It can cost about this much to insure some teenage drivers. Does it have to?

If you are paying the car insurance bills for a teenager you’re well aware of how ungodly expensive they can be. Sure, there are ways to make it cheaper, and I went over some of the ways to get cheaper car insurance for teenagers in a post last month.

The whole problem stems from the fact that the overwhelming majority of teenagers simply don’t drive as well as older people. It’s true. Ask your own if you think I’m making this up. This is because of many things, including inexperience behind the wheel, high testosterone levels, peer pressure, the inability of young people to truly realize the long term effects of stupidity, and any number of other factors.

Well, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, that part of the insurance industry that has so much fun crashing perfectly good vehicles about in their lab, has found a great way to make teens drive better. In a study from the Institute, it was discovered that keeping an eye on your kids when they are driving improves their driving tremendously. Think about it, do you really think that Joe or Joelene would be flying down the county road at 80mph if you were in the car with them?

You know that there is no way that the kids would do many of the things they do, if mom and dad were riding along. That is common sense, and it agrees with the Institutes’s findings. To monitor the kids, a black box was installed in their cars. This wonder of modern technology helps the kids realize when they are trying too hard to imitate Lewis Hamilton, Tanner Foust, or Greg Biffle by sounding an in-car buzzer.

However, the real deterrent from the device is undoubtedly the fact that parents can log on to a website and look at the data. That’s right, mom and dad can jump online and see how fast the kids were driving, if they were braking too hard or if they had their seat belts unbuckled. It works so well that the little, black box gets a 98% approval rating from parents.

There are other devices as well, such as mini GPS tracking systems. Widely used by business to track their fleets and spouses that suspect their partner of cheating on them, they work well to keep an eye on junior, too. They are relatively simple to install, and can download a complete track of the vehicle’s exact whereabouts, speed and length of stops. Want to be sure that Buffy really was studying at the library? Use one of these mini GPS tracking systems. Making sure they know they are being watched will help keep them in line behind the wheel. The better teenagers drive, the lower their insurance rates….in theory anyway.