Different rooftop tents use different features to try and entice car campers. Some put a premium on a compact footprint, while others sell you on a more spacious sleeping area. We’ve seen ones that pull double duty as rooftop cargo boxes, as well as ones that use inflatable tent frames for quick setup. The Tentbox Go’s main selling point, on the other hand, is its impressively light weight.
Billed as “the world’s lightest rooftop tent,” the car camping equipment weighs a mere 73 pounds, which is impressively light for the category, allowing you to get a proper rooftop tent while putting minimal heft on your ride. If too much extra weight on the roof of the car has never been your thing, this lightweight shelter should be a more suitable option for your car camping adventures.
The Tentbox Go achieves the low weight by doing away with some elements traditionally found in rooftop tents. Instead of the usual hard-panel roof that’s very common in roof tent designs, for instance, it uses an entirely fabric roof with internal crossbar supports for structure. Similarly, they ditched the hard floor panel and mattress, opting instead for a taut fabric sleeping surface on top of a tubular steel frame. Yes, that doesn’t sound awfully comfortable, but, hopefully, it’s a decent enough surface to sleep on.
It also doesn’t use gas struts, so you don’t get any mechanical assistance during setup, requiring you to manually open and close the tent every single time. The rest of the tent is made up of tubular steel for the frame and ripstop polyester for the shell. Despite achieving impressive weights, the tent is actually pretty thick when closed, with a wedge shape that quite chunky around the rear, but quite flat out front, so it shouldn’t affect your car’s aerodynamics that adversely. Yeah, they weren’t quite able to do that the flat cargo box-style shape you usually find with other rooftop tents.
The Tentbox Go is a two-person tent that with an internal capacity of 650 pounds, so it can accommodate a pair of occupants easily, along with a whole host of gear (including an inflatable mattress, if the fabric sleeping pad isn’t quite to your liking). It has vents on the head and foot sections, along with a discreet vent in the base, complete with integrated bug mesh on all openings, while a zippered section on the roof opens up to a skylight window if you want to do some nighttime stargazing. According to the outfit, it’s rated for four seasons, which sounds awfully surprising for such a lightweight tent.
Other features include large doors on either side, a hanging pocket, a tablet holder,a telescopic ladder for getting on and off, and a wind rating of up to 39 mph. Do note, the tent ships unassembled, so you’ll have to put it together before installing it on the roof, with the outfit estimating an assembly time of around an hour (most likely more, since this is a pretty unusual design). Once installed on the roof, though, pitching and taking down the tent should take just a minute or so.
The Tentbox Go is available now, priced at $1,199.
