There's one place a radar detector is still a cool gadget.

When did radar detectors go from kinda-mainstream to tinfoil-hat territory? Maybe along with the same rise in speed limits that rendered Sammy Hagar’s biggest hit incomprehensible. As if it was all good fun to dodge the cops when they were trying to make you drive 55, but now that you’re allowed to go 70, you’re a scofflaw, zooming outside the bounds of polite society.

Where’s the exception? Road trips.

When you’re just trying to make good time through some Godforsaken hinterland many miles from home, there are three ways can you avoid becoming the next source of revenue to pay for the corpulent county sheriff’s eelskin holster:

1. Drive under the speed limit LOL.

2. Buy a pimp-ass $500 radar detector that will (a) mark you as a radar-detector freak and (b) protect you from almost every ticket. And it’ll have to, to come close to paying for itself.

3. Buy this cheapo radar detector that will protect you from most tickets, and which pays for itself from the very first ticket you don’t get.

The Cobra SSR 50 certainly isn’t the worst radar detector. It averages 3.9 on Amazon and 46% of reviewers give it five stars. It’s not the best, either. It’s just good enough to be worth buying, and just bad enough that you’ll never have to worry about some radar-detector freak assuming you belong to his crackpot tribe.

Just in case one does strike up a conversation, though, remember not to get drawn into a discussion about chemtrails, or that snowball that wouldn’t melt, or how Sammy Hagar was just too good to replace David Lee Roth. That kind of argument is like wrestling a hog: even if you “win”, you still come out of it covered in mud and shit.