Anyone who’s spent the past decade or more paging through car magazines knows the big two names in radar and laser detectors: Escort and Valentine One. And seemingly since the dawn of radar-detector time, Valentine One’s hallmark feature has been the arrows telling you whether Johnny Law’s fun-squelching waves were coming from ahead, beside, or behind. Prepare for a topsy-turvying the radar detector world hasn’t seen in decades, because Escort’s new Max 360 has threat-location arrows now. It’s as if Porsche suddenly decided to put a pushrod V-8 in the 911.
The new Escort Max 360’s arrows aren’t exact replicas of Valentine One’s red indicators—the Escort unit tells you not only where the threat is located, but the type and strength of the speed-measurement signal as well. Blue indicates X Band, yellow is K band, and red is Ka band (for a breakdown of what each means, check out our radar detector shootout from last year). The display also indicates the posted speed limit and your real-time speed at all times, so you know just how much whoa pedal you need to dial in when the buzzer goes off.
When a threat is detected, the Escort Max 360 gives both a visual and audio alert. In addition, the GPS-equipped unit features Escort’s AutoLearn technology, which learns the locations of false alarm sources (like the automatic doors at your grocery store, or the car-counting devices at a toll bridge) on your most frequently traveled roads. This means, ideally, no false alarms on your daily commute.
The Max 360 sends alert locations to Escort’s DEFENDER database, which the company claims is the world’s largest collection of red light cameras, speed traps, and air patrol alerts on the market. When you use the Max 360, you’re helping to refine Escort’s map of both false alarms and real threats from the roadside tax collectors—and benefiting from the advanced warnings of upcoming threats detected by fellow Max 360 users.
The Max 360 also works in conjunction with Escort Live!, the detector maker’s smartphone app that warns of threats ahead as reported by both Escort radar detectors and other users of the app.
The Escort Max 360 costs $649.95, and is currently available only through direct purchase from Escort Radar’s website. That’s a pricey proposition, to be sure. And while we haven’t subjected this latest Escort to our usual barrage of standardized radar detector tests, we’re optimistic that these new features could be a big help in avoiding unwanted attention from radar gun-wielding Johnny Law.
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