Dan Roth  0:00  
Drivers we've all been there.

Music is up

the road is clear, or you're finding gaps through all the slow moving piles. So your momentum is up. So is your mood.

The sun may even be shining at just the right angle, minimal solar glare here and then bam. Sometimes you know, you crest a hill, and there's an island cruiser just waiting to make a kill. In other cases, the blue lights wind up in your mirror from out of nowhere. I once came steaming up on a speed trap at such an obviously guilty rate of speed that the state trooper started walking toward my car, pointing me to the shoulder in the lane of travel. I personally have a lot of feelings about speed enforcement. But we're not going to talk much about that. I'm Dan Roth, and this is a special edition of the Wheel Bearings podcast. I'm talking with john dendro and Randy Bader from radenso radar. But before I get to the interview, let me set the stage. For decades, if you had your emotions stirred by speed trap experiences, your recourse was to get a radar detector. And for decades, detectors have been about the same. At its core, a radar detector has been a precisely tuned to radio, looking for energy in the frequency bands that speed detection systems us. It's been a cat and mouse game as detection improved. The company's making speed enforcement tools also got more clever. They added different frequencies out of the range of current detectors on the market, and they create an instant on gear that is harder to sniff out, and laser is quite a bit harder to detect. All of those moves give speed enforcement an edge until the detection industry catches up. The first radar detectors weren't that sensitive or very smart. And it's still common to have a city mode to reduce false alerts from automatic doors road signs that display your speed and others stray radio interference. But electronic components keep shrinking. Costs keep dropping, and new technologies such as GPS, and phone app integration have made the latest radar detectors smarter than ever. But you can only cut so many facets in any sense. Gold diamond. The pace of innovation seemed to have

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
slowed to

Dan Roth  3:04  
a trickle when I recently gathered a bunch of detectors together for a test. I had units from unit in Whistler Motorola, but I couldn't get a Valentine one which has been the benchmark for many years. I also had my first contact with radenso they're pretty new brand I hadn't heard of, and the performance of their detectors was impressive. denso makes a few models, the cheapest is under 300 bucks. The winner of my test was a long range unit in model with fancy multicolor display it had arrows and a hefty price tag that was closer to $1,000 than it was away from it. But the radenso stuff managed nearly identical performance with a few less features and a much better value. So that's what started me paying attention to This newish player in a stagnant industry. At CES, in November of 2019, radenso introduced a new kind of detection technology that fundamentally changes how it's done. They're using an artificial intelligence platform. They're calling Ray. And it's expensive now. But this approach is born out of the reality of 2019, not 1973. So simply put, there's more computing power available for less money than ever before, instead of making another carefully tuned, but ultimately dumb box radenso has created an artificial intelligence platform to protect you from the revenue people. At its core, it starts with a horn, an RF collector, essentially, that's an antenna designed and optimized for the high frequency radiation that speed system to us. So far, same as it ever was. But then all the power is in the software. The first step is a software defined radio that scans a broad spectrum all at once, and then a Linux computer is on board to sort it out. The AI is looking for particular signal signatures. Every unit has a telltale fingerprint and that's just physics. So every radar gun, every laser gun, every detection technology, if you train the AI, it's going to know what it is. So instead of energy detected, lighting up a light and keeping a buzzer radenso say I can tell you which brand and model it has found. Sounds amazing, right? I wanted to know more. And luckily radenso wanted to tell me

I'm here with john dendro and Randy Bader from radenso radar if you guys are radar detector people, your your car people too, I hope right? Yeah, please jump Tell me your car people.

John Dendro  6:11  
I think every single person here owns one or more enthusiast level cars. I have a BMW MTU that's heavily modified for the track, although not as heavily modified as Randy's actual race car. And then I daily a golf car.

Dan Roth  6:26  
Oh, that's it. Those are two really good Very German choices.

