From past experience of driving fully loaded with 7 person and a week's worth of luggage (including jamming bags into all of the space underneath the seats Id thought it'd made perfect sense to buy a roof box.
See, the interior 'listed' loadable space with all 5 back seats down was 1820 litres (obviously add in the 5 seat and people and it's tiny!)
During my hunt I somehow convinced myself to upgrade from a cheaper unbranded set costing about £150 to £290! This was based on the fact it'd looked better, had slightly better fuel consumption (which these days will pay for themselves) and being Thule branded could be used on other vehicles.
The cheap deal: (from £139.95)
http://www.roofbox.co.uk
for a package including Cruz roof bars and Karrite Odyssey 325 root box.
However my car roof rails has no sunroof but with 3 sets of 2 holes on the inside which meant I had to go for the premium set costing £154.85!)
In the end I went for Karrite Odyssey 360 (in grey) and the Thule Aerobars kit.
The roof box itself is attached rather simply ith 4 large U bolts (and nuts on the inside and offers 2 luggage straps to tie down any large objects. It also had it's own lock and can only be opened from one side.
During my research I found out that Karrite is actually Thule's own brand (albeit their value brand if you will)
The Thule roof-bar package that I ended up going for was the Rapid System 753 consisting of:
* Thule Rapid System 753
* Thule Aero Bar 861
* Kit 4011 Fixpoint XT (cos of the 3 holes on the roof rails.)
Instructions for fitting should I lose them are here:
http://www.thule.com/pdf.axd?ext=\Classification_1_root\Image_Hierarchy\ImageFolder_175958\ImageFolder_177936\184011.pdf
In the end due to time constrants (3 days to go on family trip and still no box/rails) I got PFJones in trafford to match the cheapest deals I could find online:
http://www.pfjones.co.uk/
When I got there, day 1 they couldn't try as the fixing part had to be ordered/transferred from their Stroke-on-Trent branch, day 2 I got there with only 10 minutes before they shut so couldn't. However day 3 came and I got there around lunch and they spent 20 minutes fitting the box and bars to my car in the rain. Cheers guys.
After driving a mixture of 1300 miles with/without the box not much noise / wind resistance could be noticed. However my car trip computer said it was giving about 30mpg on the motorways which is A LOT lower than expected/usual! photos to come later....
No comments:
Post a Comment