Peace of mind, installed

You’re the parents of a 16-year-old boy who’s had two serious driving infractions in the past year. What do you do?

Troy and Monica Gilbert bought into a high-tech solution devised by Safeco Insurance. The cigarette-pack sized device, called Teensurance, was installed under the dash of the SUV driven by their son, Kurt Gilbert, a student at Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene.

The installations taking place Thursday were for Spokane-area beta testers of the new device. Safeco developed Teensurance as a way for parents to monitor and control teen driving.

Starting June 27 the device will be available for anyone who is an auto-policy holder with Safeco.

For Kurt Gilbert, this may be his best chance to win back points with his safety-conscious parents. After wrecking a Honda Accord in a late-2006 accident, and then getting nailed in early 2007 for negligent driving, the young Gilbert lost his driving privileges.

His mom took Kurt’s driver’s license and mailed it to her husband, who was in the middle of a six-month tour in Iraq. Troy Gilbert, 38, is a Navy lieutenant assigned to a Seabees unit stationed at the large U.S. airbase at Al Asad.

“I told Kurt he wouldn’t get the license back until I returned home,” Troy Gilbert said Thursday.

Gilbert got home two months ago. In two weeks, his son finally gets to start driving again, this time with an onboard unit that will report to his parents whenever he goes too fast or leaves a “safe zone” more or less equal to the Coeur d’Alene metro area.

“This came totally from what our customers told us they wanted,” said Matt Gertmenien, a Safeco vice president in charge of the Teensurance project.

Much of what the product offers is available in the market already, he said.

But Safeco’s product is the first bundled use of an onboard device that comes with other services, including live roadside assistance, he added.

“Many of our customers told us that having insurance was maybe No. 3 or No. 4 on the list of what they most wanted,” said Gertmenien. “What they were most in need of, those with young drivers, was peace of mind.”

The device, costing $14.99 per month, allows parents to set a designated speed limit, or assign approved zones of permitted travel. If a driver in the Teensurance vehicle exceeds that speed, an alert by cell phone or e-mail is delivered to the parent.

An alert zips to the mom or dad if the driver leaves a preset zone, said Gertmenien. It can also find drivers who violate a curfew. Another option is to assign a destination that a teen is supposed to travel to, he added. Once the driver reaches that zone, an alert goes to the parent.

At the most-intense level of monitoring, Teensurance can be programmed to identify — using a Web map — the location of the driver at intervals of, say, every five or 10 minutes.

In the case of the Gilberts, mom and dad told their son that they liked the technology so much they were willing to add a unit to dad’s SUV.

“I told him he could track me and watch what I’m doing. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me,” said Troy Gilbert, a civil engineer in Coeur d’Alene.

Mike McLeod, another parent who volunteered to have his son’s car equipped with a Teensurance device, said his 15-year-old son, Darien, has said he really wants the technology onboard.

“He thought it was cool. The idea of having remote door unlocking sounded good to him,” said McLeod, who works as a claims adjuster at the Liberty Lake Safeco building, where the installations took place.

Remote lock-opening is part of 24/7 roadside assistance provided for those using the service, Gertmenien said. Included is free towing and tire repair.

Starting later this month, the company will market Teensurance in 44 states. Gertmenien said Safeco doesn’t manage the actual technology and data that pinpoint and transmit information about users. Safeco hired a third-party tech firm in California, Seaguard Electronics, to manage the network.

That network, like other systems used by transportation and auto-safety systems, relies on a GPS system that sends data to satellites about a vehicle’s location and rate of speed.

Gertmenien said the Teensurance system is designed to handle large numbers of customers simultaneously. It’s also the first of what may be other tech products being considered by Safeco for its customers, he said.

Business writer Tom Sowa can be reached at (509) 459-5492 or at toms@spokesman.com.