No more drunk driving? US to force carmakers to adopt life-saving tech by 2024
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it has begun process to force adoption of technology, as long as it works
And when the sensor fails, your car is a brick. Gee. I wonder what the markup on replacement sensors is gonna be. I wonder how intentionally failure-prone the sensor is gonna be too.
Even worse, let's say you are having a weather based emergency like what happened in Texas last winter... And the winter before and will probably happen again this winter... You've hooked up your vehicle as an emergency generator. But you can't turn it on because of this sensor.
You're not even trying to drive, you're just trying to get some power to your HVAC system so you don't freeze to death.
Sure, that's just one example and it doesn't happen every day, but this thing could prevent successful outcomes in multiple emergency situations.
We're better off investing in proper public transit rather than this shit.
I’d like to know how the sensor will ensure the driver is sober when they’re the responsible designated driver trying to bring home a carload full of plastered friends… I have at least one friend that I know would think it’s hilarious (at the time) if he was a drunk passenger and could make the car stop by breathing on the driver etc.
A camera could focus on the drivers seat, but I feel like that would be lousy at this sort of thing… Is the driver drunk, is he shivering because it’s cold out? Does he have a cold, or even just a lazy eye or suffer from tremors of some sort?
Any sort of breath or touch sensor is going to need to be smart enough to distinguish between driver & passengers. And if it’s a touch sensor in the steering wheel does that mean no more gloves on a cold winter day?
A camera could focus on the drivers seat
You can guarantee it'll be the lowest quality camera possible. Won't work in anything other than direct sunlight, until probably require you to take your glasses off if you wear them.
The law requires a technology safety standard by November 2024 if the technology is ready.
The technology will never be ready. The accuracy required for such a thing to not be universally despised is absurd.
The technology will never be ready
I think you are right, I hope they don't push it in a half assed state.
Achieving the accuracy is not the major problem here, but keeping it accurate. You have to make it robust enough so it doesn't fail at random (sensors in general are a removed in this regard) and it has to hold a perfect calibration for long enough (a assume chemical detection sensor, which again, are a super-removed regarding calibrations), while also making it at least a bit hard to bypass. The other problem is the privacy nightmare this can be, analyzing fluids or cameras pointing to your face... are they gonna sell this data to insurance companies (just as an example, it could be other companies, your employer..)? Of course they are!
The only thing I would expect from this is a lot of people pissed or worst because of malfunctions while all the drunktards stay on the road by simply filling a ballon before they start drinking.
Mother Against Drunk Driving (MADD)
Aaaand of course this is been pushed by some Puritan-Americans lol
Tldr I rant at hypothetical, you can safely skip this
If I have a sensor, it's getting removed. If there's a camera or some such thing connecting to anywhere, it's either removed or I simply won't buy that car. Anything mandated by law for the end-user is getting bypassed and removed until there's some sort of inspection for it.
I don't drink, at all. Never could stand the taste of alcohol. So anything mandated by law to make sure I'm not drinking and driving is simply an inconvenience, another barrier between a person and what is necessity to do anything in this country (no I don't care that some people can personally get to your work, the store, and family with a 10 minute bus ride, that simply isn't reality for anyone outside dense cities) and I'm pretty biased against government agencies raising the bar for things that mostly only affect poorer people.
A rich dude will never need to worry about replacing a bad sensor, or what if the broken sensor trips again and I can't drive to work again.
The single mother of 3 in a rusting minivan, however, isn't so lucky.
But man will they be able to spend a whole bunch of money trying to get there....
"There are too many drunk drivers! It must be because we don't have any way to stop every car in case someone drunk sits in the driver's seat!" "What if we increased public transportation so people could take that instead if they'd been drinking?" "There must be a way to disable these cars!"
The busses where I live used to stop running around 12:30am out of downtown. It was ridiculous as people wouldn't leave that early if they were at shows which meant cabs or drunk driving for the irresponsible.
They finally changed it to 1:30am for some routes which helped a bit, but it really needs to be after last call.
I don't think the current level of drunk driving is large enough to violate everyone's privacy to catch the very few drivers who drank too much. I'm much more worried about road rage drivers than drunk drivers. Road ragers are actively trying to hurt or kill people.
