Parents increasingly are installing monitoring devices to check on how well their teens do behind the wheel

WASHINGTON — When Ben Ellison, 15, gets his driver’s license next month, he dreams of driving a midnight blue, low-riding Honda with monster horsepower, a performance exhaust system and, inside, blue neon rods that glow with each bass beat from the stereo.

Instead, he’ll drive a Mazda, with a computer chip that spies on every ride.

"If I wasn’t into tuning my car, I think maybe this wouldn’t have happened," Ben said last week, swinging his Mazda 626 onto a highway in Easton, Md., on a practice drive as he — and the monitor — noted his speed.

"It’s pretty cool technology and all," he said, glancing at the matchbook-size device plugged into the steering column near the knees of his cargo pants. "But after a while, this is going to be so annoying."

Figuring their children are better off annoyed than dead, parents have opened a new front in the battle to lower teen accident rates.

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Using technology employed by truck fleets to monitor drivers, families are spending as much as $2,500 for microcomputers and "black boxes" that feed speed and braking data into a home computer; cockpit video cameras; Global Positioning System devices that track teenagers through their cell phones; and lower-tech surveillance, such as the Tell-My-Mom.com bumper sticker.

"No one’s done a study yet that shows these new methods work," said Ronald Knipling, a research scientist at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute who has led a research forum on electronic monitoring. "But it’s a very promising idea."

Ben voiced the reaction of many teens. "My friends," he said, turning his car toward home, "think it’s whack."

Before his practice drive last week, Ben sat in the living room of his family’s waterfront house on the Eastern Shore hearing, one more time, why CarChip is a good idea.

"It’s not that I’m worried about your skills. ... I’m worried about your judgment, which comes as you get older," said his stepfather, Phil Bowman, who bought the $140 device. "It’s a way to prove your ability to be out there on your own."

Bowman said that when he was young, he got so many speeding tickets that his license was suspended.

"But I don’t want to be judged by your mistakes," Ben replied.

Ben’s mother, Susan Schauer, said that when she can’t be in the passenger seat, "you know there’s a device that’s paying attention."

"I feel old enough to start gaining some privacy," Ben said.

"I don’t think how you drive is private," his stepfather responded.

They’ll remove the CarChip, they’ve agreed, when Ben is 18.

The family’s conversation is at the heart of monitoring systems’ effectiveness, said Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Arlington, Va.-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

"When people know they’re being monitored, they can change their behavior," she said. "Assuming we had a study that said, ‘Whoa, this can make a difference in crash rates,’ we still have to ask: Are the parents willing to be more involved?"

Experience with the new systems and new research point to old-fashioned parental communication as the best way to instill good driving habits. In a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study released last week, parents of 16-year-olds reviewed newsletters and a video with facts about risky practices, then drew up written agreements spelling out consequences for engaging in each bad habit. The limits, researchers found, stayed in place up to a year, the riskiest time for young drivers.

"Teens whose parents had restrictions on their initial driving experience reported engaging in less risky driving later on," said Bruce Simons-Morton, a research chief at the institute and the study’s lead author. "There is a use for electronic monitoring devices. But there’s a tendency for parents to be a little more passive than they should be."

Joanne Devens agrees. Harder than watching a video of the accident her daughter Stephanie had, she said, was establishing consequences for Stephanie’s careless driving.

Devens, of Mankato, Minn., had a camera installed in Stephanie’s Saturn last year as part of a 26-week trial involving a dozen Minnesota high school students, organized by the Mayo Clinic. Mounted near the rearview mirror, it filmed Stephanie, then 16, without her seat belt, chatting on the phone, joking with passengers, fiddling with the radio.

It wasn’t long before the camera captured the car flying off a curve into a snowy ditch. "She was dialing her cell phone," Devens said. She saw her daughter’s terrified face and heard "this blood-chilling scream," Devens said. "Thankfully, she didn’t get hurt."

Was she punished?

"Yes and no ... I kind of gave in," she said.

Though the camera was designed to monitor truck drivers, parents have begun ordering the $1,400 device, inspiring its manufacturer to plan a consumer version, said Rusty Weiss, director of product management for DriveCam Video Systems of San Diego.

During the trial, students’ near misses, swerves and hard braking that trigger the camera dropped from 24 a week to nearly zero, he said. Seat-belt use rose from one-third of students to nearly all.

The camera has helped reduce truckers’ accident rates as much as 70 percent, but, Weiss said, "there has to be somebody judging the performance."

Devens has begun to curtail her daughter’s driving privileges for carrying other teens in the car and not wearing a seat belt. But she acknowledged she could do more. "I think parents have to be stronger than I was and have more consequences," she said.

Ben Ellison, after his drive in Easton, returned home and removed the CarChip. "Let’s see how you did," Bowman said, plugging the CarChip into a cable linked to his computer. A black-and-white graph appeared, showing speed and braking patterns. "You went 55 here."

"The speed limit!" Ben said. Bowman scanned the graph: no red lines indicating risky driving behavior. "You passed, Ben."

"If I have to go through this every day, I swear to God I’ll go to my room and cry," Ben replied.

"But this is what a caring parent would do," his mother said.

"Or a spy," Ben said. "Put yourself in my shoes."

"Maybe I can’t do that anymore," his mother said. Partly, she said, because of Megan Batdorf.

Tall and athletic, a 16-year-old classmate of Ben’s, Megan took him for a ride in her Corvette in December. Days later, driving to visit another friend, she hit a truck and was killed.

"Maybe he’s going to be mad," Schauer said, looking at her son. "But I just can’t hand the keys over and say, ‘Off you go.’ "