Unknown Speaker  6:31  
They're both blue as well. So

Dan Roth  6:34  
yeah, so Randy, what's what's your

Randy Bader  6:36  
race car? I've got a 2001 Subaru Impreza coupe that spin pretty much converted to a fun track car. It's got a cage. W swap. Fuel sale running at five MP racing stuff. Oh, yeah. If you racing brakes, sex brakes are awesome. Yeah, the whole nine yards pretty much been building it for about 11 years. Now. Granted Actually a Subaru ambassador. Oh, you

Dan Roth  7:01  
are That's awesome. I I spoke with a guy who was a super Ambassador because he had the one of the it's actually through through another article I was doing he had one of the oldest brats I guess in the in the country in the US and so Wow. Yeah, super was like we're going to show that car right alongside all these other early Subaru like racers and stuff. So it was it's really neat I that level of enthusiasm. It's so that's that's two solid enthusiast races. What's your daily driver though?

Unknown Speaker  7:29  
Mine is the two other foreigner.

Dan Roth  7:30  
Okay. All right. That's delicious. You know, you could have said something boring, so that's good.

Unknown Speaker  7:38  
No, that's fine. You got it.

Dan Roth  7:41  
Right, exactly. And before winter has character. So let's let's get through it, too. So what's your background? I guess before radar detectors Did you always kind of and I guess more specifically for john because I saw some videos of you out at SEMA. Introducing the latest and greatest You're AI based tech, which looks really, really fascinating, and we'll get to that. But what's your background before you got into radar detectors specifically?

Unknown Speaker  8:08  
So that's that's a question that I always chuckle a little bit when people ask because I actually have a classical piano performance degree. So I like to tell people I'm a failed pianist. However, I've been an electronics hobbyist my whole life as well as a car enthusiast my whole life. It's funny how much it's actually funny how I realized now that hobbies I started when I was younger, such as building my own amplifiers for audio or on DAX, as they call them. Yep. Or, you know, modifying computer is on overclocking them, etc. Those are things that kind of gave me the fundamental understanding of signals that I use every day in my job. So killed Yanis electronics hobbyist, and now somehow a radar detector company on Earth.

Dan Roth  8:55  
They don't fit every single one of those vibrates. So that's really good. At the end of the day, right, like that's what a radar detector is this vibration detector. Alright, so and then the radenso origin story does that dovetail with that, or how did you get involved?

Unknown Speaker  9:11  
Yeah, so back in college, I invented a product called the no photo. And this was something that in a lot of ways my cousin gave me the idea for my cousin is not current Uzziah but she lived in Washington DC. In one day at a holiday party, she was complaining about how many of the photo tickets she would get in the mail. You know, those cameras automatically take pictures of you speeding and then mail you a fine. And she was getting them for going seven or eight miles per hour over the limit on big four lane highways. And I realized that that was the problem she was having a lot of other people probably were too. And the system seemed pretty primitive to me. From a technological level, and with a couple of friends, I prototype some different technologies to defeat them and came up with the NOFA which was basically a device that sits underneath your license plate sense the flash of a camera and inspired back with its own flash. That product gained a crazy amount of viral attention. I think I kind of got lucky that it automatic enforcement was a really hot button issue at the time. There were a lot of Supreme Court state Supreme Court cases that were going on and some just kicked off a lot of drivers. I guess this idea that not a live police officer would give you a ticket, right? That product, the technology behind it was great. We ended up having quality control issues on the water side, because I didn't know what I was doing. I had never brought a product to market before you know I did a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo raise some cash prototypes and myself, and then ended up hiring some more professional engineers to help me bring it to market but it was just a huge learning experience. I mean, I had never done that before.

Dan Roth  10:54  
Yeah, well, now you get another another bite at the apple.

Unknown Speaker  11:00  
That really is how I look at it. I mean, the mistakes that I made during that development cycle helped me learn a lot for this and also introduced me to the industry connections, the capital connections that enabled me to purchase radenso, which was a very small company, it was actually a husband and a wife that started it, and then grow them by, you know, double digit multiples over the last couple of years into a real player in the industry.