I worry a lot more about road rage and distracted drivers than drunks. Last week in the nearby large-ish city a woman was run off the side of a bridge and her car fell 60ft and landed on it's roof in the river bed. She will be OK, but still yikes.
Road rage is bigger than just drivers. Most violent crime is committed by young men. Ideally, these people would have better access to jobs and free mental health care.
Yes, some counselling would help. Just talking to someone who isn't related to you or in a relationship with you can be enlightening.
No, you're supposed to submit to a finger up the bum because some child thinks this will actually work as intended.
In 2021... The law requires a technology safety standard by November 2024 if the technology is ready.
Still, NHTSA must be assured the technology works before it can require it, and then give automakers at least three years to implement it once it finalizes rules.
“If it’s [only] 99.9% accurate, you could have a million false positives,” Carlson said. “Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”
The article title is too much optimistic, not going to happen in the next few years
“Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”
Add an emergency button that overrides the lock and also calls the police.
So along with an alcohol sensor there has to be a cellular connection bc as well? What happens when you’re stuck in a rural area with little/no cell coverage? And who is paying the cost of all this new technology?
So now the police have to act as mechanics? What if the emergency is not life threatening, but I could lose my job if I don't get some paperwork to the courthouse in time? Do I still have to get the police involved for an override? Maybe the emergency is I have to get my kids to school. Maybe the emergency is I have an ice cream cake melting in the trunk of my car. At what point is it too trivial to waste the time of emergency services because a sensor went bad?
Perfect, I can get shot by the cops while trying to get to the hospital.
“Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”
If you need to go to the hospital for an emergency call an ambulance and don't use it as an excuse for driving while drunk.
This is the USA. If you call the ambulance you need to take out a new mortgage on your house.
The idea is that you are not actually drunk but in some upset condition because of an emergency. And that condition might trigger the anti-drunk mechanism. A breathalyzer might work, but the drunk drive can always get someone else to breath into it. Also not sure how much calibration such device needs, can it last for a few months in a cold/hot car and still work correctly?
Once you want something to validate the breathalyzer (to avoid asking your child to start your car for you while you are drunk) it get complicated and more error prone.
Yeah no problem, I'll just pony up $4000 because I drank a single beer at the wrong time . Why are people like you like this? You literally cannot imagine a scenario you haven't experienced and you express that lack of imagination by accusing anyone with imagination of being up to no good.
Seriously STFU
Damn! You have ambulance money?!? Nice
in that quote from the article, the hypothetical (and eventually, very real) victim of a false positive from less than absolute 100% accuracy is not a drunk.
“If it’s [only] 99.9% accurate, you could have a million false positives,” Carlson said. “Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”
and 'ambulance-worthy' emergencies are not the only critical and potentially life-saving trips that could be affected by a false-positive. how about the doctor who would treat that person in the ER, or a volunteer firefighter responding to a call, or a parent going to fetch their teen after they call for a ride from an unsafe situation........
Did you not see the second word in the quoted sentence?
I camp and hike and such in some very rural, mountainous areas pretty regularly, cell service is often very spotty in those places. I know one place off the top of my head that I've been to a few times that I'd have to drive a few minutes away to get a signal.
Off the top of my head, one way around this might be to pair the alcohol sensor with a cellular connection that can call 911, if the car has a signal then the alcohol sensor is required, if it doesn't then the sensor is deactivated. You could also probably have better cellular equipment built into a car than a phone since you don't have to make compromises to keep everything pocket-sized, so you could potentially have more of a signal in more places by calling from your car than you would with your phone.
Despite the laundry list of privacy and personal property infringements being an issue here this will also cause an issue for poorer people that cant afford the new markup for trash tech they dont need, and will create a new reason to be harassed. Cops will start pulling over and bothering every car that is made before this mandate. They can use this as an excuse to accuse people of intoxication and get real loose with their rights when they get rightfully angry.
I'm so glad my car doesnt have any onstar or cameras or any of this crap.
Yes, the entire point of this is to give kickbacks to whichever businesses provide this tech. Every additional feature added to a car raises the price more than what the feature costs to add.
The US is a joke.
“If it’s [only] 99.9% accurate, you could have a million false positives,” Carlson said. “Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency.”
Tess Rowland, the president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), said the group was “very pleased” with NHTSA’s launch.
