Earlier this week, Ford Motor Co. presented its new system developed to help parents gain a little more control over their children’s driving. The key technology allows parents to set the limits of how fast the car can go, how loud the car’s stereo can be turned and also make sure that the seatbelt is used.

The system will be used as a standard feature on next year’s Ford Focus and will also be adopted by the Lincoln and Mercury vehicles.

"Teens are probably the riskiest drivers. MyKey helps parents encourage their teens to drive safely," said Sue Cischke, group vice president of sustainability, environment and safety engineering at Ford.

The benefits of such a system are numerous, as there are many parents extremely worried knowing that their kids, with their recently passed driver tests, are running the streets without supervision. Among the restrictions and enhanced alerts, the menu provides an option for switching the "Low Fuel" alert from 50 miles to 75 miles and also one to track how far the car was driven. The most appreciated function is the limit that can be imposed to the car's speed, ranging from 60 to 80 miles per hour.

Each of the eight keys can be set separately to its own list of parameters and adults can choose to drive the cars without any of them. There is also a special security setting that resets the mileage for the teen’s key, in order to alert parents if their master key is stolen to adjust the restrictions. The details have been extremely carefully planned and it is very likely to appeal to many parents interested in improving their children’s safety.

"It's making use of existing technology, and through the magic of software, we're able to build features on top of the features we already have," said Jim Buczkowski, Ford's director of electronic and electrical systems engineering.

One of the reasons why such a system was considered useful is because teens show the lowest interest in wearing a seatbelt, not realizing its importance in the event of an accident. The car maker explained that teens have the lowest seatbelt usage rates of any demographic, which puts the accidents with motor vehicles as the leading cause of death for young Americans aged between 16 and 20.

Ford also presented other safety systems. The company developed a new crash-avoidance system that alerts drivers and pre-charges the breaks before a collision, a blind-spot detection system and also a backup radar system used for detecting other cars, motorcycles, bikes or pedestrians approaching from the side.

MyKey was received with great enthusiasm by the parents in Ford’s focus groups. The teens involved in the surveys were less than thrilled initially but on the second round of questions many appeared open to the idea if it would mean more access to the family car. Another factor that appealed to teens was the possibility of receiving discounts from insurance companies if the system is in use.

The service will hopefully boost the industry’s efforts for improving the safety of driving even more.