Dan Roth  11:23  
And the industry is really interesting to it must be in this place. Maybe you can speak to it a little bit, because we're in this age of creeping automation, where you know, dynamic cruise control should just drive the car for you on the highway, right? So what's the need? What's the sort of case you can make for a radar detector and then just the increasing level of technology and sophistication that you need to put into detectors?

Unknown Speaker  11:50  
I think that to your first point, I kind of separated into two categories. And one of them I'll call the more visceral reaction, and then the other ones, the more intellectual argument for radar detectors. For a visceral standpoint, I think one of the things that's not unique to Americans, but is kind of, I guess we focused on sometimes is we just don't like being told what to do necessarily. If we can't we can't really see why it makes sense right? Obviously there's there's certain laws in society that nobody has a problem with don't don't murder people, you know, that that's obvious. But when it comes down to you know, you're a felon for going 21 miles per hour the speed limit in some states but not 19. I think people look at that and say why this is ridiculous. You know, this might be a money grab or there's some other ulterior motives and people like independence and radar detectors are a tool that help people enjoy driving more and kind of speak to that the visceral ness of freedom from an intellectual standpoint, one of the things that got me interested in it was really learning the history of speed limits in the United States. And it's really interesting how a lot of it ties back to the gas crisis a couple of decades ago, that's when a lot of national speed limit for first put into place. A lot of states didn't even have speed limits. Montana was one of them. And it's interesting to see how a lot of them are not based on safety. Like we all assume they were. But we're really kind of forced by the federal government by threatening to withhold transportation funding is really fascinating. And I'm not going to go into all the boring details here. But I think when you look at how something came about, sometimes it gives you more clarity on on where things currently stand. Why a unit Tasker in the age of smartphones to like, there's apps that go along with some of the radar detectors. But isn't there a way where you could do this with crowdsourcing like ways or some other app Have you still need to have something like another physical device that you stick in the windshield, you know, next year EZ Pass or whatever, you know, it seems almost archaic to some folks that you know, I've got to buy this thing that only does one thing.

Dan Roth  14:00  
So I guess, you know, sort of back out from that too, can you can you give us a solid explanation for that? Why there's unit Tasker?

Unknown Speaker  14:10  
Yeah. So I actually agree with you that I also feel like our case that we have to divide by a device that does one thing, but there is also a reason that we still must buy a device. Things like waves are an awesome tool. I mean, Randy use waves all the time, right? I do. But it's just something you can't use by itself, because you can be driving one day and there's a somewhat rural areas. Yeah. Like police are actually moving. So you know, la works well, if the police are stationary, and then the police do not sit there for very long and then you also have people that actually will mark police, and they actually mean it for the wrong side of the road. So you're slowing down. It's a layer of protection. And I would always recommend using one in addition to a radar detector, but you can't rely on it and all situations Now, the reason that you still do need a physical device Simply because of the frequency that police radar is transmitted on police radars, mostly in K and K bands, although there is some x band still around. And just due to those frequencies, the size of the antenna that you need to correctly pick them up are significant portion of the size of the Sun themselves. So while phones are certainly fast enough nowadays, to handle all that processing internally, there's no real good way to kind of build that level of sophistication into a phone that can actually have the hardware to detect police radar itself. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But that's one of the reasons that our new detector is actually a total break from everything else in the industry. And we're actually designing it as a Linux computer with a radar horn attached that just so happens to fit in a traditional radar detector show.

Dan Roth  15:51  
Yeah, I've actually I've got a nice question about that approach, because I was really impressed with that actually, and to talk about some of the details. So it's, it really does. It's a completely different way of sensing what's out there? In, you know, what's the challenge of, you know, packaging this thing. And then cars is surrounded by and not that not your new one just like your existing detectors of you've got this very sensitive device, it's looking for all kinds of radio frequency and spin barded by just the cars around it too, right? Like I had. I did a detector test and I think it was, it was another brand. And the laser headlights in the BMW was driving that week, tortured it, I couldn't run the headlights. So if it did, it would just pick them up for some reason, or just something about it just freaked it out. And so, like,

Unknown Speaker  16:42  
how do you how do you deal with that?

