The fast and the furious? That’s the situation that comes to mind when your teen driver punches the accelerator on your new sedan … and you get furious.
There’s no way to know if you loan out your car to someone for an afternoon, either — say, to help a friend in a pinch. Maybe few of us are that willing to let someone drive a brand new car, but then again, if you’re the person who buys the car and someone else is the primary driver, it would be nice to set limits.
That’s what makes a new app called Lexus Enform Remote so handy. I tested it recently in a 2017 Lexus RC F, a sports sedan with a 467-horsepower engine that costs $64,165 (base price). It’s a speedy car, but I can imagine someone buying this and letting an alternate driver (say, a spouse or a teen) borrow the ride or even use it on a daily basis.
The app tells you more information that what we’ve seen in other similar apps from Ford and others. You can set a maximum speed (say, 75 MPH) and then get an alert if the car goes over that limit. I can’t say exactly what you would do at that point (my loaner vehicle was only registered for me to be the driver, so I didn’t loan it out) but you’d probably have a case to not ever loan the car out again. I’m guessing you could also use the feature at a valet. There’s obviously no option to disable the vehicle. In some Ford cars and trucks, you can set a speed limit in the vehicle itself, tied to the key the driver is using, that prevents the car from exceeding a set speed.
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Here, it’s mostly for information exchange. In the future, you could conceivably set much more than an alert — you could talk to the driver directly, show a custom message, or even tell the car to return home if you see a speed limit violation. That might be overkill.
The app also lets you see alerts related to curfew, total miles driven, engine run time, the total elapsed time driven, and the distance driven from a set location. For some of the vehicles I’ve tested, you may only have a subset of those alerts available (usually, an alert for miles driven and speeding). I liked the one for curfew because that gives you some form of control over when the car is driven, especially good because sleepy driving is a major cause for accidents.
When it comes to connected cars, this is really part of a future scenario. Soon enough, you’ll know exactly where your car is at all times and will be able to summon the car home, set certain features (say, disabling the turbo-charger or keeping the spoiler from going up on the RC F), keep tabs on any near misses at intersections, and basically monitor everything about the car.
The Enform Remote app does let you lock and unlock the car, see the fuel level, find its location on a map, and even check if the trunk or hood were left open. The app is available for iOS and Android, although I’d prefer an option to use it from a web browser because I’m not always on my phone during the day during focused work sessions.
Keeping a tab up to keep tabs on a teen driver? That would be awesome.
