that's on our Door County, and then we have that seven-way socket. You can see how we have blades on the inside. This can also be called a seven-pin socket. This is not to be confused with a seven-way round socket since what we have is a seven-way blade. Also, don't confuse it with a four-pin socket, which looks like this.

Again, I think this is a perfect spot for our wiring harness just because it makes it easy to install the shank of our Door County. Taking a measurement from the center of where that seven-pin or that seven-way socket is to right where that hitch is, base it at about 10 inches apart. So, right there to right there. That gave us enough clearance for our plug to be plugged in while we install the bike rack. Some other vehicles may have it differently. So, let's take a look at some other vehicles and why it might be a little bit more difficult to install this bike rack on them and what we did to solve that. So, here we have a Toyota Forerunner. And you'll notice that the hitch is over here, but our seven-way is all the way over here by our spare tire. So, even with putting the Door County manually into the hitch, we still don't have enough length on the wiring to reach our bracket over here. So in this case, we're taking a quick measurement from that bracket to our hitch at about 20 inches away. What we needed to do was use an adapter. So, this plug right into our seven-way and created a second socket. So, if you've noticed that your seven-way wiring is kind of far from the hitch, this might be an issue for you. Here's another vehicle that we had some issues with. You can see how this also has seven-way wiring, but it did not come pre-installed or I guess, pre-hooked up from the factory. We have some of the blades working, but not all of them. So, let's take a look at it with our testers. So, only one light is lighting up with the most important one that we need to light up, these are 12th volt and you can see that is not on. So, what's happening here is that it's not hooked up. And then our way to test for that is with a circuit tester like this. So, on your seven-way wiring, you're gonna have an explanation of what blades power of what. You also have one on your Door County showing what you need to get connected. Now, we're gonna connect it, or I guess, test the blade for our running or 12 volt lights. And you can see that's not lighting up either. So, in that case, the solution usually is to go and open your hood and check near your battery. You'll see that your wiring harness runs all the way over there, but it may have tape on the end, or it just maybe blocked, or just may not be hooked up, so you would have to hook that up manually before this gets powered. So, comparing this with other bike racks, I haven't really seen any other bike racks that use that seven-way connection just because you don't need to lift and lower those other bike racks. Some bike racks do use a four-pin connection at most because they do have those tail light kits. An example of that would be the Yakima EXO System. A whole different species of bike rack though. So, for direct comparison, I would like to say I did a Thule EasyFold XT. Has a very similar design. You have the wheels, you have that folding design too. It's not as pricey as this and it's not powered by motor. It does use a ramp, but it has its pros and cons too. You can check that vid