Hi everyone. So a couple years ago, I started an SUV
RVing Facebook group and it's grown to about 15, 000 members. It's a large active group. If you're
interested in that, I'll put a link to it in the video description, or you can just search for
SUV RVing on Facebook and you'll find it. But I bring that up because a lot of people post about
SUV tents. They have questions about tents; Are they worth getting? There are various types of
these tents, but they all basically attach to the back of your vehicle. Some go down onto the
ground, some just stay above here and hang from the the rear hatch. I have no experience with these.
I've never used them, I've never really wanted to have experience with them because it's just one
more thing to do once you get to camps, just one more thing to set up. But I wanted to try it out
just so that I have the experiences so I can share it with you guys, and so I went on to Amazon and
bought the cheapest SUV tent on Amazon. That's what I have right here. I'll put a link to this also
in the video description. This was I believe 79 dollars. Comes in two versions and I think it also comes
in a couple different colors. I think there's a black one, this one is tan because it matches
the kind of sandy tan color of my car here but the two versions of the tent are for big SUVs and
small SUVs. Because this is a big SUV, I got the big version. I think the small version is about, what
was it, like ten dollars cheaper something like that. And so I've come out here into the beautiful
mountains of Idaho. I found this campsite. There's a you can probably hear it, there's a creek right
here, right next to camp. Gives some nice ambiance here to the video and to to the campsite. I've
come out here specifically to set up and test out this tent. Let's start! I've never taken it
out, I've never used, it still has the tag on it. I don't know anything about it, never set it up,
so let's see how it goes. Okay. let's take it out. Plop the stuff sack on the ground. I don't think
this comes with any poles, I think it just uses the structure of the rear hatch here to hang from. I believe there's some straps. Okay a couple of tent stakes and some cord, some white paracord
kind of stuff. These have these little adjusters on them. I don't know if you can see that but
it lets you adjust the length, the tied off paracord. Little stuff sack for the tent
stakes. I'm seeing lots of straps and hooks. I'm just trying to wrap my head around which
end is which on this thing, give me a second here. Okay, I think I've figured this out... maybe... possibly. That did not work. I don't think there are
instructions that come with this. Yeah there are no instructions
and there's no picture. And I remember reading that on the reviews on
Amazon, there are no instructions that come with it and, I bought this like a month and a half
ago so my memory's a little fuzzy on how this gets set up. Just hang on with me here,
bear with me here I'll figure this out. Starting to come together. I think that's it! And so we have it, and I have to say, it fits pretty darn well! This is not
made specifically for this vehicle. This is just a generic SUV tent but it's
a really good fit. It took me about 10 minutes to set this up and again, that was with fumbling
around not knowing what I was doing, not having any instructions. At some point in this video
I'm going to take it down and then put it back up again. I think maybe after I show you all
the features here, all the bells and whistles, I'm going to do that. Take it down, see how long it
takes to take down, put it back up see how long it takes to put back up now that I know where all
the straps and everything go. This is, by the way, not sponsored by this company. I
bought this thing, they did not send it to me. And so here we have on the back here one
big door. You can see the zippers right here. And so this can open- all the way up so you could get in or get out this
way. That's nice And this is all mesh back here. This is all no CM mesh, it's a fine mesh, better
than what you'll find on a lot of bug screens so that's a plus. There is this little awning part
that I have rolled up I'll take this out in a minute, but this can this is just like a basically
a piece of fabric that can extend out this way as an awning, or if you want to completely weather
seal... well I don't know how weatherproof this thing actually is, but if you want to weather seal
this as much as possible, you can zip it up here and here so that the the mesh is covered
up with the with a more waterproof fabric. On the bottom here are several straps. These
are elastic straps and on the end of each one is a plastic hook. I'd feel better if these were
metal. I suppose you could probably change that. You could switch them out. So there are a couple
hooks here. There are two hooks on each side for the tires and then there are I think three or
four hooks along the bottom here with again with the elastic straps you just attach those to things
underneath there and overall it creates a pretty, actually, surprisingly decent seal around the whole
