Sounds like you have a challenging kid, and I wish you strength and calm helping her grow and learn.
Knowing grades at end of semester is:
reasonable
expected
required.
No drama, no argument. If that is not acceptable, she doesn’t have to accept your financial assistance. I hate to draw lines in the sand because you have to be willing to enforce any ultimatums, but that is one I would enforce.
@momo2x2018 your experience was along the lines of mine (a little different) and I feel fortunate that my daughter made her own decision to leave, and work.
I perceived, in her case, that any academic struggles seemed to be out of her control due to some challenges that were certainly not of her own making. When she first left school she was extremely responsible. The kind of kid who works at a dry cleaners for 3 years without complaining!
Just want to put a word in for kids with learning, or mental/physical health challenges. If kid is failing, sometimes they will, as I put it before, put their head in the sand, and sometimes they will lie, to parents (and themselves).
There are times for a more punitive tone in monitoring, “holding accountable,” that kind of thing, but first I think it is important to find out what is really going on. If you already know I defer to that!
I also think a therapist can really come in handy sometimes 
@momo2x2018, I have a feeling you will figure out how to best handle the situation with your child, but it is good to “crowdsource” how others deal with their young adult children in college.
Trust is earned in our household, and with any loss of trust, what we would expect would “evolve”. Count me as one poster who would expect access to everything after being deceived or we would just remove all financial support. But that would not affect our children as we provide very little financial support to our 2 college aged children (which they don’t even need). Your scenario scares me because my kids do not have to care what my wife and I think. I am just glad they still do care and they voluntarily gave us access to all of their portals (which we only look at when they ask us to look at something). I hope you provide an update once you have worked through this with your child.
We never saw either kid’s grade until they showed us. One of them went to a school that didn’t even show them to the students (unless requested maybe, but I don’t remember). He didn’t see his GPA until junior year.
That said, both kids were very self-motivated and also very open about how their classes were going. We covered everything financial aid did not (they got to keep whatever income they made while students), but they thought of our money as family money and were just as invested as we were in using it wisely.
Our default is to extend trust until kid shows us it might not be merited. In the case of a 2,500 mile discrepancy between my child’s location and that of her tuition, I still might not insist on verification. But I’d have a very forthright conversation about whether they were all right, did they even want to stay in school, can we help line up any support they might need, and WT(expletive) kid even if you didn’t let US know where you were please tell me someone trustworthy knew and could help you if you got into a worse bind than you did. I’m just speaking to the way I’d react if my own kids ended up in these circumstances.
Glad your daughter wasn’t hurt. Best of luck to her. 
I think it’s reasonable to expect kids to make it worth all the money you’re paying by studying hard and earning decent grades. I would not pay private tuition for a kid to party.
But families vary in expectations. We knew our kids were hard workers and not likely to slack off, but if they were more like I was at that age, I might ask for access to their grades at the end of the semester. I didn’t feel the need to ask mine to sign the waiver.
As it was, I’d just ask them how they did, and they would tell what they got.
Oh, no. That’s awful. But IMO, there’s a MUCH bigger context surrounding this. I don’t think it can be reduced to the transactional tuition-for-grades paradigm. You have to blow this wide open to get to the bottom of it. Therapy ASAP.
Oh, wow, I missed the part about the car accident. This isn’t about having access to grades, this is about immaturity and deceit in a relationship. @momo2x2018 I wouldn’t be narrowly focused on grades, but on whether your daughter is really suited for college at this point in her life. She may need to work for a few years and maybe take a class at your local CC, but I wouldn’t spend a dime on tuition right now.
I guess I have to wonder why you are buying her another car? Is this essential?
Definitely check your child’s school’s website about D grades. At many schools, a D in a course for ones major will need to be retaken. You could be adding a semester or more of payments if your D is regularly bringing home Ds. Also at some point, a GPA is going to be low enough to make employment much more difficult. Plenty of companies have a minimum GPA threshold.
Honestly I’d raise the bar some or seriously consider if this child is ready for college.
My D has been in and out of therapy since the age of about 14 or 15; it doesn’t work because she has not been committed. We keep the therapy door open and she is free to engage with a therapist any time she chooses.
As for the D grades, I was really using that as an illustration that our expectations are not A’s. In fact, last year at the end of the Fall semester, when she did show us the transcript without a fight, she achieved 2 A’s an A- and a Fail, for which she did not hear a work of rebuke from us, and she is retaking the Fail this year.
The car is a necessity - it is like a therapy dog for her. I know that sounds crazy, but without a car, she’s crazy! That would be the very last thing we would defund.
