A car sun visor can be a good place to mount a device such as a phone or radar detector. The location is somewhat near your point of vision to the road and relatively easy to reach. Car sun visor mounts are funny. Some love it and others hate it. It all depends upon the individual. Most sun visor mount manufacturers recommend attaching it to the passenger’s visor so if you are located in North America and most of Europe (except the UK), that would equate to the right visor and it would be attached to the left side of that visor.
Sun Visor Mount Features
The nice feature of the sun visor mount is that when the visor is flipped upwards, the mount is out of the way and is difficult to see from the outside of the car. Most visor mounts clip over the top of the visor when it is in the down position. They typically use a universal cradle that expands to grip a phone or GPS. Be sure to measure your device before buying a sun visor mount to ensure the mount will fit. Sun visor mounts are popular with phones although I have seen it used with GPS units as well. Sun visor mounts are also very popular for radar detectors. It’s not suitable for a tablet as the device is typically too large to fit the universal cradles that are included with sun visor mounts and depending upon the size, your visor may not be able to flip up when not in use.
Sun Visor Mount Types
The most popular sun visor mounted devices are probably radar detectors and in fact, Escort provides one of these sun visor mounts as the standard within the box with most of their radar detectors. These mounts slip into a small slit on the top of the radar detector then clip over the visor. Unlike other mounts that we will discuss in this article, these mounts work best when your sun visor is in the up position (not in use).
The second most popular sun visor mounted device is a phone. The visor is a good place to put your phone versus the passenger seat as it keeps it from under somebody’s butt and out of the way. Furthermore it can be used as a GPS or just so that you can see the caller ID of someone calling you. Some sun visor mounts will not permit a swivel into landscape mode so be sure to select one that has a swivel feature such as this well made mount from Cellet.
Lastly, I have seen GPS units mounted from a sun visor. Depending upon the size of the GPS, a phone mount with universal cradle may work well. If you have a Garmin GPS, there is a cradle that accompanies the unit and on the back is a socket. That socket fits a mount that has a 17mm attached to it. You can get the cradle and mount as a package with this sun visor mount.
Summary
Every mount has its pros and cons. We already discussed the pros at the beginning of the article. There are cons too. First, if you plan to use a power cable with your device, it’s a long way down to your power outlet. The cable is going to potentially get in the way of your passenger and after a while you may find it tiring to have a cable draping three feet down. Secondly, while it’s somewhat close to your line of site on the road, you need to look up and towards the passenger. I personally prefer a windshield, dash or vent mount for times when I need to see the device while driving.