Quest Driving Safety covertly follows teens

Teaching your teen good driving habits can be an endless, nerve-wracking pain in the driver’s seat. Even with insurance or internet-supplied GPS units, you can’t tell if your child is doing 50 mph on the road or 50 mph in a parking lot. Quest Driving Safety says it has the solution: a tail.

For $99 you can hire a retired or off-duty police officer to covertly follow your teen, making note of bad driving habits.

First, customers fill out an online form telling Quest what kind of car their teen drives, where to find them and when. After that, they receive a Parent-Teen Driving Agreement in the mail. It’s suggested that you look over the form with your teen and tell them that an evaluation is coming up. However, we’d bet that many of the parents go completely Black Ops on their kid and don’t tell them at all.

Quest driving evaluators find the car and wait for the teen to start driving. Each evaluation takes about 15-20 minutes. The evaluator returns with notes for the parents, including how the driver acted when pedestrians were near, in construction zones and how closely they followed the car in front. Gary Lawrence, CEO of Quest Driving Safety, notes that these are things that insurance GPS units can’t record.

“We ask the officer, if you were on duty, would you write a ticket,” said Lawrence. “And they make note of that in the file.”

The service isn’t just for teens. Quest Driving Safety will follow senior citizen relatives and even business fleets, looking for proper driving etiquette. A big portion of the senior business comes from families who live far away from their grown-up parents, and can’t accurately gauge their driving ability. Currently that accounts for about 30 percent of the firm’s business, the rest is teens.

Quest covers the bigger metropolitan areas of all 50 states, and some smaller cities in more populous areas. Check out the website at www.questdrivingsafety.com or call 800-868-5254 for more information.


Special thanks to autoweek.com.