An SL 63 Roadster arrived wanting Uniden's flagship radar and laser system fitted, on one condition: he did not want to be able to see it. No suction cups on the windscreen, no cable looping down the A-pillar, nothing that announced itself when he opened the door.
That is a reasonable thing to ask, and it is also the part most people get wrong. A detector that lives on the glass is a detector that gets stolen, gets knocked off, sits in the wrong place for the sensors, and puts a black box in the middle of a car whose interior somebody spent a long time designing.
The grille does the work
The R9W is a two-part system: the receiving hardware goes where it can see, and the display goes where you can. On this car the sensors went into the Panamericana grille.
The vertical-slat grille on an AMG is a gift for this kind of work: it is deep, it is already busy, and it is already black. Mounted properly, the hardware reads as another piece of the grille's own geometry. The car's face is unchanged from any normal viewing distance, and there is nothing on the outside of the bodywork to catch a car wash or a curious hand.
The trade-off worth understanding is that a grille mount is permanent in a way a windscreen mount is not. It is measured, fitted and wired once. That is exactly why it needs doing properly the first time.
Where the display went
The display sits high and tight against the windscreen header, next to the mirror. It is readable with a glance rather than a look down, and it does not sit in the middle of the glass blocking anything. Everything feeding it runs behind trim.
Why it was worth doing this way
A radar system is only useful if it is switched on and pointed the right way, and the systems that get switched on are the ones that are simply there — no plugging in, no repositioning, no remembering to take it out of the car when you park downtown. Hard-wiring it means it powers up with the car and it is always aiming exactly where it was aimed on the day it was fitted.
The car looks factory. That was the point.