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Chevy Malibu 'Teen Driver' Tech Will Snitch If You Speed
mpicpp writes General Motors wants to help curb teen crashes with a new system that lets parents monitor their kids' driving habits—even when mom and dad aren't actually in the car. Dubbed Teen Drive, the new system will debut in the 2016 Chevy Malibu, offering a bunch of features designed to encourage safe driving. It will, for instance, mute the radio or any device paired with the car when front seat occupants aren't wearing their seatbelts, and give audible and visual warnings when the vehicle is traveling faster than preset speeds. It doesn't end there. Brace yourself, teens, because you might not like this next part too much. The new system also lets parents view a readout of how you drove the car, including how fast you went, how far you drove, and whether any active safety features (like over-speed warnings) were engaged. Parents can also set the radio system's maximum volume to a lower level, and select a maximum speed between 40 and 75 miles per hour, which, if exceeded, will trigger warnings.
Not letting your shithead teens on the fucking road in the first place?
...you let your teenage kid drive your brand new 2016 car.
In the real world, most would typically have to endure the initial "proving grounds" shitbox of a car first.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
But you really should not let your moronic teen drive in the first place if you truly believe you need this in the first place.
Putting a built-in speed limit to cars might be a better idea. There's no reason to go above a certain speed in the city and unless you take a highway, no reason to go above a certain speed either...
Self driving cars cannot come soon enough.
Glad this wasn't around when I was 18. Of course then my insurance was more than the car payment.
Bicycles don't have number plates. Bicycles make you fitter. Good luck getting laid though.
If you don't trust your kids, don't lend them your car.
Not letting them on the road seems a little extreme but do they have to have a brand new car? What happened to having a beater to putt around in for the first few years?
What does it matter to you? Sure I drove a beater like most of us but if a parent puts their kid in a new(er) car, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that unless the kid develops an entitlement complex from it. If the money isn't an issue to them it really shouldn't matter to us either.
For me to project my personal experiences growing up, opinion of class dynamics, thoughts about other people who are not like me, and biases about the Right Way To Live on to only tangentially related news stories!
Kid doesn't like it: let him buy his own damned car, _and_ his insurance, _and_ his maintenance.
As an Army brat in Germany, I couldn't afford a car, but motorcycles were really cheap so that's what I had. Then into the Army and definitely no money, so I was 20 before I finally owned my own (a really worn-out TR-2 I bought from my First Sergeant). I never have owned a new car; guess I just got in the habit of buying used ones. Never had any children of my own, so I haven't gone through that "Beautiful People" issue. But there again it's the question of who's running the household. If you've turned it over to the kids, you _deserve_ to be murdered in your sleep.
Glad this wasn't around when I was 18. Of course then my insurance was more than the car payment.
Aren't insurance companies offering discounts for installing such devices reporting to them? If not, perhaps soon?
Oh good!
So now your car companies cloud service gets to have a copy of not just your teens driving habbits but yours too that they can sell to any insurance companies willing to pay the premium. That and your children will get to be fucked on their premiums in the future when insurance companies can use data on their teen driving habits to justify shitty premiums.
But this great teen feature is only for your convenience. Right. Yeah.
Teenage drivers with fresh licenses should be driving older cheaper-to-buy cars.
Unless a teenager (or their parents) are rich, they should be buying an older cheaper car that doesn't require taking out a massive auto loan. In Australia the usual recommendation/good option is something small and Japanese like a Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Suzuki Swift, Mitsubishi Lancer, Nissan Pulsar, Mazda 323, Honda Jazz or something like that but in the US the best option may be different.
And that's how skynet begins.. by giving up our control to computers.
The password to disable teen driver mode is: CHEVY all uppercase, and the disable code is 12345 :-)
When I was a teenager learning to drive, I would have absolutely hated this. It would have completely ruined the feeling of freedom that driving unsupervised provides, and would have made me rant and rail against the injustice of it all.
