What is the perfect bike hauling vehicle?

[jobob]

We just bought a Honda Element and we luuuve it. It's a great bike-carrying vehicle. Halfway decent gas mileage (24 mpg with automatic transmission, about the same with manual - sad that nowadays that rates as "halfway decent", but it was way better than the other vehicles we looked at ). It's also very easy to drive, it doesn't feel like a big SUV.

With the 2 rear seats folded up, we can roll both our bikes in and secure them to the side with bungie cords. Since we don't need it for carrying passengers besides the two of us, it works out fine. But if we wanted to, we could keep one of the rear seats folded down if we had a passenger. [Ed to add - we could probably carry more than 2 bikes that way, but that's all we tried for now].

Lee's now rigged it up with 2 fork mounts on the rear floor so that, instead of rolling in the bikes intact, we can take off the front wheels and roll the bikes in backwards and secure the forks to the mounts,we think it's a better solution for long drives. Plus we can have both rear seats in place. [oops,that's wrong ... senior moment ].

The rear seats are not particularly comfy so I wouldn't advise it if you want to use it with passengers a lot. Plus, it only seats 4. But this was a big improvement over the truck that replaced it, with the "extended cab" in which the hapless 3rd passenger (usually me!) would have to sort of lay sideways in the back, ugh. But we have another car (mine) in which we can carry passengers so that wasn't an issue for us.

The Element replaced Lee's old Toyota truck with a cab shell, which we also had rigged with the fork mounts in the floor of the cab. This worked out really well (except for the rare times we had a 3rd passenger, see above ) and we were planning to get another small truck with cab to replace this one, but it seems no-one is making small trucks anymore - even Toyota's version of mini truck is on steroids these days and the gas mileage for all the small trucks we looked at stank, plus the trucks combined with a decent cab shell cost a bloody fortune now. (The Element cost us about $21 K with all the taxes & everything , we got a 2005 model ).

Hope this helps, - Jo.