Unknown Speaker  16:46  
So that's kind of a more profound question. Even so when I was raising capital, which I knew we needed to invest in Tara done so I had talked to a lot of investors and it was interesting because they all kind of pigeonhole a lot of them pigeon holed me. As a product guy in almost a negative way, I sell you too much of a product I or too much of a product got a radar detector, and she's dying well, and I'm not going to invest capital there. And it always struck me odd that people would would say, product guy in a negative way for being wanting to focus focusing so much on the quality of the product. And I think that this industry is mature, not because people don't want radar detectors, but because of the problems that you just brought up. They're mature because the products don't solve the need for the drivers or the customers like they did 20 years ago. 20 years ago, radar detectors were a huge industry, but there was also no false false alerts coming from these vehicle safety systems and cars already with the traffic sensors on the highways. Yeah, and then it spreads to all the blind spot monitors radar, radar cruise control. Now, a lot of the drones the traffic Jones use modulating radar signals for statistics. This stuff is growing and you know this radar pollution is everywhere. So as you said, these devices which haven't really changed in just 20 years due to the anti competitive nature of the industry. They're running 50 megahertz processors to try to do all their processing. It's I don't know how, how technical, I don't want to go too technical, but there's more power in a Fitbit than there is in every radar detector on the market. And that seems crazy to me in the day and age when these things are selling for $600 all the way up till you know three or $4,000 for a custom installed system. So when we started this product project, I wanted to make sure that we took a completely clean slate approach and tried to solve the problem from an ideal standpoint, instead of just saying, okay, here's the traditional processes here, the traditional form factor, let's just make a slightly better version of our competitors, with a no clean slate design be defined the problem space first and then optimize the hardware to solve that problem. And I think that's what led us to having such a different platform than everybody else and using artificial intelligence.

Dan Roth  18:54  
Yeah, well, that's that's fascinating, but you know, let me let me touch on the comment though, about the industry dying. Ready, you handle the marketing side of things? And is it dying? Or is it really like it? Is it more of like, the industry's is sort of strangled by a lot of big players that aren't really doing much. They've got that mature technology, and they're not really innovating too much unless they're pushed.

Unknown Speaker  19:19  
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, we saw people out there that think they actually think radar detectors are illegal. There's a lot of people just that are actually just not, you know, they don't have the knowledge of how radar detectors work. So I think that also doesn't help, you know, with radar detectors, but one of the mean, how many, how many big? How many competitors? Do we have? Two, three, there's two or three centers, and then two of them came from the same company originally, right? Yep. So I mean, I guess to his point, there's, it's kind of been a situation where there was only two or three players involved. And they're both just kind of printing money. And if you don't have a lot of competition, then you don't have to spend a lot of money to come in to integrate When Yeah, this is how Uber came about that they're cranking out. profitable products. Yeah, even if they're not ideal, there's no competition. Yeah, we're stuck with them. Mm hmm.

Dan Roth  20:10  
So yeah, I mean, what's what's your what's your sales pitch when you're trying to when you're trying to explain to your mom, but she probably already knows. But like what you do and why the things that you make are still relevant and still useful and not illegal. The only I think the only place where you can't use them is DC right now.

Unknown Speaker  20:30  
Yeah, Virginia and Virginia and military bases. But you know, the one thing I get a lot of people saying is why I drive a Prius, why do I need a radar detector? And you know, our detectors will still alert you a red light cameras speed cameras, and not only that, but there are times where you're going to be speeding and you don't even know what the speed limit is. And somewhere you might not be familiar with. And it might just be a ability to like okay, maybe I should check my speed and then sure enough, you look down you slow down just in case and cops approaching. So I mean, It's not really just for people who are feeling the need for speed, but it's for everyday people. And I mean, what the investment level what an entry level is hacker costs, if it saves you from one ticket, it's already more than paid for itself. I mean, you can get a decent detector for two or $300. I think our XP is $249 isn't the most advanced in the world know, but they're gonna save you from a ticket, even if it does once over a five or six year period. You're you're way ahead financially.

