Ultimately, a rooftop tent is worth it if you know you can put it to good use. There are many regular tents that can be purchased for a much lower price, but the added safety and convenience of a rooftop tent can be well worth the extra cost. No matter how light or aerodynamic the RTT is, your gasoline consumption will suffer after you install one. Your vehicle will be less aerodynamic, especially on the road, and you will be forced to move more weight than usual.
From a mileage perspective, it's like having an additional adult passenger in your car at all times. Losing a couple of miles per gallon may not seem like much, but for trucks and SUVs that consume a lot of gas, even a minor blow to fuel efficiency picks at the gas station. A rooftop tent is worth it when you want to go camping and travel in your own car. Rooftop tents are the intermediate option next to a regular tent and motorhome.
Traveling with a rooftop tent has many advantages. Rooftop tents are much cheaper than a motorhome, are easy to set up and have a comfortable option to sleep a few meters above the ground. At this point, you probably sound like a cantarrabias or, better yet, an outdoor purist. But as the outdoor community expands at an alarming rate, so are newcomers believing the idea that they need the best and greatest equipment on the market.
A rooftop tent is not the cure for protection, comfort, or lack of experience. Car camping, road trips and even scattered camping are wonderful experiences when you use a traditional tent, curse of influencers. Finding out you can't isn't a welcome surprise if the store turns into a deadly roadside projectile. It is difficult to say specifically which brand of roof tent is the best, as they all have their drawbacks and merits, however, you can identify a good roof top tent by looking at build quality, weight, size and durability.
Still, take a minute to calculate the weight of your tent, along with that of the occupants and their equipment to make sure your roof rack is sturdy enough to withstand everything. The first step is to review your vehicle's owner's manual (if it includes a factory-installed roof rack) or a non-original roof rack. However, below is a guide to some of the popular roof tent brands available on the market and what makes each one so special. The tent only weighs 120 pounds (55 kilograms) and is therefore ideal for fitting on top of almost every car.
Most models are durable and robust enough to survive even the strongest storms, making them much more weather resistant than traditional tents. The risk is not that the tent will break under load, but that the mounting brackets or bars will not break with too much weight. My friend has a rooftop tent that you never take out of the car, even though he's only camping a handful of times a year. This isn't proven, but I suppose you can fit enough bodies inside a rooftop tent to make it fail.
Most rooftop tents are old rental tents, often of perfect quality, and are available at a much lower price compared to a new one. Secondly, the idea that rooftop tents are more comfortable than anything you would place on the ground is a fallacy when you consider the camping equipment available today. As the off-road community grows and more people choose to camp in the countryside in their 4x4 vehicles, tents in roofs have become increasingly popular. Also, if you need more space for equipment on your travels, a rooftop tent can take up too much space and you can opt for the ground tent.
Finally, and most importantly, a rooftop tent can destroy your car if you don't know what you're doing (and many newbies don't know it). Leveling a tent on the roof means leveling your entire vehicle, which requires leveling blocks, a spirit level (if you want to save yourself some headaches) and potentially driving and backing up for a while every time you camp. .