thing. I realized also that it came with several of these little magnets, they were attached
to the tent stakes. These are not very strong. I imagine these are to, you know, if you have a
gap here or something like that you could, you know, stick that there but I mean it is such a weak
little magnet. That's not going to do anything if there's any wind. Any wing comes through it'll just
pop that thing right off. And then on the top here you can see there's some paracord, so I actually
added that after inspecting it, the paracord here is mine. So there are - let
me get up here - and show you. There are these loops here, but there were no
cords, there was no cordage attached to this to to anchor the top. I think it would probably
be okay without that, but I had this tan paracord, which surprisingly matches the
tent here, so I just used that to tie off to the to the back end of the the rail here. And then
again I did the same thing on the other side. Now let me undo this and I'll see how it goes, see how it works. Like I said this can be secured. There's another
zipper on either side. Not bad, not bad. And then on each corner of the
bottom of this tarp part, of this awning part, there's a little webbing loop and a little
plastic ring. So that's what you use to tie out this awning part and for that I'm
going to use this white cord that came with this thing. This is the lightest, cheapest
feeling cord. Oh there are four pieces. I thought there were just two of these of these pieces of
white cord but there were four. So you could use two of them to do what i did on top there then use
the other two as tie downs for this awning part. And now I'm going to take down the
whole thing, see how long it takes. Put it back up see how long that
takes. Let's start my stopwatch now. Well... Doesn't fit perfectly back into the bag here.
I wish the bag were a little bit bigger. Maybe if you take the time to, you know, fold it in the
right places and tightly compress it as you roll it up and then slide that in, you know, maybe
that could work, but in reality I think most of us are just going to try to stuff the thing
in here. And I don't know if you remember at the beginning of this video, but even then even when
I got it in the mail, it was sticking out of the top a little bit here, so that's good enough for
now... and let's now set it back up. That took... four minutes. One minute of that was rolling
up the awning thing so if you're not using that, three minutes. Now let me start
it again to get it set up. Well that wasn't pretty, but that took four
minutes 45 seconds. If you knew what you were doing, you could do it in three or four minutes. I
still do not know what I'm doing, but yeah. Either way, doesn't take too long to get it set
up, even if you're fumbling around like I am. One thing you don't want when you're camping in a
tent of any kind is loose fabric, loose material. Stuff like this because if it's windy this
is just gonna be moving around all night, fluttering around all night, and it'll be loud.
I wish there was a way to secure this better, then as far as the looseness of the tent
itself goes, I mean it's loose but it's not too bad. I think, let's see, oh there
you go there's that does that sound bring back terrible memories of being storm bound in a tent
for you? Because it does for me. Yeah you don't want that sound. Well let me show you the view from the
inside here. Right away, the first thing that I notice is just how much more airy it feels in here.
So usually again I have this back door closed and I have the rear window open which takes up about I
guess this much room, but this is, I mean, this is so luxurious feeling, so spacious and I feel much more
connected to the outside. Like I can hear the creek much louder and I'm getting much more airflow
from this versus having the the rear window open, which, of course is, I mean you'd expect as
much. This is a huge a much larger opening than just the rear window, but that's pretty
cool. One thing to note is that these seams do seem to be sealed. There's like, I don't know
if you can really see it, but there's seam tape that's gone over here, so there should be some
degree of waterproofness on those seams. I don't know how much stock I would put in
that. I wouldn't want to trust my life to to that being waterproof, but I think that
in most downpours you'd probably be fine. Now this isn't really the kind of tent that
gives you more living space, it's really just for ventilation and to feel closer to the outdoors,
to bring a little bit more of the outdoors in. If you do want to get more living space by
adding a tent, again, there are tents that are like regular tents, but then there's a tube
basically of fabric on the side of the tent and that tube goes around the back end of your
vehicle of like a minivan or an SUV like this. If this video does well I might buy one of those
on Amazon and test it, so if you like this video you want to see more stuff like this, give this
a like. It snowed on me earlier today, but I think we're mostly done with
the bad weather, so this isn't going to be like a comprehensive all-weather test of this