Dan Roth  21:25  
So what's the most important thing for a detector to do? Like what if you're looking for one, I guess what's the because they all have different features, but like sort of the most baseline most important, single most important thing that you could say to be on the lookout for.

Unknown Speaker  21:41  
So I I kind of want to clarify too that even my own current products which do not use AI, those are kind of the same style of my competitor. So I don't want to make this like a me versus my competitors product. Sure. I want to make this about future technology versus all current detectors including ours and I think that right now, you really can't have it all with with our current products or our competitor, you generally have to pick a trade off between minimizing false alerts, range. And then features. I would say right now for me, I'm just looking for really good mixture between enough range to always protect me even in tough terrain, which is defined as hills, things that could block the radar signal, but also get enough false alert filtering, where it doesn't drive me crazy. And I think there's a couple of detectors out there nowadays, both for me and my competitors that satisfy that in the future. The way that we design our new platform, you don't have to make that trade off anymore, because we have enough intelligence and processing power to characterize signals and classify them instead of filtering. And what I mean by that is, if you look at an iPhone and the Android lying on a table next to each other, you'll be able to visually say, Oh, that's an iPhone and The new pixel for right, you just, you know, you've seen pictures of yourself, you've seen them online, you might have handled them visually, it's obvious to you. That's how our new detector will look at radar. The way the current detector look at radar, is if you look at the pixel for an iPhone on a table, and instead of just knowing which one of those, you tried to say, are they both rectangles? Are they both plastic? Are they both? Do they have a dark screen or they have a color screen, and you're making all these algorithms to try to tell the difference between them, but at the end of the day, it looks so similar, you might get them wrong half the time. I think that's an interesting point to make about how the AI can just look at a signal and tell what it is instead of trying to filter it based on arbitrary criteria.

Dan Roth  23:40  
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. You know, I did find even as I was testing, you know, the range is super important and that that limiting the false alarms was sort of the flip side of that, like, yeah, you want something very sensitive, but you also want to be smart enough to not go off every time you pass, you know, a grocery store or something and some of the tradition detectors. There, they use GPS so that there's no locations, you can log them, any of them. They've gotten about as smart as they can really with sort of the existing technology and the existing methods and then bolting on other sort of, you know, pieces like like GPS and sort of make them a little smarter. But you're your newest detector technology that you just introduced at SEMA. It's, it's a completely different way of doing it. It's not tuned to a specific range of frequencies, which the the sort of tradition that's been the traditional way to do it, you make a radio that detects, you know, other transmitters. You're kind of scanning everything, you know, it's the software defined radio, right? So you're just looking at all the spectrum and then you're using a powerful computer to figure out what's worth looking at.

Unknown Speaker  24:51  
That that concept is correct. So the way that a traditional detector was done, was that all of the hardware behind the antenna Which, you know, we call the radio, the intendant circuitry, but all of the hardware behind that was really optimized for that specific range of frequencies. So let's just say that down the road, a new radar camera came out that scanned a little bit lower, you would have to make a hardware change enabled to capture that that's the captain that's happened in this industry. There's a type of camera often used in Canada and internationally called multi radar and 90% of current radar detectors, they just didn't have the hardware to be able to detect it. Um, so that's going to happen more and more in the future. So the way that we did it was we took a modular approach. So we have basically two different black boxes. One is the software defined radio and that's our, that's our Linux computer. And then the other one is the antenna module. And these are actually even though inside one box, there's actually a connector in between them. So this our hardware that Linux computer can analyze and signal, it doesn't matter what it is all right, I can receive signals from satellites and demodulate them, it can, it can tell if it's a blind spot system, or can do VHF, it can any type of radio signal, it doesn't care. It's like setting the antenna, exactly the antenna, you could just put whatever module that we need on there as a manufacturer, and we've built the hardware so we can overscan a ridiculous range. So with our current, our new detector is going to be called feeha. The antenna that we're shipping with Thea will capture all radar ranges, XP on k band k band multi radar every time going to actual camera, but that one isn't tuned specifically to like satellite signals, for example. But if we ever wanted to, we could just pop a different module on there, and we wouldn't have to change any of our software code.

