When Rich Pilat’s daughter, Jennifer, was 16 and just starting to drive on her own, he wanted to install a device in her car that would monitor her driving activity and allow him to track where she went — along with whether she had done any sudden braking or had been speeding.

It was a tough sell, says Pilat, 47, an independent insurance agent in the Cleveland area. “At first, she was absolutely against the idea,” he says.

Then he told her that the insurance-company-provided device — designed to track the mileage of low-mileage customers, who pay lower rates — would mean a sharp reduction in her share of the monthly premiums.

“I told her, imagine cutting your share in half. I’ll give you the whole discount,” Pilat says. “That was enough motivation for her to say OK.”

He says he thinks the device helped make Jennifer a safer, more responsible driver; she has had no wrecks or citations since the device was installed two years ago.

A wide variety of GPS-based vehicle monitoring options is available to parents of teen drivers. They range from smartphone apps that alert parents when their children are driving faster than a preset speed to devices such as the one used by Pilat. They either plug into the vehicle’s onboard diagnostic computer or are hard-wired in the automobile by a professional.

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