According to recent Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests, the number of drivers receiving penalty points for speeding in the UK increased by a staggering 32% between 2022 and 2025 – representing a four-year high.

In fact, a shocking 86% of all recorded motoring offences in England and Wales were related to speeding in 2024 alone, with those escalating figures showing no sign of abating.

You can thank improvements in camera technology, a wider rollout of both 30mph and 20mph zones and a general increase in complacency among drivers for the mammoth rise in fines handed out.

But as well as resulting in points on the licence and potential hikes in insurance, a recent study by road technology specialist Ooono found that 30% of respondents it surveyed said that receiving a speeding fine or ticket had impacted their finances that month, with 13% having to postpone or cancel a big purchase, another 13% being late with their mortgage and 12% spending less money that month on other items.

Whichever way you cut it, receiving that dreaded letter in the post is enough to ruin any day and, assuming you are like us (because you are reading Flat-Out, after all), one of those letters has perhaps arrived on more than one occasion.

Fret not, because there is a way to protect yourself from both fixed and mobile speed cameras that doesn’t rely solely on owning the latest and flashiest infotainment system, as a number of brands now offer small, simple and discreet devices that deliver real-time updates on the location of those pesky speed traps.

Ooono is arguably at the forefront of this revolution, with its best-selling Co-Driver device that offers both visual and audible warnings of upcoming speed cameras and road hazards, without the need for a whopping and distracting touchscreen.

It relies on both traffic and crowd-sourced, real-time data from fellow users to provide the most accurate whereabouts of mobile speed cameras, traffic jams and other potential hazards.

TomTom soon followed in Ooono’s tracks with the release of its diminutive and equally hassle-free Tom device, while Road Angel’s compact Pure Sync offers a similar experience with the addition of a small screen.

We’ve been playing with all of the devices here at Flat-Out to see which one is worth your money.

How we tested

There is only one way to put speed camera and road hazard-detecting technology to test and that’s by living with it. 

We set-up and ran each of the devices for a week in a number of cars, covering a wide array of journeys, including short hops around town and much longer adventures to airports, events and beyond.

Where accompanying apps were required, we downloaded these and set-up accounts, with notes made on general ease of use, the quality of real-time information provided and the overall value for money.

Ooono Co-Driver No2

Price: £69.99

Buy now: Ooono Store

Pros

• Brilliantly simple to use
• Clear, effective speed camera alerts
• A nice piece of product design

Cons

• Hazard reporting still growing in the UK
• Requires smartphone connection
• Waze and Google Maps offer similar features for free (but not as good)

Modern cars are absolutely stuffed with safety technology these days. Some of it is genuinely useful, some of it feels like an overenthusiastic driving instructor shouting at you every five seconds.

That’s where the Ooono Co-Driver NO2 comes in.

The little, well-designed puck-shaped gadget aims to offer the useful bits of modern driver assistance — such as speed camera alerts, road hazard warnings and speed limit notifications — without burying drivers beneath layers of distracting touchscreens and incessant bonging noises.

Priced at a very reasonable £69.99 (with no pesky membership fees to pay), the compact device sticks neatly to the dashboard using a magnetic mount (complete with tiny 3M adhesive patches) or cleverly clips to a sun-visor with an accessory and pairs with your smartphone via the Ooono app. Once connected, it quietly sits in the background until there’s something worth knowing about.

“The Ooono Co-Driver NO2 is hugely impressive”

The latest generation has received a number of refinements over the popular original and now integrates neatly with both Ooono’s own free navigation software and Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, meaning alerts can be played directly through the vehicle’s speakers, rather than simply through the small device, which is perfectly adequate anyway, as the mix of audible bleeps and bright flashing LEDs are difficult to miss.

Notifications for fixed speed cameras arrive in the form of a discreet LED ring of light and a beep if you so wish, while the optional speed limit alerts are clear enough to stop accidental creeping above the limit. You can basically set it to be as sensitive and intrusive as you want.

But best of all, it never demands attention. There’s no bright display, no fiddly menus and no temptation to glance away from the road. Simply set it up in the app (it takes seconds) and leave it running in the background. It is smart enough to wake when the ignition is on and the vehicle is running and charges quickly via a provided USB-C cable. Although you won’t have to do this very often, as it lasts around a month on a full charge.

Reporting hazards is handled with simple taps on the central Ooono button, making the whole thing feel refreshingly old-school. Cancelling a report is as easy as depressing the top button. The only downside is that it requires a data connection, but then who travels without a smartphone these days anyway?

The other slight issue is the community-driven hazard reporting, which still feels less comprehensive in the UK than rivals like Waze or Google Maps. Mobile camera locations and road incidents can occasionally be patchy depending on where you are but we have to say, this seemed improve every week that we were using it.

As a discreet, stylish and easy-to-use driving companion that encourages you to leave the smartphone in a pocket, the Ooono Co-Driver NO2 is hugely impressive. It strips away the unnecessary complexity of modern ADAS systems and delivers the important stuff in a way that feels genuinely useful rather than irritating.

Tom by TomTom

Price: £69.99

Buy now: TomTom

Pros

• Ridiculously easy to set up
• Excellent speed camera alerts
• Long battery life and no cables required

Cons

• Design lacks the polish of Ooono
• Buttons can be fiddly while driving
• Dashboard mount isn’t the neatest

TomTom has clearly looked at what made the Ooono Co-Driver so popular and thought: “Yeah, we’ll have some of that.”

The result is very similar — a compact little squircle-shaped driving companion that offers speed camera warnings, hazard alerts and speed limit notifications without requiring drivers to stare endlessly at a touchscreen map.

Setup is refreshingly painless. Download the TomTom app, connect the device via Bluetooth and you’re basically done. No subscription drama, no awkward payment setup and no lengthy faffing around trying to get the hardware recognised.

