Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsNot as good as RCT515's Radar
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2022
I really like the Garmin Varia and all my friends who ride swear by them. I was using the RCT515 previously and just upgraded to this RCT715 (so my spouse could maybe have answers to what happened to me when I was biking?).
My thoughts from using it on a couple 40 mile rides into the city (my route goes through some hills, forest, hits a busy freeway for half a mile, goes into a major metropolis, and then hits a nice section of greenway pedestrian/bike paths):
- More false positives with RCT715. It will "detect" a car that doesn't exist. A lot of those times it is from turns or hills, but I've had it also happen on a straight section, and I'm not sure what it was seeing.
- More false negatives with RCT715. I watched in my rearview mirror a car come up on me, and not until it was 30 feet behind me did the RCT715 notice the car. Most of the time it would see them far off, but it was a bit disconcerting seeing how little warning it gave. Compare this with my RCT515 which noticed a car about 150 feet back when I was going through a section of road that had a lot of turns and heavily forested.
- My most recent ride I was nearly hit sideways by someone running a stop sign...and I don't think the camera would have helped here...makes me want to get a helmet cam, lol
- The Varia detected a few 'crashes' on my ride. I think it has 3d accelerometers and it ignores vertical bounces (like the bumpy gravel section), but when I hit some harder bumps it set off an alarm noise to let me know it will 'lock' those videos for later. So either those bumps gave me too big of a sideways jolt...or my assumption of them "ignoring most vertical bounces" is wrong, and it just got bumpy enough for a crash to be determined. It's probably better to be more cautious here, so I'm not complaining...but I'll have to make sure to regularly go in there and unlock those videos so the memory can be used again.
Their new update on Android is nice (fixes some bugs I had hit on the previous version). To access the videos it is a little annoying, as you have to connect to the Varia's wifi hotspot (makes sense though, since it's a lot of data transferring). It is a bit of a pain though since there seem to be a lot of corner cases the developers didn't think about during this hotspot handshake experience (like maybe adding a timeout so the app doesn't just hang waiting). I had to force-close the app a few times to get the connections working. I'm really glad most of the settings do not require connecting via wifi.
