Aguri was founded because of a life-long love affair with all things motoring. The team at Aguri are all fans of travel and exploring and driving in particular – cars, motorhomes, trucks – the bigger the better for some of us! We also love tech and gadgets that can improve that experience and make it more fun and entertaining. In fact our love of gadgets, is second only to our love of travelling! Our journey started in the early 1990’s when we developed our first radar/laser speed trap detector and since then we’ve developed a vast range of products including combination dash cam and speed camera detectors, specialists sat navs for trucks, lorrys, HGVs, motorhome and caravan sat navs, and cordless battery powered pressure washers! Read our story below…
Aguri was created because of a life-long love affair with all things motoring. The team at Aguri are all fans of driving and travelling and love any gadget that can improve that experience and make it more entertaining. In fact our love of gadgets, is second only to our love of travelling! Our journey started in the early 1990’s when we developed our first radar/laser speed trap detector. The roads were a lot quieter then, and quite a lot more entertaining to drive on! Around the year 2000, GPS technology started to become available at a price and size that could be used in everyday products. At the same time, Gatso speed cameras were becoming more and more prolific on UK roads and there was a demand for a new gadget that could easily identify where they were. We worked tirelessly over a two year period to build a database of the locations of all the speed cameras across the UK. The database was called Speedshield, and was the beginning of the same speed trap database we use today. During the same period, our design team developed the first speed trap detector with built-in GPS, utilising the very latest micro GPS technology available at the time. Our first GPS speed trap detector was finally launched in December 2002, and went on to sell over 500K units throughout Europe, the biggest selling speed trap detector of it’s time!
The natural progression for this new micro GPS technology was portable street level navigation. GPS satellite navigation already existed but only at a very high level in military, marine and aviation and was incredibly expensive. So it was very exciting for fans of cars and travel to have affordable GPS technology available that could enable us to develop portable satellite navigation systems. Not only that, we were able to combine our unique speed trap detection technology with satellite navigation software to produce the first ever, combination speed trap detector and sat nav system. The team at Aguri created the first ever 2-in-1 sat nav and speed trap detector in 2006 and from our point of view, it was the ultimate in-car gadget.
Our head of development at the time was a motorhome enthusiast. He loved nothing better than heading off in to the wild with his wife and family, exploring not just the UK but much of Europe but as his love for his hobby grew, so did the size of his motorhome. Even though he was a very experienced driver, there were obvious pitfalls, especially as he travelled further and further into the countryside and the roads became more and more narrow. He also noticed the issue of low bridges and weight restrictions and quickly realised that using a regular sat nav designed for a car just wasn’t going to cut it. Building a portable sat nav specifically for a motorhome, designed to avoid narrow roads and low bridges was a monumental task but it was a challenge the Aguri design team were determined to overcome, and after several meetings and discussions with industry experts and professional drivers, we also saw that trucks, HGVs and other large vehicles faced the same problem. The consequences of a truck getting stuck under a low bridge could be extremely serious, not to mentioned the damage to the bridge itself which was costing Network Rail millions. After 2 years in development the first specialist truck sat nav was introduced in 2008, quickly followed by the first ever motorhome and caravan sat nav. It’s been 15 years since our design team launched the first lorry, motorhome and caravan sat navs, but development has never stopped as we continue to improve and refine routing algorithms and user experience with new features including the ability to avoid steep hills and live digital traffic information to create the best truck sat nav and the best motorhome and caravan sat navs around.
It’s thought the first dash cam was launched in 2009 and naturally they were a big hit with motorists. As we love a new gadget, we were all early adopters of this new technology, everyone had one! Dash cams weren’t just fun though, they served to protect drivers from an increase in road rage and pre-meditated accidents where the perpetrator would intentionally crash in to you, or break sharply so that you ended up crashing in to them, just so they could make a false claim on your insurance policy. There was a problem though, our dashboards were getting very cluttered and there were too many wires everywhere! The obvious solution was to combine our speed trap detector technology with the new micro-video technology developed for use in dash cams. Our first combination 2-in-1 dash cam and speed trap detector was launched in 2011. The first dash cam we launched alerted you to all types of speed traps using the same Speedshield speed trap database used in our high end speed trap detector and radar/laser detectors, combined with high definition in-car video recording. We have continued to develop our range of dash cams with the latest versions combining super high-definition in-car video recording, mobile speed trap detection, fixed speed camera detection and can now even display the speed limit of every road and be set to alert you if you ever exceed a speed limit and when you drive from one speed limit to another. We might be biased, but we think this is has to be the best dash cam on the market!
2020 was a strange year for everyone but it gave us a lot of thinking time, and a lot of time to do a few of those jobs we’d been putting off for months if not years! It also gave us the opportunity to engage in some of those neglected past times – especially cycling and mounting biking! It was during this period that we realised there was an essential tool missing from our armoury – the cordless pressure washer! Jet washers are a great invention and can breath new life into your patio and decking, quickly removing ingrained dirt and making them look like new. Sometimes though, you don’t have access to power or you don’t have access to a tap, and that’s where a cordless battery powered pressure washer comes in handy and why we developed Power Clean. Cordless pressure washers were a bit of a departure for us technology wise but we knew how useful they would be. A battery powered pressure washer can be used for all sorts of tasks where you don’t have access to a tap such as cleaning your mountain bike, muddy boots after a hike or your motorhome and camping equipment when out in the wild. Power Clean cordless jet washers are also great for watersports, sailing and jet skies. Since launching Power Clean cordless pressure washers (in our opinion the best cordless pressure washer on the market!), our customers have found all sorts of new and innovative uses for them, tasks we hadn’t even thought of when we were in the process of developing them. One local customer uses his cordless pressure washer it to clean his narrow boat, another customer contacted us to say that they use their pressure washer to water their vegetable patch at their allotment. They have no power or tap on-site so instead, submerge the hose in a water butt and use the battery power jet washer to water the veg!
When we first set out on our journey, the internet didn’t exist, in fact mobile phones were only just starting to become common place. If you wanted to purchase a speed trap detector, you went to your local auto accessory store or ordered one after responding to an ad in the back of car magazine or the newspaper. However you made your purchase, you got to speak to someone, and if you had a problem, you could go back to the shop or speak to someone on the phone. The internet has changed a lot of things since then, and it’s now much easier and quicker to buy a truck, motorhome or caravan sat nav, a sat nav for a coach, a dash cam and speed trap detector or a cordless pressure washer. You can order one from this website and it should be delivered the next working day. However, excellent customer service is something we are passionate about preserving, so you can always call us before and after you have made a purchase. We are just as happy to talk to you about any queries you might have after you have purchased a unit from us, as we are to help you make a decision before you decide to buy something from us. Even if you just want a little bit of advice, please feel free to give us a call on 0330 102 5578 – we love to talk!