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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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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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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Looking for USB-C, longer battery life, nice if it would be smaller and even more accurate. The basics I guess.
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Would maybe get me off the fence
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USB-C would be nice, its on the more expensive Varia camera version.
FWIW I’ve been using my gen1 (rtl500) and gen3 (rtl515) Varia 4-5 times a week since 2016. A little more in 2016-2017 because I was doing 2-a-days. A little less during 2018-2019.
Never once did I think “wish it was more accurate” - never ever. Works great. The gen3 is more sensitive versus the gen1, for example I can walk behind it in the garage and that will generate an alert. However on the road the gen1 and gen3 have been great, no complaints about accuracy or range.
Battery life on the gen1 was ok, bought it in 2016 and did a double century in 2017. Back then I was able to get ~8 hours out of the gen1 unit, which was fine for century rides. The lights were dim on the older units, so I disabled the lights and used a separate rear light (Flare RT). For the double I used an Anker lipstick battery to charge my phone and Garmin 520 and Varia 500. In 2022 I gave the gen1 to a forum member, battery was still good for 3-4 hour rides.
Battery life on the gen3 has been great, no battery alerts on long 6-8 hour century rides. After 2 years the battery still shows as New on bike computer, and opening FIT file its still reaching a very high voltage at the start of ride the next day or two.
I’ve always come home, let Garmin bike computer turn off the radar (put it in standby mode), charge it fully, and then take it off the charger.
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Mentioned earlier in the thread, but on the EC Geek Warning podcast Dave Rome made the point that Garmin in general has really low margins for retailers. So the point of the CarBack is probably not to compete with Varia on performance or consumer price, but to give Trek stores and other retailers an option to sell that puts more money in their pockets.
Radar is something you want to work right every single time, so I see absolutely no reason to buy this thing.
For me to upgrade my aging Varia I would want USB-C and, ideally, better battery life.
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Yep. I will upgrade for longer battery life, usb-c, and if they make the camera version higher quality and long battery life I would go with that so I can record close passes etc.
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