Now that I am a grown-up, when my kids become teenagers, you bet your bottom dollar they are going to have to put up with this. Yes, they will hate it, and they will hate me for it. And they will live to do the same to their kids.
Why can't they have what I had?
A POS car that could only go 75 if you turned off the AC.
The radio would cut out when you turned left, and if you tried to turn the volume up, you'd just blow a fuse anyway.
The backseat was so small you weren't getting up to anything even if you could convince a girl to look past the rust and bubbling clear-coat.
All this for less than $1k, and it gets 40mpg due to the three horsepower engine (one for each working cylinder)! Put the money you save into their college fund since they now have a chance of getting out of high school alive and childless.
Now excuse me as a I return to my Fortress of Solitude...
Those poor kids might have escaped the tornado if their car hadn't been limited to 45 miles per hour.
The thing I find most sad about this is not that teens might be shocked by an invasion of what used to be their privacy, or that average people might fear the government would use it to track them (they don't need new ways of doing THAT anywhere you can reasonably drive a car). It's that this technology could be used to MARKEDLY improve peoples' fuel efficiency and overall driving skill levels, but it's not being marketed that way because people would likely never care to use it that way.
what kind of society is America building ?, you are freaking obsessed with spying, monitoring, tracking, identifying, is that the best you can do with trillions of dollars of tech ?
i dont know what you are teaching kids and the next generation in schools but it doesnt seem very beneficial for a healthy society, millions of people dedicated to watching what others are doing with their lives.
But what about all the subwoofers and the burnouts?
Wont somebody think of the children?!?!?
Teens learning to drive in anything but the last decade, without these parental smart phone apps. We should all have died an instant fiery death.
just one more step into the 24/7 surveillance life. Get them used to it early, then they won't think it abnormal it later.
how about educating them about speed ??? FFS, since when abstinence did work???
we had this for over a decade. ODB-II dongle that is easy to install that records all that. Hell you could buy a version that had a gps that logged location.
Glad to see GM is finally catching up to 2005!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kids learn from their mistakes. I learned from mine as much as my parents tried to protect me, mine learned from theirs. I made some real doozies but miraculously survived, by all indications mine weren't as reckless. Not positive it was because I was far less restrictive but it seems plausible.
I wonder how much this opens the owner up to additional liability when there's an accident and the opposing council subpenas the records of the vehicle and shows a pattern of reckless driving?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Chevy Malibu Barbie, the doll that tells your parents what you have been talking behind their backs and instantly converts any six-year-old to a loyal Chevy customer.
Title says it all. This is a pilot program for the automotive insurance industry to offer "reduced rates". Eventually, it becomes mandatory on new cars based on some government regulated standards.
Yeah well, they can suck my cock and like it!
Life is not for the lazy.
... no teen wants to be seen driving your POS Malibus.
self-driving cars at least 5 years away and then it will likely be only on some roads / self drive only roads. Self-driving cars will be leased, as long as the leasening co is willing to take the risks.
Also we need more public transportation.
we also need real speed limits on highways no more on of this 45-55 shit on 3-4+ lane ones much less major toll roads.
So are these the same engineers that designed the ignition switch?
Visualize Billy's, Tammy's and Chris's future debt
I can visualize a big fat goose egg. So can anyone else familiar with Dave Ramsey's techniques.
You have a bullied nerd for a child if they choose being spoiled + monitored over riding in a friend's car. I'd be more concerned about them if they accepted this scenario openly than I would be if they sped occasionally.
Perhaps teenagers shouldn't drive at all? At least, we have had serious proposals from researchers in several EU countries that rising the legal driving age from 18 to 20 years or above would be a pretty sensible thing, and save quite a few lives. Seems like the younger drivers are over-involved in accidents not just because of a short driving experience, but also lack of general perception and judgment skills. (30-45 km/h mopeds would still be allowed from 15-16 years old)
Of course, this would be a (independent) mobility impairment in a car-centric society, with extensive suburbia, without adequate public transportation and cycling facilities. In a car-centric society it would of course also raise a big cry deny access to the instrument of "freedom and unhindered movement" (don't mention congestion ...)
