Can You Trust Suction Cup Technology? Allen’s Smart Suction Go Rack Might Change Your Mind

Source Domain: www.slowtwitch.com

The technology has been around for a while, but it’s still not easy to trust your however-many-thousand-dollar bike on a suction-cup bike rack. But what if that rack came with an app that let you know if there was anything to worry about? When the folks from Allen reached out to me to see if I was interested in giving the new Smart Suction Go Compact 1-Bike Rack a try, I figured it was time to put my hesitations about the technology aside and put the rack to the test – especially once I heard that I would be forewarned if anything was going wrong before my bike disappeared off the top of my car.

For those who aren’t familiar with Allen bike racks, the company got its start way back in 1967 when Dick Allen, a Harvard physics graduate, was laid off from his job working on NASA’s Apollo program thanks to government budget cuts. Since he wanted to take his family on trips to Cape Cod and into the mountains with their bikes, and there weren’t affordable rack options available, he started drafting up bike rack designs and then building them in his garage. By 1971 he was selling Allen Bike Racks across the United States. Over the years the brand expanded beyond trunk racks to add hitch racks, spare tire racks, bike trailers and strollers to the mix.

Last year Allen added another innovative product to the line up – the Smart Suction Bike Rack, its first venture into the suction-cup rack world. What made the Smart Suction rack different were the bluetooth sensors that monitored the pressure and provided warnings if you needed to check on the rack. This year the company released the Smart Suction Go, which offers the same real-time monitoring, but in a more compact form factor than the original Smart Suction rack.