I can carry a 15 foot solo canoe in my 4-Runner with 4-5 feet of it sticking out the open rear window. It rides very securely with the bow resting on the front armrest and trapped between the front seats. When I had an Expedition lease vehicle I used to love carrying my solo canoes that way because I could load and drive away in about a minute (including the dog) while stunned kayakers were still fussing to get their spray skirts off.
Ditto for inside carry with the right vehicle. My 14-foot boat was carried inside my Toyota Matrix, very well secured and protected with maybe two feet of it sticking out under the rear hatch.
I gave that car to a relative who used it to carry a 12 foot kayak inside but alas, a friend wanted to “help” load it and cracked the passenger side of the windshield.
BINGO!!! Perfect X 2!
Funny, I was going to post that a friend of mine did the exact same thing. Considering that it could happen if you had to brake hard, it just doesn’t seem like a great idea to carry a kayak inside a vehicle.
I’ve never done it again! Carried one inside.
I more often than not have carried my shrimp WW boat inside the vehicle for pool sessions. Only comment on safety, I have never trusted it just being jammed between the seats to stop an unfortunate event in the case of a sudden stop. That means the seats themselves are holding it, and most car seats are only good at holding passengers in that situation because of the added hold of the seat belt. The seats are not designed to be all that protective by themselves.
It is easy enough in most short boats to run a line from some mount in the back, thru the handle in the front and back to a similar mount in the back on the other side. Compact and full size SUV’s will have at least a molded in door handle on the back doors, sometimes something better.
An excellent, simple and practical step toward safe travels, Celia. I do not in any way want to minimize the safety concerns raised by others here. Yet, while I haven’t been in a significant accident with my kayak inside my Town & Country, I have so say that the solid, unbudgeable fit of my kayak wedged inside that vehicle has never raised a safety concern.
I would think that the fit could vary quite a bit with different boats and vehicles. On my 4-Runner the rear seats have a position where they recline maybe 20 degrees so that gives an unobstructed loading path to slide a boat in. It also has solid anchor points both inside (in the rear) and outside if you want to add a rope or strap for those pesky skinny kayaks that might try to wiggle around. One downside to carrying a boat with the rear window open is that it will suck in a lot of dirt and dust if you travel on dry dirt or gravel roads.
Who needs a SUV?
3 Likes
Have you considered a pickup? If you need passenger capacity, there are some very good choices like the 4 door Toyota Tacoma. The 10 foot boat won’t fit inside, but it will ride nicely in the bed and the little bit it sticks out is no big deal. I have a 13’-8" boat that I haul in the bed of my Tacoma.
The bonus is that the Tacoma will probably last for ever.
I’ve carried a 14ft Old Town canoe and a 10ft fishing kayak in my Tahoe for many years. I dropped the back of the passenger seat flat and folded the middle seat flat, no problem and no windshield issues.
The security of having a kayak inside a locked SUV or van seems attractive, but I wonder if being inside a baking car would be even worse than on the roof on a hot day?
As typical on this site, many people offer their opinion on a topic that is not based on first hand actual experience.
I put 2 Kayaks in my suburban, one 10’ perception and one 10’6" pelican.
The 10’ sits at an angle while the pelican sets on top of but its nose goes between the front seats.
No kayak sitting right behind your head ready to launch like a missile. The bottom one is secure btwn from seat and lift gate
You need a better understanding of simple Newtonian physics. That boat doesn’t “build” velocity; it already has the same velocity that the rest of the vehicle (and everything else in it) does. This is what seatbelts are for: to keep the passenger from flying out through the windshield in a case of violent deceleration. Think about tiedowns.
1 Like
No, a 70 pound kayak with the surface area creating friction and sitting pointed at a seat back with no room to move much isn’t going to get away from you without help. It would be wedged in and not going anywhere. At least as long as you make sure it is not able to move around much. The concept of it is already in motion is partial science. It is stable relative to the truck. It has surface friction. Movement has to be initiated between it and the truck. It would only have inches to move before hitting something. It’s already in movement is a false analogy. So is the truck. It’s the change in momentum between them that is the movement. We are on a spinning globe, but the concept of sitting still is relative to what we are sitting on. Difference in velocity up to impact with the seat is the velocity used to calculate energy, not velocity relative to the pavement.
I carried s 12’ in our Suburban. And lost the windshield.
F=ma. Same principle as in concussions… Deceleration injury. A big enough m with a big enough a is substantial.
In my 4-Runner the bow of the boat rests on the armrest and is trapped between the front seats. It’s rock solid. Some years ago I picked up a 16 foot canoe in Canada and it rode the same way in an Expedition for 100 miles and again was rock solid and the boat didn’t even have any wind pushing it around. Just bring your boat when you go SUV shopping and do a test fit. 
I had hesitated to weigh in on this one until someone above mentioned they had lost a windshield that way.
I started carrying my WW boat inside the car for pool sessions, an old Innazone 220 which is just workable in volume for that purpose. But one thing I never did is trust the front seats or console between to hold it in case of a sudden stop, because since better seat belts and all those air bags they simply do not make the seats themselves strong against an impact. Seat backs only stay put with the aid of the seat belt. And with just me driving and seat belts that can’t be locked into a rigid position I can’t use the belt to protect the passenger seat. (I frankly still miss the days of belts that could be locked into a position, I found it helped support my back on long days in a car.)
So any time I have put the little Innazone into my compact SUV, I also take a strap or rope and secure it thru the front carry handle and run it back to something on each side behind that. I admit that if I can only find the handle for the rear doors it is not great, better if I can find a metal anchor of some kind. I have done this in two compact SUVs of two different makes so what I am hooking thru has varied.
It is likely not foolproof. But it is something more than the seat back if something happens. Obviously air bags would deploy in a major crash, but air gas are designed to stop people who are buckled into a seat. Not boats.