GPS Tracking ROI

Here, at random (thanks, www.westportnow.com) is just one of the countless, mind-numbing pictures injury/death crashes caused by teen drivers which kill and main our teens at a rate that makes the war in Iraq look like a picnic afternoon.

Many of the searches that land new readers on this site come from the phrase “GPS teen tracking” and many also are the search questions having to do with keeping parents from tracking kids. It seems like a hard question, but it’s not hard for me. As a parent who raised two teen drivers who survived thanks to the grace of God I wish the technology had been available years ago when my boys were teens. I’d like to think they were good drivers and didn’t speed much and went where they said they were going, etc. If they were, then great, both they and I would have had confirmation. If they didn’t, as a dad, I could have stepped in and done something to modify behavior. Today? Absolutely no question I would have it on the car of any child of mine.

There are some who have given me feedback and criticism about my “preachiness” and sort of single-mindedness on this subject. To those whom I have put off by my turgid writing style, I apologize, but to those who think I should get off the subject and on to more “sexy” and popular GPS-related subjects … such as Easter Egg hunts, GPS Caching evens and using GPS on your Golf Cart to improve your score I say, no way. We rightly cast our eyes downward when we see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. The major networks don’t even have the guts to publish the list of the young men and women who come home in body bags every week (thanks for your courage, Jim Leher and PBS), but all those sad events notwithstanding, we kill our young at an even greater rate with our own lack of courage each and every day of the week. And unless parents start living up to the responsibility of being parents, instead of “buddies” then we are going to keep right on doing it, even if Shrub ever comes to his senses and gets our troops out of their unwinnable suicide mission in Iraq.

Cars are dangerous. Driving, using decent judgement, is more difficult than it looks. Most of us in the mid-twenties through mid-sixties have adapted and learned the task well enough to get by … oh my God, the 10 years from 15 through 25. This is not a diatribe scorning teen drivers, it’s a plea to those of you responsible for teen driers to wake up and take action to help the teens in your life and under your span of influence. They may never thank you for it, but the good things in life don’t always come with gift ribbons attached.

The graph above shows the problem very clearly. One of the sadder things to me is, it’s hard to find graphs like this with more current data. We’re more attuned to picking stocks and betting on sports than we are at keeping track of where we kill people, but AIG, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies has decided to track things in a big way. Both in the US and in Canada AIG companies have set up pilot programs that will put GPS monitors on teens cars and alert the parents of unsafe driving. The motive is, as it should be, profit. But could there be a better way to improve the bottom line than to keep young people out of hospitals and funeral homes.