From The company Who Brought You The Escape, We Now Present The Kid Leash

Last Updated on: 11th February 2015, 03:05 pm

Wow. This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while. It’s right up there with making Alzheimer’s patients wear RFID tags. Now, Ford has come up with a special key for a parent’s teenager that can be programmed to limit the speed of the car. It will also limit the car stereo’s volume and nag them incessantly if they don’t put on a seatbelt, and can nag them about certain speeds up to the max allowed.

I know kids speed, and I know it’s a problem. But having the car do the speed-control for the parents is a recipe for disaster. If you don’t trust your kids enough to drive alone, then maybe they’re just not ready yet. I can see kids swapping the keys for their parent’s keys that don’t have the limits imposed. That’s all they’d have to do. Or maybe they’d drive mom’s car to a friend’s house and then they’d drive off in their friend’s car that doesn’t have those limits. Kids are smart. Once they figure out that you’ve put limits on, if they want to, they’ll get around them.

The solution is not to let technology teach the lessons. It’s to actually teach your kids what they need to know. If you can use technology to prevent them from speeding in *your* car, what happens when they get their own? They’ll speed,and they’ll speed like they’ve never sped before because they can. They now have this freedom, and goddamn it, they’re going to take advantage of…ker smash.

Now, what good did basically keeping them on a leash do? It just pushed the age for speeding-related accidents to a bit older. We can theorize that when kids are a bit older, they’ve matured. But the only way they can mature is by learning lessons. Otherwise, they still have to learn those same lessons.

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