It’s the news that every parent most dreads hearing. For anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves, there’s simply no way to communicate the sickening shock of learning that a much loved child has passed their driving test.
They’ll be wanting their own car, to go out and drive around in it, and they might even need some insurance. Not that they can afford any of those things. Oh, no, that’ll be someone else’s problem won’t it!
Plus: there’s the worry of knowing they’re out there somewhere, at all hours of the day and night, risking life and limb on roads crowded with other youngsters every bit as clueless and unsafe as they are.
One way to put the fear of God in them is to get them on one of those telly-magic insurance policies, where there’s this black box somewhere in their car that can magically tell exactly how badly they’re driving.
Once they know their every move is being monitored, they’re much less likely to go tearing around like a complete maniac. It’s almost as effective as sitting there beside them yourself going ‘Slow down, indicate, brakes!’
Insure My Box, a firm that offers telly-magic insurance, has been pushing the safety benefits (alongside the money-saving benefits) of in-car spyware for some time now. But something’s got them spooked.
Now that awareness of black box spyware is so prevalent among teen drivers, some cynical parents have apparently been wilfully deceiving their children by telling them there’s a black box in their cars when in fact there isn’t.
On one level it’s a perfectly understandable attempt to nudge a youngster’s behaviour in the right direction. It’s a bit like when you tell a younger child that there’s a terrifying, flesh-ripping, blood-sucking werewolf type creature lurking under their bed, so they don’t keep getting up in the night and interrupting when you’re watching telly.
But Simon Tewell of Insure My Box insists lying is bad. Especially if you’re lying about something as important as telly-magic insurance. ‘It’s somewhat concerning,’ Simon says, ‘that some parents think they can give their children the safety benefits that come with installing a black box just with a white lie.’
Whether these same parents are also lying about whether the offspring’s vehicles are even actually insured, Insure My Box don’t say. But, basically, what they do say is that everybody should have a real black box, not an imaginary or fictitious one.
Riffing on the theme of realisation, Simon says: ‘It’s important parents realise that the extended benefits of this technology, such as reduced speeding and lower accident rates, are realised only with the installation of an actual black box.’
That’s actual black boxes, not ones that are not actual (or even black boxes, come to that), just nasty little, penny pinching, so-called white lies.
Got that?
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