Dan Roth  26:51  
Yeah. So that that approach means that you've had to spend a lot of time training the AI right to understand it, and you've got get different radar guns and say this is a stalker or whatever the you know, this is a direct X or Y gun and go from there to do that. So is that just a different shift from like engineering, you know, the horn and the circuitry to detect it to detect the signal versus like, and spending the time building the AI and training it like you're just you putting the time in a different area now.

Unknown Speaker  27:29  
Yeah, so that from a software perspective, the only thing that our AI, which we're branding re stands for radenso ai, the only thing that Ray cares about is that the hardware is fast enough to run her with sufficiently low latency. And this is really cool because we've been able to use production code for really a year and a half now during development, because it's just Linux, right? It doesn't care, just like Mac OS X runs on a variety of different laptop configurations. Whether at the 2012 Mac or a 2019 Mac, that's how the software we've built works as well. So we can run our, our production AI on a computer running Linux, like a full blown DELL LAPTOP or something. Or we can run it on the actual radar detector hardware, which is an ARM processor. So we've been able to develop very quickly and really iterate and spend a lot of research and development time training that AI and a lot of ways it's, it's what the automotive industry is moving towards, in general with self driving car technology. I mean, if you look at the hardware, for example, that Tesla's using, they're using a lot of similar FPGA and a lot of the similar hardware that that we're using to accelerate that AI. It's kind of funny. I mean, it's, it's the way that the OEM world is moving to, and I think we're one of the first aftermarket devices to kind of head in that direction as well.

Dan Roth  28:52  
Yeah, well, an FPGA is field programmable gate array, right? So that's a very flexible platform. You can make it You can be, you know, filters or signal conditioning or whatever you need it to do. You can you can make it do that. So it sounds like you've really thought about sort of future proofing and making something that's that's flexible, and that you can update later has there, have you come up with any other uses that you can talk about. For this tech, like it actually seems like autonomy and autonomous driving is a really good place that you'd want something to be aware of the signals around it. And not necessarily just for avoiding speeding tickets, but just knowing what's going on.

Unknown Speaker  29:37  
Yeah, and one of the things that I decided to do was actually, we're going to make a commitment to open source some of our code, our user interface code, because we've used a lot of open source tools during development of this that fundamentally changed how I viewed signal and signal processing, right. And that was made possible by these very generous people essentially, that created these tools and allowed me to you them for free. And I don't think those people who made those tools ever thought that it would be used to build a radar detector. So that got me thinking, you know, if I'm giving people what is not really a radar detector, but a Linux computer with a signal processing capability and a car, what else could that be used for. And I'm certain that, you know, we're not smarter than the rest of the world. We're not smarter than the internet, there's going to be somebody out there who's going to figure out a novel use for this platform, and we want to make sure that we give them the opportunity to develop for it. selfishly off the top of my head, I can think of a few other applications. I know that when we go to the track here, we're done. So we like knowing our lap times. And it's kind of interesting, but if you look at popular laptop devices like like the aim products, the aim solo or the smarty cams or even Harry's lap timer, which is an app, they're pretty expensive, usually hundreds of dollars and even the ones that use your cell phone, you have to buy it Dedicated GPS for because the GPS inside your cell phone doesn't update fast enough to be useful. It only does it one time a second or one hurt. Well, thinking ahead, I spent the money and put a 10 hertz GPS inside this radar detector. So it's, it's conceivable that was a few days of coding, somebody will be able to say, hey, I want to use this radar detector as a high performance lap timer. Go ahead, you know, develop it, if we don't do it first. Because I made my engineers. That's just the type of thing where we want to overbuild the hardware compared to what a normal radar detector would be, and then open it up to the community and say, Here you go, it's a Linux computer and after it's an aftermarket Linux computer in a car, have fun.