Fuck these people, they don’t give a fuck about lives, only their incredibly specific use-case.
Soon enough you'll need a blood and stool sample to start your car ... and of course all the information will be sold to advertisers.
Something has gone wrong if we've crossed universes where South Park is making predictions instead of The Simpsons.
South Park never fell off.
Simpsons have been irrelevant for almost 20 years.
Don't forget the insurance companies.
In all seriousness, I think this sort of thing is really just another factor pushing to truly self-driving cars.
I foresee a huge drop in new car sales in conjunction with a huge spike in used/pre-owned car sales.
Every time something like this pops up, I'm reminded of a line from a silly book I read as a kid:
"When technology advances, the technology to outsmart it advances too."
The people making these regulations don't understand car people. That cute little mandatory device will be defeated, and a workaround will be sold, within the first year. The same thing happened with diesel trucks - EPA mandated emissions controls were built in the sloppiest possible fashion by engine manufacturers, and when these expensive trucks started needing thousands of dollars of work with fewer than 100,000 miles, people started disabling the emissions controls.
The same thing will happen with this regulation. It will be implemented in the cheapest, most failure prone way possible to save Ford or whoever $5 per unit. Drivers will start having problems with their whiz-bang fancy electronic DUI detector bricking their car, and boom, now there's a market for disabling or removing the devices.
Also, just to attract more downvotes - there doesn't seem to be any similar regulation being pushed for motorcycles. Consider a Goldwing instead of an Accord?
Classic cars are about to be huge.
Some sentences for driving under the influence require those convicted to install a breathalyzer in their cars that prevent them from starting the vehicle if alcohol is detected, though regulators said it’s unlikely future ubiquitous technology would be as intrusive as requiring a puff every time.
So instead they want to install cameras to continuously monitor the driver...
Dude, 13000 deaths are approximately 28% of the total traffic death toll for 2021. Even if I take the data for 2014, with the all-time low of 1.17 fatalities per 100m mi driven, that 28% is more than the 0.12 total fatalities in Germany (1.9 per bn km, 2018). Maybe the government could start fixing driver's ed and make sure vehicles are actually road safe.
They won't fix driver's ed, nor ensure cars are safe because America is a car country with no public transport in most of it. So to get the plebeian workers to generate profit for the rich, they need them on the road driving to and from work an hour or two each day. To a German, our idiocy would be absolutely confounding. We don't take driving nearly as serious as the Germans.
I've seen an old woman at a DMV fail the vision test, and the employee just pretended it didn't matter and let her pass because without her driver's license she couldn't get around. We have cars on the road missing body parts, rusted through, warped brake rotors, seized calipers, damaged safety devices, they can be in any state of broken, and in most states, that's perfectly fine to drive in.
This really weird grab for installing drunk driving interlock is just...that, weird. It seems like it is meant to target the "lower classes", which is strange because it will drive up the cost of cars even further, and their prices have already ballooned in the last decade.
Distracted cell phone driving, which the NHTSA claims only accounted for 3,522 deaths in 2021, seems a much more prevalent (all day and night) issue in frequency, (although likely, not as fatal) as most people I see while driving around aren't looking at the road, they're just looking down at their phone. One person even told me they use their car's lane departure correction feature as an ersatz autopilot, letting the car ping-pong down the road so they can focus on reading their phone.
I think we all know what's the only foolproof solution here is: anal probe. It would be integrated into driver's seat and make a measurement every couple minutes. Yes, I know, it could be defeated by sitting on sober person's lap while you drive but I don't actually think it's a big security issue. If you have someone who can sit in driver's seat the whole trip they can probably also drive. Also it would be very uncomfortable for everyone and very easy to spot by police. Any other solution is stupid and wouldn't work. It's so obvious I don't think it even merits a serious discussion. Anal probe is the only way: it doesn't depend on some shitty AI face recognition BS that will fail randomly or won't work at all for some people, you can't cheat it by having someone else start your car, you can't cheat it by having the passenger blow into something or give his blood sample and it's compatible with every driver
I knew a guy that had an interlock device in his Tahoe because of two DUIs. I watched him drink a beer while driving it. He figured out somehow that if he drank enough water with his beer, it would fool the device and let him keep driving. This was 20 years ago, so they may be better now.