SafetyMate (Lighting & Plate Kit)

Very good light kit, but almost perfect.

Pros: The light kit itself is great. The lights are bright and the ability to rotate them so they display when the rack is in the up or down positions works well. The lights worked perfectly over 7,000 miles on our recent cross-country trip.

Installation is fairly easy. Wiring it through the StageTwo Bike Rack is a little tricky threading the wire through the bike rack (because the images on the Yakima instruction manual are poor). But it's doable - it only took me two tries to get it right. :-)

Cons: DO NOT TRUST the license plate holder's puny screws to hold your plate on for long. I initially added a zip tie because I was concerned about the security of the screws. But I should have checked it sooner, because our plate vanished somewhere on our first 1,000 miles, including wearing through the zip tie. That left us without a rear plate!

Likewise, for the bolt that limits the light bar rotation (up or down), that bolt's tiny nut vanished some time after the license plate. I was lucky the bolt stayed on, so I didn't need to replace that too. I replaced the lost nut with a split washer and a locking nut. That lasted the rest of our trip, showing me that Yakima should have used something like that for better security.