Softride Bike Racks - Ingenious Design!

High End Specialty Hitch Mounted Bike Racks

Ivor Allsop and his family have sought to make everyday tasks easier. Like all of our products, Softride Access Racks developed out of necessity. Ivor's brainchild arose with the realization that his five-foot wife, Betty, would never be able to lift her bike atop the family Suburban. Like he had been doing for nearly 25-years, Ivor sought to make this burdensome process easier by creating a hitch mounted bike rack.

In one afternoon Ivor and his two sons, Jim and Mike, sat down and brainstormed what was the first hitch-mounted bike rack. The men quickly went to work patenting their ingenious parallelogram design that allows individuals to lower their rack parallel to the ground. The parallelogram functionality is unsurpassed because it does not "dump" bikes onto the ground when the user lowers the rack. This allows the user to easily access the rear of their vehicle without having to remove their bikes from the rack.

Seventeen years later, the Allsop family & the Softride team have maintained the same primary focus solving consumer problems. This year marks an exciting evolution for Softride as they unveil four new hitch mounted racks, including two upright racks, a tray style rack and a cargo rack. Maintaining the "access" advantage, Softride has updated the features and aesthetics of their racks significantly expanding the line. The four new racks will allow Softride to serve a much larger range of consumer needs from the Access Dura to the premium aluminum Access Elite.