Installation is similarly simple. Peel off the large 3M adhesive metal ring on the back and stick it somewhere convenient on the dashboard. The Tom will then magnetically connect to this, so you can remove it to charge.  Although this is where the TomTom slightly loses points against Ooono, because the mounting solution feels much less elegant.

There’s no clever visor mounting options here and the 3M supplied is much larger than Ooono’s offering. Once it’s stuck down, it very much looks like it intends to stay there permanently.

Thankfully, unlike the Road Angel (see below), there’s no need for constant power. The built-in battery lasts around 30 days depending on usage and means you won’t have cables dangling awkwardly across your dashboard like it’s 2007 all over again.

Speed camera alerts are clear and timely, delivered through a mix of audible bleeps and bright LED flashes, while upcoming traffic hazards and jams trigger more urgent red warnings. The device also warns when you drift over the speed limit with an orange-and-blue flashing sequence that’s difficult to ignore without feeling overly intrusive.

Reporting incidents is nice and simple too. A single press reports a speed camera, while a longer hold logs hazards or traffic issues. There’s also a dedicated cancel button for false alarms.

“Setup is refreshingly painless”

It all becomes second nature fairly quickly, although the physical button layout isn’t quite as intuitive as Ooono’s excellent oversized top-mounted control. Finding the TomTom’s buttons without looking occasionally requires a bit more finger fumbling than ideal.

Design-wise, it also lacks the premium feel of Ooono’s latest devices. The plastics feel cheaper and the overall finish isn’t quite as polished, even if the bright LEDs and colour schemes are arguably easier to spot while driving.

Still, the important stuff is excellent.

TomTom’s speed camera database is predictably strong, static camera warnings are accurate and the overall user experience is slick and distraction-free. But again, you can get most of this stuff for free with apps like Waze, Google Maps and more. But it’s a good solution for those that want a completely distraction-free driving experience.

Road Angel Pure Sync

Price: £99.99 (includes 12 months subscription)

Buy now: Road Angel

Pros

• Reliable speed camera database
• Clear visual speed limit warnings
• Neat magnetic mounting system

Cons

• Setup process is unnecessarily painful
• Feels cheap for the money
• Requires permanent power connection

On paper, the Road Angel Pure sounds like a strong alternative to the likes of Ooono and TomTom’s latest speed camera gadgets. It offers live speed camera alerts, speed limit warnings, hazard reporting and GPS speed readings, all wrapped up in a compact dashboard-mounted unit that connects to your smartphone. But unlike the rivals tested here, getting started isn’t exactly frictionless.

The setup process feels oddly long-winded for such a simple product. Despite the included 12-month subscription (something else competitors don’t require), Road Angel still insists on taking payment details during registration, while Bluetooth pairing required several attempts before the app and device finally decided to talk to each other when we were getting things set up.

Once up and running, though, things improved.

The Pure One mounts via a neat magnetic dock that also cleverly incorporates the USB-C charging cable, helping keep things relatively tidy in the cable department. Unfortunately, it requires constant power, meaning there’s still a wire snaking somewhere around your dashboard unless you’re prepared to spend time routing it properly.

The device itself feels a little underwhelming for the price. It’s very plasticky and the screen resolution looks faintly retro, while bright sunlight can make it difficult to read depending on where you mount it.

That said, the alerts themselves are very effective. Fixed camera warnings arrive with plenty of notice, while the speed limit detection system flashes the screen red and emits a fairly impossible-to-ignore warning sound if you creep over the limit.

Actually, “fairly impossible-to-ignore” might be generous. The voice alerts are absolutely deafening out of the box. You have to fire up the app and trawl through the settings to turn the volume down, which is recommended unless you want a jump-scare every few minutes.

Road Angel also displays a live GPS speed reading, which is handy in older vehicles with wildly optimistic analogue speedometers, although perhaps less useful in modern cars that already feature accurate digital displays.

“The device itself feels a little underwhelming for the price”

Hazard reporting works well enough once you’ve memorised the controls. A quick press of the left-hand button submits an incident report to the Road Angel community, which is then verified before being distributed to other users.

Like most of these systems, it relies heavily on smartphone connectivity and community participation to work at its best. And again, much like Ooono, the UK user base still feels a little patchy compared to the likes of Waze or Google Maps.

Still, there’s something refreshingly simple about having a dedicated device that quietly gets on with warning you about speed cameras without demanding constant attention from a touchscreen.

The Road Angel Pure One isn’t perfect and it certainly doesn’t feel particularly premium, but if you can tolerate the setup frustrations and slightly clunky interface, it remains a useful bit of driver tech, especially for those with older vehicles that could do with a little tech upgrade.

Verdict

More often than not, the original is always the best and Ooono has been in this game for a long time. As a result, its product feels more polished that the competition, with the Co-Driver now offered in a number of stylish finishes, including limited edition numbers that will suit most modern car interiors. It is discreet, easy to set-up and even more simple to use, blending in to the background and only alerting drivers when absolutely necessary.

Tom by TomTom is essentially the same thing in a slightly less refined package, although it will feel very familiar for those already embedded in the TomTom ecosystem. Similarly, Road Angel throws a screen into the mix for largely the same money, which will benefit those with older vehicles, bereft of any sort of infotainment system.

Granted, you can achieve much the same thing with free smartphone apps, while modern cars are jam-packed with these sort of safety systems anyway. That said, all of the speed camera detectors tested here come into their own on those days where you might not be navigating via Waze, Google Maps and more, as the devices automatically come alive with the vehicle’s ignition and warn of upcoming hazards 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Always getting pinched in your local 20mph zone? One of these gadgets could be the perfect answer.