A friend of ours who writes for a certain nationally-known newspaper in Detroit called something to our attention last week. Ford is getting ready to debut a new product claiming to keep teen drivers safe while driving alone, and thought we might be interested in reading more about it.

“This is right up your alley,” our former cohort said.
We were hesitant at first. This reporter has not had the best of luck with Fords.

We drove a Ford in college for barely four months. It was an early college graduation gift from Ma and Pa Commuter, and it ran great, right up to the day it was flattened by a tree, courtesy of an EF2 tornado.

Welcome to life in the Midwest. We went back to being a die-hard Jeep fan after that episode and haven’t looked back.

Anyway, reflecting on the debacle, we told our Detroit friend we’d pass on the news release.

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll want to check this out.”
A system called MyKey allows parents to program their teenager’s car key to control the maximum speed, audio volume and a reminder to buckle up, among other features.

You loyal readers probably saw a lot of stories last week about MyKey. The technology is one that seems to have readers split down the middle as to whether it fosters responsibility in young drivers or gives them a safety net to be reckless.

We have a niece who is chomping at the bit to get her driver’s permit in less than six months (scary), so we decided to give MyKey another look.

The key, no bigger than a regular ignition key, allows parents through a computer chip to program the speed their child can drive to up to 80 mph, how loud the radio will play and release an audible signal when the vehicle starts to hit speeds of 45, 55 and 65 mph. In fact, the key can also be programmed to mute the radio until the driver buckles up.

The feature, Ford’s safety communications manager Wesley Sherwood III said, is a way to “really build trust in the family.”

“That’s the biggest benefit, building trust within the family when it comes to teenagers driving,” Sherwood said. “On the data we compiled, parents not only liked the feature, but they said if they purchased it, they would allow their child to have more time in the driver’s seat, which what most teens want, I would think.”

MyKey, Sherwood said, would complement driving limits parents set on their novice driver.

“You get your license, and you get some parameters,” Sherwood said. “And it’s something that can change as the teenager gets more experience (driving).”

OK. To Ford’s credit, it is not a bad technology itself. After all, the number of traffic fatalities involving teenagers — at least 5,000 a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — has dramatically increased in recent years, mostly due to distractions (a loud stereo, not wearing a seatbelt, texting on their cell phones, etc.). Not only do teens have the lowest rate of seatbelt compliance, but their likelihood of being in a crash is 10 times that of drivers ages 30 to 59, the safety administration reports.

So clearly, MyKey does plenty of benefits to the teenager who uses it. But it’s the idea behind that bothers us.

If a parent needs to continue to “build trust” with their child after they earned a driver’s license, then why let the child take the car out alone in the first place? Shouldn’t that responsibility already be there if they were able to prove they deserve a driver’s license?

OK, we admit we don’t have teenagers of our own, but we were a teenager once upon a time, and the rules were no taking the car out alone until we had proved were responsible enough — i.e., obeying the speed limits, wearing a seatbelt — to handle it.

To us, this sounds like parents giving their children a safety net so they can have a back up when Junior gets the lead foot out.

“We can’t speak to a parent’s decision,” Sherwood said. “We believe parents should have a hand in teaching their teen to drive, but this is a tool to give them peace of mind.”

MyKey will appear on the 2010 Ford Focus next summer and will become a standard feature on other various Ford models after that.

Follow Meghan Malloy’s commuter blog and track the cheapest gasoline prices in town daily at www.kjonline.com.