Given how expensive traffic tickets are, it’s amazing so many people won’t buy a good radar detector. Unlike the car you’re driving, it actually is an investment – and not just in terms of the money it will save you.
A good radar detector will also make driving enjoyable again. Instead of hewing to the letter of every ridiculous speed limit – or living in perpetual fear (and inevitable actuality) of being ticketed for exceeding them – you’ll be able to drive again. Which, incidentally, is also a safety advantage. You spend more time watching the road than the speedometer (there is a reason why race cars do not have speedometers).
But let’s run the numbers first.
You’ll pay about $400 or so for a good radar detector. You do not want a bad one – defined as one that either isn’t sensitive enough to pick up police radar until it’s too late or one that picks up too much radar that isn’t police radar – like the radar emanating from automatic doors and other cars equipped with radar-using safety systems such as Blind Spot/Lane Departure Warning systems. Too many boys-who-cried-wolf and you’ll probably be off your guard when the real wolf appears.
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I use the Valentine1 and recommend it – because in addition to being very sensitive and very discriminating (the latest models have new “Junk-K ” filtration software to separate out not-cop radar while still being ultra-sensitive to cop radar) it has front and rear facing antennas (most other detectors only have forward antennas) and it’s the only detector that you can send back to be updated as the latest technology becomes available. Other detectors may be state-of-the-art today, but tomorrow not so much – and your only option then is to drive around with an obsolete detector and be increasingly vulnerable to the cops’ latest technology – or throw the thing away and get a new one.
At full price.
The V1 also has directional indicators – telling you where the radar-running cop is lurking – and can track multiple threats at once, each displayed digitally, with an accompanying audible warning cue. It is the SigSauer of radar detectors.
Anyhow, you pay let’s say $400.
Once.
Now consider how quickly that investment is amortized – and begins to actually make you money. I will use myself as an example.
This morning, on the way home, the V1 alerted me to a pair of county cops running a speed trap on a very straight, very tempting – and very under-posted stretch of the rural highway that bisects my county. This road – US 221 in SW Virginia – usually doesn’t have much traffic and the posted speed limit (55 MPH) is, per usual, set well below the 85th percentile speed (read about that here) which is nearly universal and has the effect of turning almost every driver on any given road into a “speeder” vulnerable to being ticketed.
