CarChip and TeenArriveAlive - Monitor Your Child’s Driving Remotely   - 5,180 Views, 1 Comment

Just on the heels of the Wherify Wherifone, which itself was on the heels of the Firefly and Tic Talk cell phones for children, comes news of TeenArriveAlive and CarChip - two more high-tech ways for parents to be not only mother and father, but Big Brother to their children.

TeenArriveAlive and CarChip are both technologies which allow a parent to keep track of how their child (or hey, their spouse) is doing in the safe driving department. TeenArriveAlive uses GPS remote location, and even allows you to log in and pinpoint exactly where the car is at any given moment, as well as its rate of speed, while CarChip records speed, acceleration, and braking for up to 75 hours at a time.

TeenArriveAlive is actually a partnership between the TeenArriveAlive service and Nextel, and it requires your child to carry a Nextel cell phone. In fact, really what is being tracked is the phone, so if you log in and note that your teen is driving on the sidewalk at 3 miles per hour, or through the mall making erratic stops, you may want to reconsider exactly how much stock you put in the TeenArriveAlive system before jumping down your child’s throat for unsafe driving. If the blip on the locator screen is at a standstill, they may be stuck in traffic, sitting in a theatre, or making out at Lookout Point. Or maybe they just decided to ditch the Nextel phone and pick up their own MetroPCS for $40.00 a month with no monitoring attached. Depends on your teen, I guess.

Apparently in an effort to ensure a complete invasion of your teen’s privacy, TeenArriveAlive also gives you a decal which you can put on your car, asking “Am I Driving Safely?” and inviting others to call a toll free number to report your child’s poor driving. An audio recording of that call is then immediately forwarded to you.

CarChip is a bit less ditchable, but also does not provide the GPS geolocation of your child or vehicle. It is installed in your car and will monitor the time, date and distance of each trip while logging the speed every five seconds. It also records hard acceleration and decelerations, and idle time.

CarChip does not, however, work with either gas/electric hybrid cars, or some diesel engines.

It will be interesting to see just what sort of adoption these devices and technologies receive. And whether, once adopted, the parents will actually tell their children that they are so monitoring them.

Would you?