Gadgetory

as if being a teen weren't hard enough next year Chevy's rolling out something called teen driver on the 2016 Malibu I think of it as a monitoring system for parents to keep track of their teen drivers now it doesn't tell you where they went who they went there with but it does give you a pretty good sense of how they're doing is drivers it's kind of like a report card in fact the car calls it a report card so as soon as teen drivers engage there's a few systems that kick in automatically that the teen can't actually turn off those include ABS stability control and avoidance braking and the teen has no control over those but the parent can set them up ahead of time and make sure they're in place so there's a couple of things that it does the most notable is that it cuts the audio as soon as you release the seatbelt so let's say we have some music going I take the seatbelt off and the music automatically cuts and it does the same in the passenger seat put the seatbelt back in and we're jamming but the brains of the system are right here so let's go into settings teen driver enter our top secret pin the teen doesn't know about so there's a couple of things you can manage here the first is audio volume limit so let's say you're tired of your teen driving around the neighborhood blasting Fetty WAP well you can turn on audio volume limit and a limit how loud the system can go go back here and you have teen driver speed warning so this lets you set up a number so let's say you want to be alerted every time your teen goes 65 miles an hour well you can do that and every time the car hits 65 miles an hour it will register on the report card and the system goes all the way up to 75 but if you're going that fast well you're in trouble mister this is the readout so this is probably the most important part this is the report card as if teens didn't have enough report cards so it tells you how far the drivers gone this is maximum speed this is over speed warning this tells you how many times the teen went over the speed warning that you set forward collision alert Ford collision braking alert stability control and abs active one of the things you might be wondering is this sounds very dystopian having all this information flying around but in fact all this information stays in the car and if the parent wants this readout they have to cut actually physically come into the car and read it there's a couple reasons for this it's mostly security and privacy but there's a more fundamental reason and that is if you need a constant alert to how your teen is driving in real time maybe you don't trust your team to drive at all