I mean let’s be realistic here, if you have an SUV instead of a more substantial vehicle like a 4Runner then you can only get a lighter hard shell anyway. And BEING a soft shell makes this light enough for an SUV. And it looks like this soft shell is much larger than a hardshell that must not exceed SUV weight. So although there will obviously be better options for a substantial truck considering that you can go with very large hard shells, for an SUV this might very well be the best option. Personally I’d rather have something that’s much bigger and easy to setup, at the expense of having to put up with some noisy soft tent noise while driving. As opposed to having a hard shell that’s a lot smaller.
Such a good point! With my little SUV, roof weight is pretty important, especially not wanting to 'feel' top heavy when I'm driving around. Having this tent on there, I noticed about 2mpg deduction and not that much roof tent noise. At least not more than having a roof rack up in general which is already kind of noisy, unless I keep the sunroof closed and covered. The biggest perk here is that it's so speedy setting up the tent. It takes 2 minutes to remove the soft cover, but about 30 seconds to unfold it with NO having to reach in the tent to lift up struts. Kind of evens out with a hard shell of similar size.