Dan Roth  31:45  
I mean, that's, that's fascinating. Have you had any interest from OEMs at all about a integrating it into the car cuz that's like the holy grail of detection systems is the ones that are very cleanly installed. They're not stuck to the windshield. So

Unknown Speaker  32:00  
So it's an interesting space. I know. So this industry is allowed me to make friends with some a decent amount of executives in the automotive industry. It's actually especially interesting how many interesting people you meet at the track. Oh, yeah. But even though all of those executives use these products Personally, I think from a company standpoint, some of them may be afraid of liability. And I think that's why I'd be surprised if in the near future, we saw any kind of speeding devices integrated into cars. I think it's just a liability thing.

Dan Roth  32:34  
Yeah, probably. That's too bad. I mean, think of the potentially get your ca Corvette with the special edition. I am dreaming. Yeah, but I mean, it sounds like the best case for radar detectors in 20 is just that there's there's a lot still left in the space and a lot that you can you can still expect that To be doing and you know, things you haven't even thought up yet are, are coming, you know, how does it work when you're you're figuring out how to improve the product and features to add? Is it just word of mouth? Or is it like, again, the track day stuff? Or any? How do you?

Unknown Speaker  33:16  
Usually first and foremost, we use our products, we are customer, we're building these products because we were all let down by the products in the space. And you know that that's a decision that I made. Even when we're hiring, I try to hire people that kind of fit that philosophy that if they see a problem, they're going to go ahead and take initiative and attack it themselves and come up with solutions to fix it. We try to really avoid being a passive company in that constant improvement regard. And then, you know, we're that we're the first layer we build the products that we want. But there's actually a pretty amazing community around radar detectors and countermeasures, speeding countermeasures in general. We participate in a lot and a website called rd forum. That's the business We have big message boards similar to any of the other car forums that I participate on. Where people test these products, and they discussed them, they rip them apart, they do tear downs. And I think some companies are afraid of that. Because there's some really smart people out there and they will tear apart your product. And they'll find every every corner that you cut every compromise that you made, but we consciously try to say, okay, we're not perfect no product is but these people have a point. Let's see what we can do to take their advice and build the products that they want to buy. And I think what that's done is created a really strong grassroots movement of support for us, where we say we're not perfect, but what we'll commit to that we will try to be perfect.

Dan Roth  34:44  
Well, that reverse engineering is important too. I mean, it's that's part of how you guys figure out what to make the thing do anyway. I mean, I'm sure sure the guys that at the radar. Gun companies are less than fond of your activities.

Unknown Speaker  34:58  
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's surprising how slow I think we have an advantage as drivers because we don't have to deal with government contracts and all the red tape associated with that they do come out with new technologies every now and then to try to counteract us but they can't move with the same speed that a small agile company can. I've seen a little bit more on the laser side of things there's one company in particular who will not name but they've shaken up the industry coming out with the laser gun that was very difficult to jam on the radar side so far it's just mostly been that multi radar camera up in Canada that I talked about Yeah,

Dan Roth  35:35  
that's sure I kind of forget about laser to a certain degree just I've always kind of been like if it's laser they're gonna get you that's so hard to detect but but maybe that's really but again that's not the case you can you can see the signature of the laser gun and and detect it even though it's kind of this like instant on thing that the tortures other detectors

Unknown Speaker  35:58  
later jamming does exist. But that's a different product than radar detectors is illegal right now, I believe in 11 or 12 states, so you have to have a little bit more awareness about where you're driving. And the real downside why it hasn't grown as much as radar at the cost. I don't think there's an effective laser jammer on the market for less than $1,000 for front protection plus info, which is also typically $1,000 deal. So whereas you can get a decent radar detector for a few hundred dollars, and it's legal everywhere, except Virginia, laser jamming, gotta spend a few thousand dollars. So that's understandably a smaller market.

