Road trips can be made less stressful if you have the right gear for your car.
Whether you’re preparing for your first weekend adventure, or you’re a seasoned road trip veteran, it’s easy to accumulate a mountain of gear that seems useful for your next adventure. No-one wants to get out on the road and have plans ruined by forgetting to bring a critical piece of kit. However, it’s equally possible to go too far the other way and bring far more than you actually need.
To keep car clutter to a minimum, it’s always good to take a moment to review your arsenal of road trip gear and gadgets every so often, to make sure it’s all still as useful as possible. If some of your go-to gadgets are due an upgrade, or if you’re missing a potentially useful gadget altogether, it might be worth investing in one of these safety-enhancing fresh finds.Garmin DriveCam 76
Offering the additional functionality of a satellite navigation and a dash cam in one device, the Garmin DriveCam 76 makes a versatile road trip companion if you can justify the cost. SlashGear’s reviewer tested it out on their own interstate road trip and appreciated its easy setup and clear image quality. It wasn’t flawless — for example, its speed limit warning feature wasn’t entirely accurate — but, crucially, both its navigation and its dash cam functionality worked without issue.
As standard, the Garmin’s camera backs footage up to the onboard SD card, but Garmin also offers a cloud storage subscription for a monthly fee. The SD card slot can handle cards up to 256 GB, but our review unit arrived with a 16 GB card. As a result, the card filled up quickly, with early footage of our road trip being overwritten by the time our reviewer arrived home.
Garmin has several different sizes, but the only model that’s available with the built-in camera is the seven-inch model. It doesn’t come cheap, and that’s perhaps the biggest caveat. The Garmin DriveCam 76 retails for $449.99, although at the time of writing, it’s available on Amazon for less than $400.Syncwire Inflate 190 Tire Inflator
While many road trip gadgets are niceties over necessities, a good tire inflator like the Syncwire Inflate 190 Tire Inflator sits in the latter camp. Particularly if your car doesn’t come with a spare tire, the ability to patch up a puncture and re-inflate a tire at the side of the road is vital to ensuring a road trip goes as planned. We tested the inflator on both car tires and a variety of other inflatables, finding the Syncwire to make inflating all of them an easy task. It can be configured to a target pressure then connected to a tire and left to its own devices, since it automatically shuts off when it reaches that target pressure.
It’s capable of inflating up to 150 PSI. The Syncwire Inflate 190 Tire Inflator retails for $43.99, but can regularly be found on sale on Amazon for less. It’s a little over five inches long, roughly three inches wide, and two inches high, and so can fit in a glove box or be left in a storage cubby until you need it.Avapow A07 Portable Jump Starter
Alongside a tire inflator, a portable jump starter is another item that is essential to ensuring that long road trips don’t come to an unexpected halt. There are plenty of good, cheap car battery jump starters out there, but one that caught our eye was the Avapow A07 Portable Jump Starter. It retails for $59.99 and can jump start gas engines up to 7.0L and diesel engines up to 5.5L in displacement. The jump starter is IP65 rated, so can withstand water and dust ingress and thus is suitable for use in adverse weather conditions.
Recharging the battery via a wall outlet takes around four hours, and when it’s fully charged, the brand claims that the jump starter can perform up to 40 starts before running out of juice. It’s also claimed to hold a charge for up to nine months, and so can be charged and left in a glovebox or tool kit in case of emergencies. In a pinch, it can also be used as a power bank thanks to its USB-A port or a flashlight thanks to its built-in LED array.Streamlight 66601 MicroStream Flashlight
Most smartphones have built-in flashlights, but it’s always safe to carry a backup in case your phone’s battery is running low. The Streamlight 66601 MicroStream Flashlight features a clip that allows it to be attached to a pocket or the brim of a cap. The latter might come in particularly useful if you need both hands free to work on your car when it’s dark outside or a little extra illumination to see inside the darkest depths of the engine bay.
The flashlight provides 250 lumens at peak brightness and runs for up to an hour-and-a-half at that level. Its low light setting increases the expected battery life to around three-and-a-half-hours on a full charge, but produces only 50 lumens. It features an integrated rechargeable battery that can be charged via a Micro USB port. While buying a gadget with Micro USB is far from ideal, at least Streamlight includes a Micro USB to USB-A cable with the flashlight — you’ll just need to make sure you don’t misplace the cable.
