etrailer | Kelty Backroads Car Awning with Side Walls Feature Review

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-review-ke...
Hey everyone, it's Evangeline right here at etrailer.com. Today we have the Kelty Back Roads Shelter. This is a car mounted awning/tent, which you can attach to your roof or to the tires of your vehicle. This creates a large shade that can hold up, even in windy conditions like this. We'll take a look at some of its features right here. This is a universal fit shelter, and it can fit most types of SUVs, cars, jeeps and even vans.

You don't need a roof rack to get this attached to your car, but it might be a little helpful and I'll show you later how to get it all set up and installed. The main difference between this shelter and other shelters from Kelty and other brands is gonna be the coverage. This is gonna have a more of a tent like structure where you have walls along the side, and then the other wall is going to be your vehicle. So if you want to get access into the shelter, this gives you a door access panel. You have these zippers for your door.

(zip whizzes) These are double-sided zippers, which are my favorite, which means that you can zip it up and down from the inside or the outside. You can also secure the door by rolling it up and utilizing the loop and the anchors along its side. You also have access along the sides of your shelter. We currently have these side walls down, just to give us more privacy as well as more protection from the sun. But you also have the option to unstake the sides and roll them up against your awning, securing them, creating an open sidewall.

You also have the option of a mesh window if you want even more breeze, but protection from insects and the sun. This doesn't give the full protection an actual tent would have though. As you can see, this really is mainly an awning. It doesn't have a floor, so if you do have water or insects crawling from underneath, nothing you can do about that. But something it does have, over a standing tent, is that adjustability.

You can get as much or as little coverage as you want, being able to move the corners around, and your only fixed point being the vehicle it's attached to, that's gonna be different from your ground tent. Being able to adjust where you stake your tent means you also get to adjust how much room you have inside your awning. This has enough space for around six or more people, depending on how you have your area set up. What matters is gonna be the height. So this can go from six feet, eight inches tall, all the way up to nine feet in height. That makes a difference, depending on the car you have this mounted to. I've dealt with a lot of different awnings and the experience changes from one to another. Kelty has always made some quality items. They've always had fun colors, and you can see from the inside, just the nice geometric design with all the seams. We have these lighter colors that allow light to come through, but also block out your UV rays and give you some shade. There's a good amount of wind coming through, but that's mainly 'cause it's really windy outside. I don't feel like I'm out in the elements though. This does feel like it gives you a lot of protection and just shade from the outdoors. It's pretty windy out here in Missouri, and we have 31 mile per hour gusts coming through. Setting this awning up was pretty tricky and we'll talk about that one later. And if this was other brands of awnings, I wouldn't even risk it. But I know that we have a lot of good design features in this one. A lot of quality materials, which is why I risked setting it all up. You can see that the canvas material is all holding well. Even with the gusts of wind. We have our fiberglass poles giving the structure to the awning, and when you have everything staked down, because Kelty reinforces their seams and also because of how they tape those seams, I know that I am protected from extremely strong winds, but also a little bit of water if it starts sprinkling out here. It is a more water resistant fabric than it is a waterproof fabric. So that adds into all the specs of it being a three season tent, spring, summer and fall. Plus being made of a 68D polyester denier, which is your stronger mid-weight rating material for tents. Ultra-light backpackers have lower denier counts. This is gonna be what's pretty common on your sturdier materials. So if water does fall onto your material, you'll notice that the water will bead up and not seep through. I don't recommend using this during a rainstorm. If possib