Very cheap GPS tracker required.

paddyrg

I really don't understand why your sister is worried it'll affect her insurance - it will probably reduce unless he keeps wrecking cars. Sounds like he's young and hasn't learned about consequences yet, so if suggest finding a way for him to learn about consequences before he kills someone, and if that means having to cycle to work, so be it. He can't have free access to someone else's car and not respect it. He can save the petrol money up to get his own vehicle, insure it, and have some responsibility for the cist of maintaining it.

AndyPix

Wow, whats happened to parenting these days ..

If that was my lad I would give him a clip round the ear and tell him he's not using the car for a month.

GPS trackers !! Whats the world coming to !!

Fightsback

AndyPix wrote: »

Wow, whats happened to parenting these days ..

If that was my lad I would give him a clip round the ear and tell him he's not using the car for a month.

GPS trackers !! Whats the world coming to !!

Quite, my old man would have had a fit then handed me a pair of bicycle clips.

wba31

AndyPix wrote: »

Wow, whats happened to parenting these days ..

If that was my lad I would give him a clip round the ear and tell him he's not using the car for a month.

GPS trackers !! Whats the world coming to !!

My parents didnt trust how i'd drive their cars when i passed at 19 so refused to insure me on them.

I bought my own motor for £100 and promptly drove it like a complete moron until i blew a hole in the engine. etc etc until i had a right fright from the police one night and decided to try and calm down.

I agree that your sister needs to put her foot down and tell this kid to get his own car.

I'm 31 now and my parents still wont insure me on their car.

psychic_teabag

It is possible in principle to separate the gps bit from the phone bit, using bluetooth. .e.g we find it useful to run google map on tablet in the car, but rather than using gps on the tablet itself, we use bluetooth to pair it to a phone running gps - free software on both ends allow them to exchange the gps data. Then the phone can be positioned better for the gps.

There are dedicated bluetooth gps devices avaiable, though I never got round to buying one.

If you hide any devices, there is the issue of recharging them, unless of course you leave them permanently plugged in. Or just having them charging while the car is running may be enough. But stepping 12V down to 5V does tend to be wasteful.

One thought that ocurs to me, though I don't know how practical it is... a wii remote has accelerometer etc, so it could in theory measure sharp acceleration, braking and cornering, without actually tracking where you are. I believe they also use bluetooth, and could in principle log to a smartphone. I'm sure there are other ways to do something simialr (eg attach accelerometer to a raspberry pi to do the logging. But now you're looking at custom software to set this all up. Might find existing projects who are happy to share their code : google rpi acceleromter for ideas)


I'm still not quite clear on the situation : they share a car but the son is named as the main driver, so it's basically his car / insurance policy and your sister is an additional driver ? A tracker-based policy might not make it worse, since insurance company may assume he's a maniac anyway - esp. if there have already been several claims. (Or is it just repair costs due the excessive mechanical wear, rather than actual damage ?)

ETA: yeah, knew someone would have paired wiimote to rpi by now : http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/robot/wiimote/

rmg1

Maybe a little extreme but maybe sis could have a chart with local hospital/morgue and get them to show son what happens in a high-speed crash.

The human body is very fragile (in comparison to other things) and maybe a glimpse of what could happen will be the shock he needs to calm down (assuming it is him hammering the car).

If the brakes are down to metal in 7 months someone's been hammering them and not letting them bed in properly.

pappa_golf

suggest OP goes to Kwik fit and have brakes with a "lifetime" guarantee fitted !

psychic_teabag

Any chance of hiding something in plain sight ? You mentioned a dashcam - could also take the satnav angle. Either way, give him a device which is useful to him, but which has a side effect of recording the data you want.

Of course, if he's technical, he might play around with it and discover that it has been set to record gps data. And you can only confront him with the data once, since that will reveal the truth about the device.

RumRat

I have no idea why the poor woman is allowing him to drive the car. The saving on the insurance is destroyed by the cost of the brakes, apart from costing more because he's on it.
He won't learn a lesson unless he's taught one. Don't ferry him around either, he's got plenty of mates or public transport as well as shank's pony.

pappa_golf

RumRat wrote: »

I have no idea why the poor woman is allowing him to drive the car. The saving on the insurance is destroyed by the cost of the brakes, apart from costing more because he's on it.
He won't learn a lesson unless he's taught one. Don't ferry him around either, he's got plenty of mates or public transport as well as shank's pony.

see http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=69987526&postcount=18