Modern Cars Wreak Havoc on Radar Detectors

Summary

Get The Drive’s daily newsletter The latest car news, reviews, and features. Escort Radar, one of the big brands in the radar detection biz, has been under some scrutiny this year as customers and reviewers reported suboptimal performance on the $800 Redline 360c—Escort’s flagship. Today, it’s dropping a big firmware update to address those complaints. I’ve now had the chance to test this new firmware and speak with somebody at Escort, and came away with some insights you might find interesting, even if you don’t run one of these on your dashboard. All radar detectors can be affected by the radar-powered collision avoidance systems of modern cars. And since more of those cars are on the road every year, filtering those signals out becomes a bigger challenge for detector engineers. As most of you reading this probably know, radar detectors are designed to alert you when cops are measuring, or about to measure, your speed. They’re legal throughout the USA except in Washington, D.C., and the state of Virginia. Since we don’t write about these too often, I’ll quickly rip through some high-level context and then run down Escort’s new update. How Radar Detectors Work A radar detector is basically a radio receiver. When police post up somewhere to collect ticket money, they’ll often point a radar gun down the road, which shoots a radio wave at oncoming cars. When that wave bounces back to the radar gun, it does a little math and tells the cop the target’s speed. Many American police use K- and KA-band radio waves for this purpose. The reason a detector is a viable countermeasure to this is that K-, KA-band, and other such radio waves, shoot wide beams that kind of spill out beyond one specific target—think, kind of, like a shotgun versus a rifle. So you can be driving down the highway, and a good detector will be able to pick up a KA signal before police have made visual contact, giving you a little heads-up. Adobe Another speed-measuring tool police use is laser—this is m...