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Leitner Designs Launches Revolutionary Rack for Your Outback

/ October 15th, 2026
A Subaru rally car equipped with a Leitner Designs roof-mounted storage box parked in front of snow-capped mountains.

Gone are the days when fitting a roof rack to your rig meant ordering some A1 towers and a couple of load bars from Yakima and calling it good. Roof gutters have long disappeared from the automotive design landscape, and model-to-model updates can subtly change roofline profiles and the hardware on factory rails. Hidden fasteners or attachment points can mean a labor-intensive, and frankly, not very DIY install for what should be a pretty simple upgrade. Then there are the worries about static and dynamic load ratings, aerodynamic drag, and long-term durability. But some smaller rigs—like the ever-popular Subaru Outback and Forester—benefit from the extra storage and accessory-mounting versatility a rack provides. Corona, California’s Leitner Designs has a brand new roof rack solution for your Subaru that solves all these problems: the ACS Roof platform rack.

One of the barriers to entry for adding a roof rack on the 6th-gen Outback Wilderness or the 2026-on Forester Wilderness is the seven-hour installation that involves dropping the entire headliner, drilling a whole bunch of holes, working around fragile plastic trim, and not disturbing sensitive SRS systems. There were rumblings that bolting on an accessory roof rack like this could even void the vehicle’s warranty. Would your roof stay watertight? Time would certainly tell. Leitner’s ACS Roof for the 6th generation Outback is a true bolt-on accessory—no drilling, no complicated disassembly of the car’s interior. The billet mounting points attach securely to the robust factory tie-down hooks, and it sits inside the standard roof rails so it adds no height, keeping the center of gravity as low as possible. The whole procedure can be completed with hand tools in your driveway in less than an hour.
Beyond the idiot-proof installation, Leitner claims a whole host of other benefits for the ACS Roof, including its 1,000-pound static load rating and 500-pound on-road and 300-pound off-road dynamic load ratings. That’s plenty of weight to put on the roof of a unibody wagon and will accommodate even the beefiest of roof tents. The load bars are nearly infinitely adjustable, locking positively into toothed channels in the side rails at any point. You can add multiple load bars in multiple configurations to take on a wide variety of loads. The bars themselves accept T-track accessories from Thule, Rhino-Rack, and Yakima, and the corner caps come off for lights without drilling or zip ties: small details that make a difference.

Roof of a Subaru Motorsports USA rally car featuring a Leitner Designs storage container, light bar, and antennas, parked on a road with autumn foliage and mountains in the background.

Rally Innovations tested prototypes of the ACS Roof on the taxing ALCAN 5000 Rally:

“When Bernhard Leitner mentioned he wanted to build a rack for the Subaru market, we jumped at the chance to co-develop one that stayed true to both companies. A rack that mounts to OEM locations without drilling, cutting, or removing the factory rails, a pure bolt-on, and that still looks like it came from the factory,” said John Peñano, Co-Owner and Product Development, Rally Innovations. “Don’t let the sleek design fool you. We put it through the Alcan 5000, and it held up to everything the route threw at it.”

Two white Subaru rally cars with Leitner Designs off-road equipment parked on a dirt trail.

Of particular note, this platform rack weighs only 38 pounds, key to keeping roof weights down. Leitner’s lineup of accessories, like the $795 GearPOD Roof, bolt right on. Engineered and made in California, the ACS Roof lists for $1,560 and is available now for the 2022 to 2025 Subaru Outback Wilderness and the 2026 Subaru Forester Wilderness at Leitner Designs and Rally Innovations.

Read more: First Drive :: 2026 Subaru Forester Wilderness

Images: Leitner Designs, Rally Innovations

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Stephan Edwards is Associate Editor at Expedition Portal and Overland Journal. He and his wife, Julie, once bought an old Land Rover sight unseen from strangers on the internet in a country they'd never been to and drove it through half of Africa. After living in Botswana for two years, Stephan now makes camp at the foot of a round mountain in Missoula, Montana. He still drives that Land Rover every day. An anthropologist in his former life and a lover of all things automotive, Stephan is a staunch advocate for public lands and his writing and photography have appeared in Road & Track, The Drive, and Adventure Journal.