Joshua H.

We installed this on our 17yo daughter's new (to her) car. The GPS function works great. It reports position every 60 seconds when the car is on, and every 60 minutes when it is off. So far, no issues with battery life based on normal driving.

We were primarily interested in MOTOsafety for the Daily Report Card to monitor her safety and how her driving improves. Unfortunately, most of the posted speed limits in the MOTOsafety database near our home are off by 10-15 MPH. We have the speeding threshold set to +5 MPH, meaning that she gets lots of false speeding alerts, impacting the overall grade she gets in the daily report card, and making it useless for the purpose they advertise -- teen driving safety.

MOTOsafety allows you to "update posted speed limits" on their website by selecting two endpoints on a road and manually setting the speed limit between those two points. It also stores these updates for reference. So far, none of the speed limit updates we've created have had any impact at all. While the website correctly shows where we have updated the speed limits, those updates have not had any impact on MOTOsafety's speeding alerts.

For example, the main road off our neighborhood has a posted limit of 50 MPH. MOTOsafety says it is 40 MPH. With the speed alert limit set to +5 MPH, she would get speeding alerts all up and down the main road for traveling over 45 MPH. So we went in and set the speed limit for the entire road to 50 MPH as it is posted, but she still gets speeding alerts for exceeding 45 MPH. None of the speed limit updates we've created have reduced the false speeding alerts. We contacted MOTOsafety customer service about this issue and have yet to receive a response (more than 2 weeks later).

We also contacted MOTOsafety with a general question about the "harsh braking" and "rapid acceleration" alerts. It's unclear whether these alerts are checked only every 60 seconds like the GPS positioning is, or whether it continuously monitors braking and acceleration. In this case, MOTOsafety customer service responded within 24 hours, but provided a stock answer that did not at all address the question. It only stated that there were two types of speeding alerts, "speeding and high speed", and did not mention how often those alerts were checked. If acceleration and braking are only checked 1x every 60 seconds, then it would be easy for a hard braking situation to go unreported in the 60 seconds between checks.

The lack of timely responses from customer service, stock answers that don't address the question, and issues with invalid speed limits that cannot be corrected make this product useless for monitoring teen safety while driving. It's a simple GPS position tracker that is pretending to be something more.