However, at least over here, thar car is (slowly) losing status, at least in urban areas. In many European cities, the response would probably be "meh" - or "good damn time". In many cities most 20-year olds don't have a driving license already, and driver license rates are pretty steadily declining.
I rented a car once that sounded an alarm when I went over 65 mph. The alarm stopped when I went back under 65mph.
Legal age for an unrestricted drivers license in South Dakota is 14.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
One of the most annoying safety features to have come out in quite a while.
I've lost track of the number of times I'd had to buckle my -backback- in because my car thought there was a person sitting there :/
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Getting a shiny new car for your first car is typically a symptom of being a spoiled brat.
You apparently don't know many children of wealthy parents. I do. My parents aren't well off but they put me through a private school (with financial assistance) where many of my classmates came from monied families. You know what? Virtually all of them were nice, well adjusted and not at all spoiled. Quite a few got to drive nice new cars while still in high school. And when they did act spoiled their parents usually came down on them like a ton of bricks.
The car is meaningless. It's how much the parents are involved and give a shit about their child's behavior that matters. Sure there are some parents who get it wrong but you're painting with an awfully broad brush there and the actual facts don't support your thesis. It's been my experience (first hand) that on average kids with well off parents tend to be MORE involved in their child's life (car or not) and the statistics on this tend to on average back me up.
For this -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
* :)
(Dave420's a serious moron that's been harassing me for MONTHS now dozens of times I have bookmarked, probably many more via unjustifiable downmods of my posts etc, & no joke on that - it was time for some "payback" is all, & what you did was better than anything else I did by far!)
APK
P.S.=> I'm also NOT the only one that feels that way from THIS WEEK ALONE -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... that I quoted (I wonder how littered with like opinions there are through his entire post history, you know?)... apk
In the noughties my employers set out to develop similar technology. We had GPS-based units that would record where a vehicle was and could be programmed to tell on you if you drove too fast, stopped for too long, went to somewhere you weren't supposed to go, and so on. They communicated over a 2 way paging network.
The technology worked. I did the mobile device programming and put together a test unit that used differential GPS. Instead of telling you which street you were on, it could tell you which lane you were in. :-)
The marketing, on the other hand, didn't work. :-(
...laura
A smart insurance company would insist on data gathering devices in all of their insured cars. Do you really want to insure a person who frequently fails to use a seat belt? Or should you insure a person who frequently violates speed limits or runs red lights? I had a driver's license at the age of 14 and had no problems at all. As a young person I had zero tickets and zero accidents. At 16 I was a Western Union motorcycle messenger working 40 hours a week in all weather and under frequently very dangerous conditions. And I still had no problems other than a chronic lack of sleep from working full time while going to school and having some academic recognition. Underneath the driving issues rests the simple fact that we have segments of society that are worse then useless. Many of the teens these days will simply end up in drug rehabs, jails, prisons and mental wards, or welfare receivers. The question is what can we do to turn defective youth into something resembling productive citizens. It seems as though once a teen starts to go sour it is usually a one way street.
Speeding and drunk drivers have been a boogie man for a long time.
Inattentive drivers are where the crashes are. No politician will make laws that target the majority though so "OMG drunk speeders are going to eat your baby!" make a villain. Of course most of us know this already.
Will this tell you how much time your kid spent on their cell phone while driving?
Speed contributes to damage when a crash happens, it doesn't commonly cause them.
Now with teens they are not used to driving the car so there may be a little bit of worry. At least their reflexes and senses are faster and sharper than ours, when they use them.
Good. Parents need this kind of app. ANYTHING to help parents manage these wild heathens they claim to be rearing up.
Teens have absolutely no claim o privacy as long as their parents are paying the bills, particularly those teens who have proven by their actions the cannot be trusted.
How long before your car auto reports you to the police for violating regulations?