Car Top Carrier Advice, Please!

We have both. A soft one with a zipper and also a hard top one.

We often use both together. We need a bigger vehicle!

The hard top is easier to pack. And it's more secure. It has a lock. It would be harder to break into - if someone was going to try. It's waterproof. It holds a ton. And we don't have the biggest one. So when we camp, we can fit a lot up there - and it's great for tossing the sleeping bags, and duffle bags and bits and pieces like beach toys and chairs.

The soft one is just not as good when it comes to rain - and you have to strap it all down.

The hard top one is screwed into our car's roof somehow on our rack. My husband handles that but easy enough to get on/off.

I think either would handle a couple of suitcases. We started with the soft then upgraded but kept the soft for stuff we didn't worry about getting wet.

Hope that helps :)

We had one for decades and it was great - hard sides, rain-proof. It was easiest to put on with 2 people but in a pinch I did it myself a couple of times. I'm sure they don't have our model anymore but I'm pretty sure it was an Ex-Cargo - it had a snail on it which I am sure was a play on words with "escargot". When we got ours, we attached it with hooks that went in between the top of the door and the body of the car, and later on we attached it to the roof rack of our new car. The carrier lasted longer than the cars - probably 20 years! The hard surface makes it easy to hose off at the end of a trip, and it was light enough to store up in the garage rafters during the winter.

We didn't put as many suitcases in it because those tend to stack easily in the car. We used it more for beach chairs & umbrellas, towels, sand toys in a mesh bag, roller blades, bike helmets, sports equipment and so on. These are the bulky things that slide around in the car and just take up a lot of space. I kept all food and toiletries in the car because things up on top do get really hot in the sun. And of course I wouldn't have put electronics in there.

It was pretty easy to get things out of it, just by pushing the lid up a bit (or, if necessary, we one person flipped it up and over to the side, and the other person "caught" it on the descent. We opened the car door and stood up on the edge, and could reach in to get things. I think it might be tough if you had a bunch of small things in there that rolled around during transit, but anything in large sports bags or with a handle on it was easy to do.

Good luck deciding!

We had one from Sears. We called it "the hamburger". It was hard plastic and it lasted at least 25 years. It connected to the roof rack.
I think it was an X-cargo.
Spend the money. You only buy it once.

I don't know if they still have them but many years ago I rented one from U-Haul; it wasn't expensive and I could drop it off at a U-Haul center when I arrived.