Whoosh. This is a bigger topic than one might think at first blush, as there is a lot to consider.
I'll boil it down to the essentials.
Over the last 45 years, I've tested a lot of outdoors equipment for makers, many products in the prototype stage as I did catalog product shoots and found the flaws in the field the designers missed in the studio. Those nascent designs often had severe flaws and I got cold, wet, hungry, or sometimes all three when they failed so I always took reliable, proven gear as a backup.
One of the tent designs that seems evergreen in the touring world is the bike-parking tent. The idea seems so logical for all the reasons you cite but the practicalities seem to always outweigh (often literally) the benefits. They're larger than you really need to house only yourself and the rest of your gear apart from the bike. They are heavier due to the extra material. They generally catch more wind and then there's the conundrum of parking the bike securely upright (or fully inverted for those designs that use the bike's upended wheels as a structural support) and how to keep the rest of the tent interior clean and dry after you wheel a very road-dirty and wet bicycle into it. An added challenge with most designs is avoiding the bike as you enter and exit.
I've tried the gamut, from the MSR Ghisallo to a Tatonka Alaska 3 and a whole variety of ultralight tarplike structures. With the exception of the Tatonka Alaska -- which happens to be an expedition-class tunnel tent good for holding a lot of gear, all the bike-specific shelters I tested made it about a year on the market before leaving. The Ghisalo was nice, light, slept 1 person, but...the wall between the occupant and the bike was subject to snagging and tearing, the compartment was not long enough to hold many long-wheelbase touring bikes with racks fitted, and the one I had failed to support the bike one windy night, when it came crashing down on me. For photos, see...
https://www.rei.com/product/779410/mountain-hardwear-ghisallo-1-tentThe tarps stretched over overturned bikes were great in concept but not execution, as dirty water from the bike's wheels and oily drivetrain leaked onto my sleeping bag and the greatest headroom was over the wheels, leaving a very low "shed" for me to sleep under. Here is a good, well-developed example of the type I have
not tried, so cannot speak about firsthand...
https://www.cyclon.cc/?fbclid=IwAR3YfW8FhHhvDZ028rnUhS-kfwAgBb2H-oceZ-c8ekaRieGJyUSXoxjjWhIThere is not a lot of room inside for the occupant.
The most successful version I tried belonged to my Dutch touring buddy when we toured the NL and BE together in 2008. He wanted security for his bike and all his gear and lots of room to stretch out. You can see it here...
https://www.tatonka.com/en/product/alaska-3-235-pu/It ticks all your boxes for space and sturdiness, but is heavy and -- measuring 4.7m/15.4ft
plus guylines! -- it takes up as much space as a car when looking for a camping pitch. It weighs 4.5kg/10lb dry but when it gets wet, it weighs even more as it did during our tours when it rained nearly every day and night. It packs big, too. Still, he was very pleased with it and there was a lot of space inside. We slept side-by-side as two in the three-person capacity rear portion, the door screened against ticks. The entire front vestibule was devoted to gear storage and he did indeed park his inside, using the rear kickstand for support. He rode a fairly small frame; I don't think it would have been tall or long enough to hold my own bicycle. The vestibule was floorless, which solved the problem of dirty bike water and he had the option of flooring it with the tarp he brought as well. A great tent but a bit "much" for 1-2 person cycle-touring. He enjoyed "lux camping" and when he came to visit me here in America for a tandem tour, the big bike with trailer weighed 272kg/600lb with us on it; my self-made trailer we towed weighed 57kg/127lb alone, filled with such luxuries as the Dutch tanker's boots he preferred to hike in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_bootNeedless to day, these were adventures far from the lightweight or ultralight gear I prefer, but still a lot of fun in their own way.
The point of all the above is to say a tent shared with a bike comes with a lot of compromises and the end result has never been as good
for me as the one-person tents I prefer for quick and easy pitching and small footprints, the bike securely locked outside leaning on its Click-Stand and armed with a remote-controlled motion-detector to alert me to any theft attempt (or more commonly, to porcupines with a taste for sweat-soaked Brooks leather saddles!).
I've attached a photo I took one morning as we dried our wet gear out using the guys as clotheslines.
Best, Dan
