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Toyota App Will Emotionally Scar Your Teenage Child into Driving Responsibly

We all dread the moment when our teenage sons and daughters will reach out their hands toward us expecting a handover of the car keys. You can lie to yourself and say that you're prepared, but the truth is you'll sit there and watch the car disappear in the distance, then hide under the kitchen sink and cry while biting your fingernails.
Toyota Safe and Sound app 6 photos
Photo: YouTube screenshot
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It's not that we don't trust our kids, it's just that they are teenagers. During those few years, they stop being our children and turn into some weird creatures we're forced to continue to love and live with if we want to have someone take care of us when we grow old. That is if we make it until they head off to college.

Getting the driver's license is a big moment in anyone's life, but it's completely useless if you don't get to drive something immediately afterward. Most parents have their own ways of limiting the chances their offsprings will do anything stupid, which can range from simply giving them the minivan to following them around in a taxi or simply gluing their asses to the passenger seat and never leaving them out of their sights.

I remember my drive after getting the license, and I still can't understand how my mother allowed me to drive again after experiencing that. I was so close to rear-ending the vehicle in front on a few occasions (which was down to the poor brakes on our car, to be fair) that I'm grateful to this day it didn't happen. Who knows, I could have been writing about fashion or gardening instead of cars if I had.

Teens behind wheels are a problem

Teens behind wheels are a problem, and not just for their parents: they're also a menace to themselves and everyone else around. That's why they receive extra care from those parties who want to reduce the number of victims and crashes among early license holders, one of which seems to be the Japanese carmaker Toyota.

The once world's number one manufacturer has released an app called Safe and Sound, and it came accompanied by a video commercial. The idea is to have everyone in the family download the app on their phones, and when the fresh driver gets behind the wheel, a certain set of features activate.

The idea is to keep the young one from using the phone or going over the speed limit - the two most common causes of crashes - and the means to do it is humiliation. With the app active, the GPRS sensor knows when the driver is speeding, so it starts playing the parent's music library instead of their own. Provided there's somebody else in the car - somebody whose opinion of the driver is very important to them - that's supposed to be highly embarrassing.

Touching the phone at speeds of above nine mph (around 15 km/h) will have the same result. The whole thing relies on the teenagers' fear of being seen as 'uncool,' which is a great insight, but the system does have a few major flaws. For one thing, you can always turn the sound down, and second, it makes the assumption the driver will only want to show off when he has company, whereas speeding can be done while alone as well.

Toyota's approach isn't exactly bulletproof, but it's something (a PR stunt, to be more precise). Of course, a very good relationship with our children and mutual trust would be much better than any apps, but as we've already established, it's hard to have that with a creature you don't know anything about anymore. Which is what makes parenting is so much fun.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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