Llama mentioned that the light pattern doesn’t change when a car approaches. Honestly, with the Varia that gives me the most security that it flashes more to get the drivers attention.
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Hard to know for sure, but the pattern used by Trek was tested and developed with lots of research to be one that gets attention even if it doesn’t “change” actively.
That was a very good review. What a lot of work. The only thing I didn’t see (and maybe I missed it) was whether the Car Back changes the alert if a car is approaching at a high speed. Varia does this.
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Good question! There was another 10 things I could have covered with that little device… but don’t give me an excuse to make another 37 minute video on this thing! 
I had to go back and look at the video. At 27:14 I drive at the two radars at ~100kph. The Varia alert is red on the 1040. The CarBack alert is orange on the 840. I can’t recall ever seeing the CarBack sending a red alert. A quick scan through all the other detections… nope. Only ever orange from the CarBack.
Also of note: I don’t think the CarBack has a radar only mode. I’d have to check this.
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Wow, that was thorough! One thing I might have missed was the battery life comparison, or are they basically lineball? I’ve got a 515 already, but if the Trek is $70 cheaper (Au RRP), works virtually the same (with no false positives) as the Garmin but lasts slightly longer it’d have to be considered.
In addition to the display indicator turning red, the Varia also changes the tone of the audible alert to a sharper sounding warning. I pick up on the audible tone of a fast car right away. This is very helpful and not overdone.
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I just saw on Insta that you bricked one!
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Yeah… not great. First time they’ve seen that happen. Apparently.
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I simply don’t understand how products get tested. Is there no QA QC team that is not biased? If Trek claimed to have done testing over thousands of miles, how have these issues not been uncovered? Or they were flagged and simply ignored.
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In their defence I assume their use-cases were all tested and given a green light. The device does work as sold. It’s just nowhere near as consistent/reliable at the stated maximum detection range as the Varia (even though they have differing maximums), the narrower radar beam does have downsides, and the sensitivity to slow moving vehicles isn’t as good as the Varia either… but… I guess it works well enough for them to call it done and ship it.
A lot of testing groups I’ve come across include a lot of people who are a) so happy to be sent free stuff that they forget to be critical and/or b) simply don’t have the hands on experience with competing products.
Thankfully Trek are still replying to my emails. For now. 
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This was my career across several high tech sectors and I can confirm that this is very often the case, assuming Trek did have a decent set of use cases. More and more there is a reliance on automation and simulation to test products versus hands-on and very much depends on the design of the tests. Very few QA teams are true arbiters of the decision to go/no-go on a product release and it is mostly based on (sketchy) risk assessments vs market pressures. You’d probably be surprised at how much stuff gets released as “good enough”
The dev triangle is Fast - High Quality - Cost. In most cases you can have two, at the expense of the third.
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I really had high hopes for this unit. I still don’t have a radar and want to get one this season. I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer until garmin releases their updated varia. I really hope it’s sooner rather than later.
What are you looking for in an updated Varia that would keep you from buying now?
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Early in my career I was on a software testing team and I raised several concerns that I thought were serious enough to delay go-live. When it didn’t, I went to the Program Manager (or whatever we called them way back then) and challenged him. His response was something like, “If we waited until everything was perfect we would never go live. If we wait until almost everything is perfect, we will still find out almost everything wasn’t perfect and our competition will have beaten us to market.” That was eye opening.
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In some situations, it is acceptable or at least tolerable, in other cases you get Boeing.
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This is very, very true. I’ve seen many a case of people (sometimes including me) focusing so much on delivering a high-quality product or service that they get beaten to market (or beaten in the market) because they iterate too slowly.
Sometimes it’s much better to release something that’s good enough, then be REALLY awesome to the inevitable slice of customers who aren’t happy, then take all that real-world feedback and make a much better version much more quickly than you could have done with just the internal testing capability for version 1.
As @ZeroGravity noted, of course you can take that to unhealthy extremes and you definitely don’t want to be whatever Boeing has become.
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Coming up from a product development background, an important early lesson was “Put the mouse down.”
You can always make a product “better”, but at some point, you need to call it good and move to production. No product is ever “perfect”, every product could have been “better” in some manner. Moreover, products that are revealed to have issues not found during testing and evaluation are not necessarily the result of poor QC or nefarious intent. You sometimes have issues that reveal themselves only once you go into mass production / distribution.
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100%
Same question
I bought the gen1 in 2016, and, wait for it, NEVER LOOKED BACK 
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