Review: Very well engineered & easy to use, though it is a bit heavy cycling
With three points of contact, bikes are held firmly and securely, and it's easy to see what's going on with them by just glancing in your rear-view mirror. The EasyFold XT 3's big feature compared to Thule's other high-end racks like the VeloCompact and VeloSpace is that it folds for storage.
The wheel supports fold up like butterfly wings so that the whole lot ends up as a roughly cuboid lump 87cm tall, 31cm wide and 84cm long. It's still not exactly tiny, but that makes it much easier to stash in a corner of the garage until you need it. Your bikes are held at the bottom by ratchet straps round the wheels and at the top by clamps attached to arms that in turn mount on the rack's frame. Dubbed Acutight, the clamps click when they've reached sufficient torque to hold the bike so you can't overtighten them and risk damaging thin-walled frame tubes., a £22 rubber widget that wraps round the tube for further protection.Thule's XXL Fatbike Wheel StrapsThe bike arms are easily removed for repositioning. If you've put a bike on the wheel supports nearest the car, and then realise you need to put the next arm through its frame, you just take an arm off and thread it through; no need to unload bike #1. If you need to get into the back of the car when the bikes are loaded, the EasyFold XT 3 tilts out of the way so you can open your hatch or boot. This slightly confused the dogs at first, but they soon learned how to jump into the car at an angle.The EasyFold XT 3 grabs your towball with a lever-operated clamp that you adjust with a small dial on the side. Thule's instructions imply that you should adjust it so it needs 47kg of force to close the handle . You should therefore be able to tweak it so you just have to lean on it using your body weight to close it, but my partner Caroline couldn't manage to exert enough oomph; there's a definite knack to it. The Easyfold XT 3 comes with a 13-pin socket to hook up to your car's electrical systems; you'll need an adapter if your towball hitch has a 7-pin connector.Thule offers a £60 loading ramp for the EasyFold XT 3 so you can wheel them aboard rather than having to hoick them into place. That sounds expensive, but it folds up so it can be stashed in a compartment inside the rack and is therefore there when you need it. The EasyFold XT 3 weighs the best part of 23kg , so it's not something you ever want to carry very far. To help move it around, Thule has fitted a pair of wheels and a handle so you can just drag it from its hidey-hole in your garage to your car.I'm a big fan of towball racks. If you can't actually fit your bike inside your car, they're the best way of transporting it because they have less effect on fuel consumption than a roof rack, don't touch the car so can't damage the paintwork, and are the easiest rack type when it comes to loading and unloading bikes. The downside is that any rack on the back of your car makes your bikes vulnerable to theft and to damage from a shunt or careless reversing. The EasyFold XT 3 is sufficiently beefy that I suspect it'd provide at least partial protection for your bikes if you get hit from behind, at low speed at least. Thule deals with the theft problem by making the frame grabbers and the rack itself lockable. These aren't super-high-security locks, they're intended to discourage casual theft in service station car parks. If I'm leaving a bike-laden car for more than a minute or two I loop a D-lock or two through the frames. I found that when the rack was mounted on my towball, its wheels got in the way of plugging in the electrics. I dealt with this by bending the mounting plate, but using a drop plate to lower it might have been a more elegant solution. As with all towball racks, you'll need to check the load rating of your towball to know just how heavy a set of bikes you can carry. Thule specifies a maximum of 30kg for any single bike, and a maximum total of 60kg. However, if your towball is only rated at 60kg, for example, then the weight of the rack itself only leaves you 37kg for bikes.
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