Teen app with connected car device helps coach teens

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Gilbert Shar

zubieThe 2016 Tech CARS award for “Best OBDII Device with Software and Services” from Auto Connected Car News, Zubie is now offering the Zubie Teen App that connects teens to their cars and to their parents. The service can also be used by insurers to keep tabs on driving data.

The Zubie Teen App helps keep young drivers safer on the road by y providing teens and their parents a personalized view of driving behavior insights combined with coaching tips, always-on location monitoring and a remote view of the operating health of the car.

Teens who say their parents set rules and monitor their driving in a helpful, supportive way (known as authoritative parenting style) are more likely than teens with less involved parents to have been taught to drive by both parents and to have been taught by a driver education instructor. This finding suggests familes with an authoritative parenting style may be more likely to control the quality of their teens’ supervised driving.

Ginsburg KR, et al. Parents Teaching Teens to Drive: The Adolescent Perspective. Research Brief published by The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance Companies online at www.teendriversource.org. September 27, 2011.

The Zubie GPS tracker for Teen Drivers and Families costs $94.99 for the device and one-year of service.

Zubie’s cellular-powered connected-car service helps parents who want peace of mind when it comes to their kids on the road. With the Zubie Teen App, parents “invite” their teen drivers into the app which then provides access to a driving scorecard and behavior trends, alerts about engine or battery problems, driving statistics and trip logs after each trip, and coaching with tips on how to be a safer and more efficient driver.

Because teens receive relevant feedback after each trip, they can learn to drive safely. Parents can view scores and additional details so they can relate with their teen drivers.

The new Zubie Teen App also provides powerful and in-depth data for insurance underwriting and claims management purposes.

Through the Zubie device inserted in the vehicle’s OBDII port, data is collected as frequently as every second, including various aspects of the car’s performance such as RPM, miles driven, battery voltage, engine diagnostics and other elements.  Zubie aggregates this data and further augments it with information on location, speeding over the posted speed limit, harsh braking, and rapid accelerations. The combined data provides a more comprehensive understanding of teen driving behavior, and provides opportunities to proactively increase safety before there are incidents or accidents.

Because the teens are ‘invited’ to access the data and it’s a simplified real-world picture of their car and driving detail, they’re more engaged and receptive to using the coaching tips and insights. It also offers great insights for insurance partners, helping them hone and enhance their family-centric UBI products.

The Zubie Teen App comes free with Zubie service and is available for Android and iPhones.

For insurers, the new Teen App complements Zubie’s suite of consumer-facing apps, creating opportunities for them to better engage with their customers, whether through a usage-based insurance program or broader insurance retention strategies.

Zubie is a connected-car service focused on making driving safer and worry-free for business enterprises including automotive, insurance and mobile/telecom operators, as well as consumers and small businesses.