February 2022 — on not accepting that “luxury sedan” and “ski trip” are mutually exclusive

The Audi A8 is not obviously a ski car. No roof rack options, no factory ski bag slot, seats that cost enough to make you nervous about wet gear. The commercial answer to this problem is “buy an estate” or “get a roof box,” neither of which I was prepared to accept without at least trying to solve it properly first.

The actual answer turned out to be a Twinny Load on the towball and a Thule board carrier bolted into the arm, doing exactly what neither was designed to do individually, and working perfectly.

The problem with the obvious solutions

A roof box on an A8 requires a roof rack. The A8 has no roof rack mounts — it’s a sloping roofline with nowhere to attach anything. You can sometimes find aftermarket fitting kits for specific models, but you’re then committing to leaving attachment points on a car that doesn’t have any, and explaining the resulting scratches to yourself every time it rains.

A dedicated ski/snowboard carrier that fits into the towball is the right category of solution. The Audi A8 has a factory retractable towball — the 13-pin socket is there, the electrics are there, the receiver is rated for the load. This is the right place to attach things.

The commercial towball ski carriers I could find were either designed for two-pin connections (this car has 13-pin), cost a significant amount for not much engineering, or simply didn’t exist in a version that fit the A8’s specific towball geometry correctly.

The Twinny Load approach

The Twinny Load is a towball-mounted bike carrier. Two padded, folding arms that sit horizontally, designed to hold bike frames by their top tubes. It clicks onto a standard 7 or 13-pin towball, locks with a key, and folds flat against the vehicle when you don’t need it. It’s a well-engineered piece of kit designed for a specific job.

That specific job happens to produce a carrier geometry that works extremely well for snowboards.

Two boards sitting across the padded horizontal arms, bindings facing out, strapped in place — the boards are lower than the roof, behind the vehicle, and don’t obstruct the rear cameras or parking sensors because the Twinny Load positions them at bumper height.

The boards are stabilised by their own geometry: a snowboard is wide, the arm spacing is designed for bike frames that are narrower, so the boards sit stably with the deck resting across both arms. The straps do the actual securing, but the geometry prevents any lateral movement.

The Thule addition

The Thule snowboard carrier in the photos solves a different subproblem: vertical-mount board transport, where the board stands upright rather than lying flat. I experimented with this as an alternative configuration — using the vertical arm of the Twinny Load as a mounting point for a Thule ski/snowboard carrier that clamps around the towball arm post.

The result is a board standing vertically beside the car rather than horizontal behind it. This works, but for two boards at once, horizontal is more stable and simpler to load.

The Thule piece ended up being most useful as a single-board-at-a-time option when one board needs to come out at the mountain and the other stays in the car. It stays attached to the arm and clips in quickly.

What actually works

The final configuration for a full trip:

• Twinny Load on the A8 towball, locked and deployed
• Both boards lying horizontally across the padded arms, deck up, tails toward the car
• Straps through the bindings and around the Twinny Load arms, not the boards themselves (protects the board deck from strap marks)
• Thule carrier clamped on the right arm post for single-board convenience

Loading time once the Twinny Load is on: under two minutes. The boards don’t move. The car’s rearward visibility is not affected — the boards are below the rear window line. Parking sensors remain functional because the boards don’t extend laterally past the car width.

For a 700km drive to the Alps and back in February, the setup was completely solid. Not even a creak.

The case for towball over roof

For a sedan without roof rack options, towball mounting is objectively better in almost every dimension:

Loading: Snowboards at bumper height, not above your head. For 165cm boards, not having to lift them 180cm in the air is not a trivial quality-of-life improvement.

Aerodynamics: Mass behind the vehicle rather than above it. Fuel consumption impact at motorway speed is lower for a towball carrier than a roof box.

Car access: You can still open the boot. The Twinny Load folds down or pivots to give you boot access without removing the carrier.

Stability: No flex, no rattle, no wind noise from a roof box. The towball is a rigid connection directly to the car’s chassis.

The one disadvantage: total vehicle length increases by about 60cm with boards loaded. This matters in underground car parks. It’s a manageable constraint — you learn to check clearances and pick end bays.

The broader principle

The ski rack problem is presented as: “buy the thing designed for this specific use case.” But the specific use case product either doesn’t exist for your car, costs disproportionately, or is mediocre. The alternative is to understand what the problem actually requires — a stable, low, behind-the-vehicle attachment point — and find existing products that provide that geometry.

The Twinny Load was not designed to carry snowboards. But it was designed to carry long objects on padded horizontal arms attached to a towball, and that turns out to be exactly the thing you need. The adaptation is trivial. The result is better than the dedicated product that doesn’t exist for your application.

This is the same instinct as building your own monitoring stack instead of buying an overpriced SaaS dashboard: understand the requirements, find the pieces that actually satisfy them, combine them.

The boards got to the mountain. The car got back undamaged. The solution cost the price of a Twinny Load and a Thule ski holder, both of which were available same-day from a Dutch automotive accessories shop.

Job done.