Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
Yeah, that’s my question too. I ride a lot of narrow roads with bad pavement and I pick my position strategically and tactically. If the road is wide enough to stay out of the way I do. I also hear about 99% of approaching traffic and look back a lot. I can’t imagine what I’d do with more information.
Originally Posted by
kissTheApex
I haven’t been riding roads with that kind of speed limits since I’ve had it so I can’t comment on that, but I’m mostly on 35 mph roads where people tend to go around the speed limit. The advertised detection distance is 150 yards, and I’ve had cars that far back detected on straight roads. At 45-50 mph, they’re close to 25 yards a second, so one would have seconds to react. At my current level, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable, but I’m a ham fisted, sausage fingered guy, so take it with a grain of salt.
Gplama has has a video review on the tube site that might be in conditions closer to hat you’re looking for, so if you’d like to watch it I think it might give you a better idea.
So I have a few riding buddies that have the Varia, both the first gen and the newest version. Around here we have lots of county roads with minimal traffic but also minimal shoulders, usually about a 55 mph speed limit. I haven't met a single person who has one that has any complaints. Occasionally there will be a false positive but no one has said they had it fail to alert when a vehicle is actually there.
On the first generation model, the lights on the actual unit would light up when a car was coming. If you are following someone with a Varia, that can be sort of useful but you have to be looking at your buddy's tail light at the right time. However, it seemed to give 4-5 seconds of warning time when I happened to notice.
I don't recall if the new generation lights up when it detects traffic or not.
When the person with the Varia calls out "car back" it seems like there might be even more time, as if it alerts on the computer before the lights activate.
It seems like a perfect device for our particular usage -- country roads where there is not much traffic, but you want to know about it when there is. For riding in city conditions where there is constant traffic, I think it's less useful.
With the employee discount it's pretty low risk so I'll probably order one next week or so.