An important aspect of traffic safety is the development of aids that extend the driver's time and motion perception. One promising candidate is the compact, lightweight millimeter-wave FM-CW radar now being widely studied. Although the homodyne FM-CW radar is well known form its simplicity, it has a relatively low S/N ratio. This paper describes the principles behind our newly-developed heterodyne FM-CW radar and it's evaluation results. The heterodyne FM-CE radar generates sidebands by switching a front-end amplifier and also uses the heterodyne detection technique for gaining sensor sensitivity. The heterodyne FM-CW radar's signal to noise ratio was 19.5 dB better than previously designed homodyne FM-CW radar.