For the last two months, despite my earnest effort, I have not been able to get a single speeding ticket. It was all part of my plan to test the speeding ticket payment guarantee that comes when you purchase (or review) K40 Electronics radar/laser detector, the RD850. In fact, that’s sort of the defining feature in some ways—for the first 12 months of ownership, K40 will pay for any ticket you get that notes your speed was detected with laser or radar (note “pay for,” not “hire a lawyer so you don’t get points on your license”).
That’s a pretty good deal, right? It would be except, despite driving like an idiot on three separate road trips, I haven’t gotten a single ticket. I have an instinctual inability to keep speeding when I hear bells and whistles explode in the cabin. My foot lets off the fuel pedal, I let the engine spin down as much as possible without hitting the breaks, and since I rarely speed much more than 20 miles per hour or so over the limit, even when trying to fish in a ticket, in just a few couple of seconds.
So I guess that’s how they get you: counting on the fact you’ll never keep driving through the RD850’s annoying chirps, and building a unit that works well enough to detect cops before they detect you. Of course, if they nail you using a plane or something, you’re SOL—K40’s promise doesn’t cover any tickets that don’t specifically note you were detected by laser or radar.
So how’s the unit itself? It’s solid, as these things go. The build quality itself is high, although the included mounting options don’t work quite as well as I’d prefer them to. Some of the springs used to mount the clips have too much tension, making it difficult just to clip and unclip the unit from your sun visor, let’s say. Obviously, there are better options for mounting the unit permanently, but that wasn’t an option for me.
But I bet you’d like to know how the radar detection functions work. I’m of the school that, basically, I don’t really care what sort of electromagnetic wave (or particle) a cop is bouncing off of me—I just want to know when to slow down. The RD850 was totally plug-and-play in that regard. The only time I tweaked any settings was to hit the ‘filter’ button in a few towns where banks (or something) were causing the unit to beep far too often for the warnings to be legit. Each different type of detection (X, K and Superwide Ka band Radar and Laser) makes a different noise, so if you wanted to get more detailed, I’m sure you could spend the time to learn what was what.
So if you like to speed on the highway already, it gets the job done. For me, though, the RD850 was a simple excuse to break the law more often than I already do, which is the mark of any quality piece of electronics.
Product Page [K40]
