The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has conducted a survey of 1,500 adults who own or lease a Ford vehicle equipped with technology that allows them to monitor their child’s driving or control things like top vehicle speed and sound system volume.
While more than a third of the respondents said they didn’t know their vehicle was equipped with the ‘MyKey’ system, 57 percent said they were aware of it and, of those, 61 percent said they use it with their teen driver.
Of the parents who said they don’t plan to use MyKey, the most common reason cited was that their teenager wasn’t a primary driver of the equipped vehicle. Many parents said they didn’t need it because their child was trustworthy.
“Systems like MyKey have the potential to reduce the risks faced by teen drivers by limiting speeds and distractions,” said Rebecca Weast, an IIHS research scientist and the paper’s author. “To do the most good, more consumers need to be aware of it and to choose to activate it for their young driver.”
MyKey allows parents to set things like top vehicle speed, program speed alerts and varying levels, limit audio volume and make it impossible to disable the ‘do not disturb’ feature.