thing. I just wanted to bring it out on a trip, set it up, give you guys my first impressions,
see how I liked it. I don't think I'm going to be using this very often on my trips. I
think I'll probably use it occasionally, if it's like super hot outside and I want maximum
airflow, if I have an awesome view back here maybe I would set this up so to just give me like a more
open window, a broader look, a better look at that view. I'll continue to use this occasionally
in the future and give you guys updates on it, but yeah, I think it's time for dinner. I'm
gonna go ahead and enjoy my peace and quiet for the rest of the night here and my pieces
of pizza and I'll see you guys in the morning. Good morning I slept really, really
well last night, I got about 10 hours of sleep. It was fantastic. Before
I talk about the tent though and how it all went, I forgot to show you the creek
yesterday. It's just right behind camp here Really pretty little creek. Basically the tent worked as expected and there
were a couple of things that I wanted to touch on here. The first is that I don't think any bugs
got in now there aren't a ton of mosquitoes out here at this time of year or other bugs, but there
are some and I don't think any of them got into the car through the tent so that's
a plus and second, it was much colder in the car last night than it would have been if i had just
opened up the windows in the car without putting the tent on. Now that's not surprising, that's
pretty obvious given how big of an opening, how much air there is and so that can be either a good
thing or a bad thing. This time of year, I mean, it got down below freezing last night, it was
chilly. I stayed plenty of warm with my sleeping bags, but the inside of the car I could just tell
it was colder than it otherwise would have been. In the summer, that's awesome. If you're camping
in the desert, great. If you're camping higher up in the mountains or in the shoulder seasons, then
maybe you might not want that that abundance of of cooler outside air coming into your car. Overall,
cool little tent. I'd say it's worth 80 dollars. If you get a handful of nights out of it, I think it
would be worth it. I don't know what the long term durability is of something like this. I'm
guessing not great. One thing I did want to show you is on top of the tent here. There's
dew or condensation on top of the tent here. It's 9:37, the sun has been up for a little while
now and so it's been burning off the water on top of there, but pretty soon here I'm going to be
packing that up and putting it into its stuff sack and that is one of my least favorite things
about tent camping is putting away a wet tent in the morning. Just wrangling with all of that
wet nylon is not very fun. Now if you're the kind of person who stays at camp for days at a time,
then yeah, all of the water on there will probably burn off by the end of the day, so that's not a
huge issue, but again if you're packing up camp in the morning, that is something you're going to
have to contend with probably more often than not unless you're in really dry climates, unless you
are in the desert. I think that'll just about do it for this video. I'm gonna break camp and
get out of here. Overall I could see myself potentially using this in two circumstances; one if
it's raining a lot but I want to have some airflow. Like in the past, when I've opened up that
that back window in the car without the tent and it was raining a lot, some water did get in my
sleeping bag was a little bit wet in the morning, so something like this would help with that. And
then also, like I said yesterday, if it's really hot and I want a lot of airflow then I would open up
both the side windows and the back there, put that tent on the back, get just a lot of airflow going,
try to get it as cool as possible inside. I'd say that something like this is worth getting if
it fits with your camping style. It doesn't really fit with mine because again I like to to pull
into camp and be done and in the morning I like to get up and go without having to mess with a tent.
That's to me the appeal of camping in your vehicle. But you know everyone is different everyone's
style of camping is different and if you are interested in this kind of thing, then yeah, I
mean it's a good little tent for eighty dollars. I'll keep it packed away in the car or up in the
cargo box and I'll take it on trips with me and if I encounter a situation where I need to
use it then I wouldn't hesitate to pull it out. I hope that was helpful, again, if you want to
check out the link for this tent I'll put that in the description down below. Thanks
for watching. Let me know what you think, let me know if you have any questions,
and I'll see you guys in the next one. Be sure to check out adventure know-how my
new site where you can gain access to a map of all of my free campsites plus monthly
bonus videos that you won't find anywhere else. Learn more at adventureknowhow.com and
for links to everything else SUV RVing related, visit suvrving.com. Links to these sites
and more will be in the video description.