Dan Roth  36:32  
Well, if you're jamming laser, like are you essentially basically shooting laser back at laser

Unknown Speaker  36:36  
to confuse it in a simplified way? You're absolutely right. Yeah,

Dan Roth  36:40  
so that's just more expensive pieces. Anyway, exactly.

Unknown Speaker  36:44  
Yeah. And it has to be installed on the outside of your car and there's, there's rules about how to install them to make sure they're effective. It's, there are some people that DIY but usually you have to go to an authorized dealer to get that done.

Dan Roth  36:57  
I was surprisingly fascinated by it. When I do dug into the industry to write some reviews. Because I again, I thought that it was like it's it's kind of like a stagnant market, but it's not actually I kind of want to ask like, what's what's next. But it is the beginning of 2020. And we just talked about what's next. So it's kind of a loaded question.

Unknown Speaker  37:19  
A lot of people make fun of me for saying this, because they said you never say anything bad about your own products. But I think we're kind of a weird company where we say, yeah, we believe our products are the best relative to everybody else's, but I think they all suck, including the ones that I currently sell. And I think that's really the answer to what's next is we're focused on taking this technology that we we've developed and we have prototypes here but is in fairness, not yet for sale, focusing on getting it through production, getting it out into the field and then coming out with with different models, different price points and have different features to make that technology is available to as many people as possible, because really, it goes back to the fundamental question that I said in the beginning is the industry or sales slow in the industry, because people don't like driving, or because the products are in up to their standards. And I personally believe that it's the second. So if we fix that problem, I think you're going to see a lot more buzz about radar detectors, maybe hopefully not even just among driving enthusiasts, but among the population at large, I think it's the people who

Dan Roth  38:23  
get tickets would prefer to get tickets.

Unknown Speaker  38:28  
And I mean, we really all that our radar detector is, right now the trade off is safety against ticket versus your annoyance level. And to be honest with you with products nowadays, they're going to annoy you more times per month than you are going to get a ticket. And that's in my opinion is what is held back adoption of these things. They such a narrow demographic right now of customers to buy radar detectors, but that demographic is not the only demographic that gets speeding tickets and then the data that we have for that is Mind blowing, where you look at all these other populations that are constantly getting speeding tickets, and my cousin. I mean, she, she's a young professional. She's a female. She is not a car enthusiast, and she was getting three or four of these tickets every couple months. Of course, she wants a radar detector. But when I loaned her one, it beats all the time. She said, I can't deal with this. But if you take away that problem, all of a sudden, you've opened up the market to a lot more people.

Dan Roth  39:24  
Right? Right. Well, it'll be fascinating to watch. And for those of us that love to drive, I like having it. And maybe with autonomous cars, making things easier for the people who don't want to drive. There'll be more room for us to actually go and drive. That's, that's my hope.

Unknown Speaker  39:42  
I would love that.

Dan Roth  39:44  
All right, what's up, john Andrew, Randy Bader from radenso. Thank you for spending time with the Sun Wheel Bearings. And, you know, look forward to the next developments from you, folks.

Unknown Speaker  39:54  
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Dan Roth  40:01  
Thanks for listening to Wheel Bearings. The whole crew will be back soon we'll talk about what Sam and Rebecca saw at CES this year. In the meantime, find us at Wheel Bearings, step media, and on Twitter as at Wheel Bearings cast. Remember, there's only one vowel that's the A in cast. We're also a car review tweets on Twitter, or you could just email us that's feedback at Wheel Bearings Media music on this episode is from free music archive.org and used under creative commons license. Tracks are Peace Corps by Paddington Bear and the third by anatec. We also borrowed a little bit from the Whoa, I hope they don't mind. Thanks again for listening to Wheel Bearings.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai