Rooftop Tent on a Suzuki Jimny

A quick summary of this blog would be, you can carry a rooftop tent safely on a Suzuki Jimny. (You have to go slow and cross winds are scary)

I went out and bought a rooftop tent to go on top of the Zook and this is my honest review. I purchased a Frontrunner RTT as this is the lightest option and the quality is brilliant. This is a review on carrying this rooftop tent on a 5000km trip from Cape Town to Durban, if I would recommend it or not.

The trip

My trip took me from Cape Town to Durban, with a mix of highway, gravel and 4×4 trails. The tent was my main form of accommodation on this trip, no complaints here as it is a major upgrade from the 1 man floor tent.

The underlying issues.

The first issue with carry a RTT on the Jimny is that you are well over the roof load rating. Realistically you can not carry much on the roof rack. The Jimny can only carry 40kg on the roof. (The rack itself is 31kgs!) We completely ignored this rating, loaded a rooftop tent and two full jerries on the roof. Please don’t do this! 

The handing on the Jimny is not bad with all the weight on the roof, you can fell the load on the roof when on highways. The Jimny is made even slower with a rooftop tent and that not the worst part. One my trip, we had very heavy winds on the up to Durban. These winds were pretty bad, with the car loaded it blew about all over the road. This did not feel safe at all, I was limited to a top speed of 80km/h and literally thought the car would blow over.

This was probably the worst experience with the rooftop tent. Probably not the best experience in a Jimny anyway.

Off-roading with a Rooftop Tent

I even hit the tracks with a rooftop tent, this was actually a surprise. The car handled pretty well until there was some pretty sketchy leans. I decided to keep to the easier tracks due to the rooftop tent. ( We even showed a Landy up! ) If you are planning on doing some of the hard tracks, I would recommend you don’t carry a rooftop tent.

A Jimny is not known to keep all wheels on the ground. Your tip over angle is drastically reduced. This is pretty scary when the car is on a vertical angle and you feel the tyres lift off the ground.