Chevy's Teen Driver Technology gives parents a slew of information about how they're young driver handles their time behind the wheel.
No one is more aware of how bad a driver a teenager is than the parent of that teenage driver. The first months and years are often fraught with worry as they back out of the driveway to head to school or meet with friends.
Automakers have been trying to soothe the frazzled nerves of parents for years with a variety of in-car technologies aimed at limiting the parameters of teenage tomfoolery behind the wheel. Last year, Chevy introduced its Teen Driver Report Card option on the 2016 Malibu.
The report card tells parents how far their young drivers traveled, what their top speed was and, perhaps most importantly, what safety features, if any, were activated during the trip. The idea was to give parents some hard data to use in discussing how to become a better driver.
Chevy is now expanding the option to 10 cars in its 2017 model line-up, including Chevrolet Bolt EV, Camaro, Colorado, Cruze, Malibu, Silverado, Silverado HD, Suburban, Tahoe and Volt.
The 2017 models with Teen Driver receive a few new features, depending upon the model, including a maximum speed limiter and a configurable audio volume limit. Parents get additional report card information, such as traction control activations, wide-open throttle events and, kin some vehicles, tailgating alerts.
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Inexperienced and unsupervised teens don't always make the best choices behind the wheel.
Each of the 10 vehicles also features available Apple CarPlay or Android Auto compatibility, to help encourage teens to refrain from using their handheld phones while driving.
“I, like many of our employees, am a parent of teenagers, so we personally understand the anxiety of having a teen driver in the house,” said Steve Majoros, director of marketing, Chevrolet Cars and Crossovers.
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“And while we can’t control a teen’s behavior when they are in a car without a parent, Chevrolet’s Teen Driver Technology can remind them to buckle up and avoid speeding, while our other available active safety features can help to alert them in certain situations when they’re making less-than-perfect driving decisions.”
Teens give their parents plenty of reasons to worry about what happens when they’re behind the wheel. Traffic fatalities is the biggest killer of young men between 16 and 19 years old, according to the National Safety Council.
(Car crashes No. 1 killer of teenagers in U.S. Click Here for the story.)
Additionally, according to a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Chevrolet, more parents with teens worry about their child driving (55%) more than any other area of parental stress, including drugs and alcohol (52%), sexual activity (49%) and academic performance (53%).