Marshall Brain's Blog

A couple of weeks ago in Raleigh there was an accident that killed four teenagers. They were coming home from a basketball game, and the driver was going about 100 MPH in an RX-8. He went out of control on an exit ramp and flipped over a wall. The car fell about 50 feet to the ground below and exploded.

There was much coverage of the accident, and one parent asked the question: We have parental controls on AOL accounts and TV programs - why not on cars that our teenagers drive?

There seem to be two technologies designed to keep an eye on teenagers and detect when they are having problems as new drivers. One of them is in-car GPS-based vehicle tracking systems. Lots of companies sell these systems, and here is one example:

AllTrack USA

One quote from the site: "­Speed Threshold Alert- Alerts you when, where, and by how much a vehicle speeds. Tell your teen to neverdrive over, say, 60 miles per hour in the car. You'll know right away if they ever do !!" There are lots of other variations on the theme offered by these companies.

Another system is called DriveCam. It places a camera in the car that can store video into flash memory, and uses an accelerometer to decide when to record information. Anytime there is a sudden maneuver (turning, braking, bumping), it will set off the accelerometer and 10 seconds of video pre- and post-incident gets recorded. This video from CNN shows the system in use.

Combining these two systems would create an environment that would make it very un-fun to be a teen with a car, but it would be likely to significantly decrease the number of accidents.