GPS unit trains young drivers

We took it for a test drive -- see below -- with mixed reports back from my daughters. But as a parent, I can see some benefit.

More unnerving for parents than watching their toddler take their first tentative steps is watching their son or daughter drive off on their own for the first time. Now parents can feed or ease their anxiety by monitoring where and how their children drive with a variety of GPS tracking devices.

The Mercurien BetterDriver service tracks the vehicle's movement, detecting fast cornering, harsh acceleration, erratic lane-changing and sudden braking and providing immediate audio feedback to the driver about their road behaviour with a series of beeps.

Parents also can download a log of their children's driving record and maps that show the exact route they have driven. Mercurien BetterDriver costs $100 to install and $2 a day to monitor, but company boss Michael Graham says it would pay for itself by reducing insurance costs.

He said AAMI had already offered a 20 per cent reduction in comprehensive insurance premiums to the first 1000 drivers who installed the BetterDriver system. "We have designed BetterDriver specifically in response to the crash rates for P-plate drivers who are most at risk in the first years of driving," says Mr Graham.

"The number of accidents per month increases dramatically when drivers cross the threshold from L to P plates." Mercurien's BetterDriver system consists of a Skymeter unit which is a highly accurate GPS transmitter with an "accelerometer". The unit emits a beep to the driver under risky driving conditions such as heavy acceleration. 

The five different volumes of beeping represent the severity of risky actions from simply uneconomical driving through to a life-threatening event. Mr Graham says the service also provides access to a password-protected, individual website that allows drivers and their families to assess how safely the vehicle has been driven. 

"The BetterDriver individual websites show the route the vehicle has taken, time, distance and the manner in which the vehicle has been driven," he says. "As well as illustrating any at-risk actions over time, the system also reports an eco score that helps young people to drive in a manner that minimises green house gas emissions."

TEST DRIVEN

One test-driving daughter thought it was a beeping nuisance and the other had a beeping-good time trying to make it beep. My daughters, Lucy and Alice, took turns test driving one of these BetterDriver devices in their Mazda2 and Suzuki Swift in a variety of weather conditions for a week.

The first daughter - no, I'm not going to say which one - handed it back saying it drove her nuts: "It beeps every time I go around a corner." So I drove the car around the neighbourhood and couldn't get it to beep at all. Only when I drove aggressively did it start to beep.

The second daughter also couldn't get it to beep. However, when she discovered how to do it, she tried to get it to beep more often, sort of defeating the purpose of the test. So the unit is flawed right from the start by the attitude of the driver. It's also flawed because it doesn't take account of driving conditions such as rain and visibility in fog or at night. 

Better Driver also doesn't adjust for the type of vehicle. For example, a modern small car with stability control and ABS (such as our girls' cars) can handle more G forces than, say, a fully loaded old ute on bald tyres. It's a cheap way of monitoring your children's driving and where they are going, but money would be better spent sending them to an advanced driving course.