We can't really deny it, every now and then you're going to want to take your bike out of the city and whether you're off on holiday, taking the bike to a favourite spot which happens to be 50 miles away, or even visiting another city you need some method of getting the bike from A to B.

Here isn't the time or place to be discussing the benefits of relative merits of mounting your pride and joy on the roof, back, or even in the boot of your car (mainly because we're only testing one method here), but a couple of things unite all possibilities - the bike and the car should remain damage-free for the entireity of the journey.

And so enter stage left the Avenir Arizona.

The Arizona is a high mounting rear cycle carrier, possibly one of the easiest ways to carry your bikes, with the rack attaching to the boot of your car, and sitting high enough that the bikes are clear of your car's lights and registration plate - doing away with the necessity of a lighting board.

So far so good. And this continues with the mounting of the rack, something which one person can manage within around five minutes after having a few initial attempts. With six straps slipping into the boot seal this is a rack that won't shift about too much. The carrier then takes three bikes, each held in individual mounts, locked into place with rubber strips that, while looking insignificant, seem immensely secure.

So this is brilliant right? Well it kinda goes downhill from here.

Remember the two main things a bike rack must do? Well this rack managed neither. The feet of the rack, rather than being made of a soft material, are hard rubber, which means that if the surface of the car underneath isn't totally clean, and the bike rack moves even a tiny amount, the paint on your car will be scratched - and unless you like the look of four rubbed patches around the boot of your car this is going to be a major turn-off.

But even if you only see the car as a way to get your bikes around and so not that important to you, the rack managed to rub the decals off one bike and through the paint of another in the space of two journeys.

My word this isn't going well. In the end I took to tearing up an old t-shirt and putting pieces of the fabric underneath the feet and round the frames of the bikes where they sat in the mounts. Not exactly satisfactory. So much so that I've resorted to taking the wheels off my bike and putting the whole thing into the boot instead.

Secure definitely, useful? Not in the slightest.