Outdoor Retailer hits Minneapolis August 19–21 — the biggest trade show the outdoor industry has. TerraGnar isn't exhibiting this year, but the trends coming out of it are worth watching anyway. Two of them affect anyone hauling a bike, whether you're at the show or not.
E-bikes are getting heavier, and hauling gear hasn't caught up
The growth in e-bikes right now isn't commuter bikes. It's adventure and touring builds — bigger batteries, bigger payloads, meant to go further and rougher. Riders are loving it. Hauling gear is lagging behind it. A lot of racks on the market were built around lighter analog bikes, and they flex, rattle, or strain under an e-bike's extra weight. If you've loaded a 55-lb adventure e-bike onto a five-year-old rack, you've felt this.
Bed racks are going modular — which helps and hurts
The bigger brands are all moving the same direction: modular crossbars, half-racks, hybrid platforms you can configure around bed access. That's a real upgrade from the one-size tailgate pad era. The tradeoff: more parts means more failure points, and more stuff to lose track of at a trailhead before sunrise. The harder engineering problem isn't adding configurations — it's solving modularity with fewer parts, not more. That's the detail worth watching for.
Where we fit into this
This is exactly the shift we built for. A 55-lb e-bike is not something you want to lift and wrestle onto a rack — you want to load it and go. With ours, you load the bike with the tailgate down, then close the tailgate. That's it. No lifting a heavy bike over a raised gate, no fighting a rack that wasn't built to move with the truck. As e-bikes get heavier and more people haul them, that one difference matters more every year.
Bottom line
E-bikes are outgrowing the gear built to haul them, and the brands solving that with less complexity — not more — are the ones worth watching. That's the lens we're bringing to this trend, show or no show.
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