We’ve always been fans of hitch bike racks, but we came across another reason that we hadn’t thought of. One of our customers recently did an experiment with gas mileage while carrying bikes. We were surprised at the results and thought we’d share them.
Brian Johnson drives a 2006 Toyota Prius and was looking for a solution for carrying two bikes. He started with a roof rack and measured the resulting impact on mileage. The empty bike racks on his roof caused his mileage to drop between 1-2 mpg. When driving with his bikes on the rack he found that the mileage dropped by nearly 10 mpg!
He does a lot of driving and decided to try a hitch rack to see what the impact would be. He bought the Toyota Prius Trailer Hitch and a Softride Versa hitch bike rack and started tracking the mileage. The impact of the rack without bikes on it was not measurable, as it is in the wind shadow of the car. When the bikes were on the hitch bike rack, the mileage only dropped by about 4 mpg, a savings of 6 mpg!
Now, it’s not as if you’re going to retire on the savings, but at $4 per gallon, every mpg matters! We decided to calculate a scenario to put into perspective. Let’s say you go on three 250 mile family biking trips per year. Plus, you drive your car 15k miles a year and get 45 mpg on average.
That give 750 miles driven with bikes for a savings of 3.1 gallons of gas by using a hitch bike rack. The extra roof rack drag adds an additional 15.5 gallons of gas over the 15k miles. At $4 a gallon, having the hitch rack would save $75 per year, or $375 over five years of ownership. Not bad! Who knows what it would be with a car that is less efficient than a Prius?
If anyone else out there has a knack for science and wants to log some miles, let us know what you come up with.