The first automobile driver ever fined for speeding was Walter Arnold in England’s Kent County, circa 1896. Arnold, a Benz dealer, got caught going approximately 8 mph, well over the 2-mph limit for towns, and was cited for a few wacky 19th-century infringements in addition to the speeding offense.
This story originally appeared in Volume 27 of Road & Track.
It took until the late Forties to make ticketed speeds less approximate with the arrival of the Electro-Matic Radar Speed Meter. Initially employed for enforcement in Connecticut, it was the first such device designed for police use. By the Sixties, radar detectors hit the market. And in 1968, Dale T. Smith invented the aptly named and commercially successful Fuzzbuster, partially as a response to getting nailed by cops in a speed trap.
The game hasn’t changed much since, but the tools used by both sides never stop getting better.
“It’s kind of like electronic warfare,” says Margaret Valentine, president of Valentine Research Inc. and surviving spouse of Mike Valentine, one of the great pioneers of consumer radar-detector technology.
The tit for tat truly kicked off in 1974, when the federal government enacted a nationwide 55-mph speed limit. Millions of radar detectors were sold that decade to drivers looking to avoid speeding tickets. The Fuzzbuster was useful, but after Valentine co-founded Cincinnati Microwave in 1976 and offered up the Escort, testers and drivers quickly discovered that it was much more effective than everything else on the market.
Police didn’t stand pat either.
The oldest speed guns operated on X-band, a frequency that’s largely been phased out of use. Today, radar detectors will detect it, but Ariel Bravy, who runs the radar-detector testing website Vortex Radar, suggests that activating X-band is useful only in a couple of states where police still use older equipment. The debut of K-band radar guns in 1978 allowed for handheld units thanks to smaller antennas. Ka-band followed in the late Eighties with even smaller equipment and better overall performance, making it the most common frequency range cops still use today.
Radar-detector companies reacted to new police technology by tweaking their products to maintain or better their line of defense. “And so it was kind of a cat and mouse,” Valentine says. “Each side, when something changed, upped the ante. We would meet the challenge of new radar equipment with new features, new software redesigned to be able to detect the signals.” The Valentine V1 detector, introduced in 1992 with its game-changing directional arrows, was even hardware upgradeable, so you could send it back to the factory for improved performance.
One strategy that law enforcement employs to evade detection is instant-on radar guns. It’s much harder to pick up a radar signal if police activate their speed gun only in quick bursts, as opposed to the lazier method of leaving it running. Detector companies then responded with faster frequency sweeps to defend against this new tactic.
Things changed dramatically in the early Nineties with the advent of lidar speed guns. This laser technology picks off speeders more accurately than the shotgun-style radar that can struggle to pinpoint a single car in heavy traffic. Radar detectors added lidar detection, but once the alert rolls in, it’s already too late. That, inevitably, led to lidar jammers.
While the practice is legal as far as the FCC is concerned (the agency doesn’t regulate light like it does radio waves), actively blocking police speed enforcement ruffled enough feathers that 12 states and Washington, D.C., have outlawed lidar jammers.
This nonstop technology battle has an ethical side too. Speeding is illegal, and the assumed goal of these tools is to help consumers evade its consequences. Radatron, an early radar-detector company, marketed its products with a safety angle. Others, such as Autotronics, more blatantly called police enforcement “harassment.” Today, folks like Bravy acknowledge the safety argument but also point out that low speed limits sometimes seem designed more for revenue generation than for reducing accidents. Wherever you land on the morality of the issue, NHTSA says excessive speed contributed to 12,151 deaths in 2022. There’s little to no modern research into how radar-detector use might affect such numbers for good or bad.
“Technology is never going to be stagnant,” says California Highway Patrol Lieutenant Matt Gutierrez. “There’s always going to be new devices on the road, and it always comes back to making sure that everybody stays safe when they’re traveling.”
The battlefield for technological superiority continues to evolve as speed cameras show up across the country. Waze pioneered user-generated speed-trap and camera alerts, which are now common in navigation apps, negating the need for signal detection in those cases. Radar-detector companies are staying on top of the surveillance by incorporating GPS into their devices and connected phone apps, as detectors can struggle to pick up radar from those pesky speed cameras’ ultraweak signals.
Detectors also face a side battle with modern driver-assistance systems—adaptive cruise control, collision-avoidance technology—which often use the same bandwidth as the cops. Manufacturers are constantly working to filter out such noise, which would otherwise cause a detector to ping nonstop.
Today’s detectors can adapt quickly to changes in police radar tech and strategies with software and firmware updates. Where the fight will go next is unclear, but everyone involved, from the police to the companies developing the police-thwarting tech, is sure that the back-and-forth will continue.
A Michigan-born car nut and racing enthusiast, Zac Palmer is talking about or thinking about cars somewhere. He bought his first when he was still 15, a 2001 Acura Integra GS-R that still resides in the garage today. It’s now joined by a 2004 Porsche Boxster S, and there will be even less practical additions to follow. Palmer worked at both Autoweek and Autoblog before joining R&T.
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