Overall, she is doing a lot better in life this past year, than she did in the preceding five years, BUT, I really do want to see the transcript - not for grades but to know she is going and has not been ‘withdrawn’ from classes or put on ‘academic probation’ which did happen one semester.
Anyway, you’ve all had terrific opinions and advice, and for that, I thank you.
Well I am hesitant to offer advice but here it goes. First off I feel for the OP. Raising kids these days is not easy. Especially if there are underlying issues. But if not having a car makes her “crazy” and giving her a motor vehicle that could induce harm (going fast, accident), calms her down… She is playing you. She knows how to get to you. All of our kids do to some extent. So use this to your advantage. 2 hours of therapy a week or no car. Or tutoring or… She did great that semester and had a stumble… Oh well… Many kids do for various reasons. So she’s taking the class over. Great. She might take 5 years or more to graduate like many kids… So be it.
We took the pressure off of grades in college for both our kids. To me, college is about learning, not the grade per se. At college also there are social workers, psychologist etc at their health care centers. Many kids take advantage of this. Again, maybe she needs to talk with someone different… We told our kids that we pay for college and that comes with many things that are free or low cost. Peer to peer tutoring, art shows, theater like plays, mental health professionals. We encourage our kids to use them all. They don’t need to let us know unless they want to. There is stress on colleges these days. I want my kids to get the help they need from any resource available to them. Maybe an approach like this might be helpful?
Just because the school structure works for most kids, doesn’t mean it works for all. We’re sitting here emphasizing grades, when becoming educated is a different matter.
We did keep D2 in college because that was the right venue for her to be exposed and learn. Her problem was finding the right fit in a major took time and it was what i see as a grade deflation school. She never mastered that.
She had a therapist at home who specialized in underperforming college age kids. A godsend. Imo, it’s not just about “therapy,” it needs the right match. Later, she connected with another right one via campus.
None of this was about making her normal or ordinary or gpa, per se. It was about her blooming.
Neither of mine ever had gpa as a job qualifier.
OP, would you consider tying the purchase of the new car to having your D sign a waiver that allows you to access academic information? You could tell her that you will only use it to determine if she has any withdrawals or is placed on academic probation. Just an idea, and/or a negotiating point…if this is your starter, then compromising on her showing you her grades at the end of each semester might seem palatable to her.
This is very narrow. The school troubles are a symptom, not the problem. There is something larger going on with OP’s daughter.
This jumped out at me. Very, very worrisome. A clue that she craves stimulation and in fact may need dopamine-fueled, high-risk activity to function. The reason it’s a red flag is because people who go “crazy” without high-stimulation activity are at high risk for addictive behavior. Could be substances, or could be gambling, or fast driving or other risk-taking like, say, rock climbing without ropes or standing in the car of a roller coaster.
Does she engage in other risky or high-stimulation activity? Does she engage in noticeably histrionic behavior? “Drama queen?” Is she impulsive? Ever evaluated for ADHD?
What would you do if she showed you her grades and they were all Fs or withdraws? Would you not pay for college and not pay for a car?
I think that’s what you are faced with. If she won’t show you the grades, there has to be a reason other than she just doesn’t want to. The cost to her is too high (losing it all) to be hiding Bs and Cs.
UT Austin addressed this situation this year… students have full access and now have DUO authentication.
She has granted eProxy which allows me to see Financial Aid and to pay the bills. BUT no access to anything academic.
Even if I had her password (and I do) she would have to grant authorization each and every time I use her password.
UT sent an email telling parents… under the law you have NO access to academic information once your child is an adult.
We don’t anticipate having an issues but she has agreed to share grades when we asked. I guess it will be at the end of the semester, if she doesn’t share before that.
This was exactly what I was thinking but didn’t articualte it well.
I’m late to answering this, but it was expected our kids would show grades before next semester’s tuition was paid.
We paid for EVERYTHING while they were in college, but when 1 kid got less than a 1.5 GPA (not by trying hard or doing anything to help himself) I made him take a student loan for whatever was allowed to help pay the next year. When he graduated he had over a 3.0, so I paid off the loan.
This is not true. I have posted this a few times on CC.
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/pdf/ferpafaq.pdf
My sister, who is a lawyer, told me when my kids went off to college not to bother to sign the FERPA stuff because if I really wanted to I could have access to my kids’ information because they were dependents on my tax returns.
Not for medical stuff. My kid didn’t get around to signing a release and when she went to the hospital the school couldn’t tell me where.