I have Thule square bars with the 480 Traverse foot pack and Thule saddles from my last car. Apparently Thule has no foot pack that fits the Chevy Sonic hatchback. I can’t afford to spend $500 or more for kayak and bike racks every time I get a new car. “Affordable” to me means $150 or less, which rules out Thule, Yakima, and Rhino Rack. Is there any affordable and secure roof rack by other manufacturers that would fit the Sonic? I don’t want to run a strap through the windows.
I’d like to think it would be strong enough to carry boats given that it comes from GM and is made for load carrying. Offhand I might worry about the cross-section shape of the crossbars which looks odd…not round and not aero. You might have trouble attaching some rack accessories. It does appear to have a little more clearance to the roof than some racks but I don’t see how that could create any problems.
I see that rhino rack does offer stuff for your car and they have one lower cost system (still 350) that looks like it has crossbars like Thule so maybe your Thule accessories would still fit.
There’s a sonicownersforum and I didn’t quickly find anything about roof racks but maybe others have figured out which racks work on a Sonic.
Did you try to fit your existing rack system to the new car? I don’t believe the parts are as proprietary as they would have you believe. I found my older Yakima rack fit my new ride just fine once I got it dialed in. Just my .02 , your safety is your responsibility.
tjalmy, indeed I did test my Thule 480 Traverse feet on the Sonic and they don’t fit at all. After two days of research, including a lot of detailed information in Sonic forums, I concluded that getting a rack on this car is going to be very problematical due to the shape of the door frame (including an almost nonexistent ledge at the top of the frame) and the lack of space between the frame and the door. Numerous owners report that the Rhino Rack 2500, while purporting to fit the Sonic, actually doesn’t. Sonic owners have had similar results with the GM OEM rack designed for this car. One poster reported that Thule abandoned trying to design a foot pack due to the odd configuration of the frame and door.
The alternatives are a “universal” rack that doesn’t actually attach to the car with hardware (not reassuring, I think) and a “permanent” rack bolted to the roof—but reports are that this roof is very thin sheet metal, not to mention the possibility of drilling into air bags.
I’m pretty bummed out at this point. I’m wondering if a metal fabricator would be able to modify the Thule 480 fit pack to fit—but what do they know about roof racks and getting them to stay on a car?