You may have noticed a lot of talk lately about this idea that, starting in late 2026 or early 2027, all new cars sold in America will come with a “kill switch.” That’s sort of an alarmist way to describe what’s actually going on, but only sort of. There is truth to the statement, and while the initial goals of the legislation that led to this have ostensibly reasonable goals, technological and logistical and ethical issues make all of this a colossal cauldron of burbling ethical and political issues. Let’s dig into what is going on so you can decide on the most precise and appropriate level of freaking out you’d like to employ.
This all comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on November 15, 2021. Section 24220 of that law instructs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to establish regulations for “Advanced Impaired Driving Prevention Technology” which is, as the name suggests, technology designed to prevent people from driving while impaired. A 2023 report to Congress describes this mandate as follows:
“Section 24220, “ADVANCED IMPAIRED DRIVING TECHNOLOGY,” of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), enacted as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), directed that “not later than 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall issue a final rule prescribing a Federal motor vehicle safety standard (FMVSS) under section 30111 of title 49, United States Code, that requires passenger motor vehicles manufactured after the effective date of that standard to be equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.” Further, the issuance of the final rule is subject to subsection (e) “Timing,” which provides for an extension of the deadline if the FMVSS cannot meet the requirements of 49 USC 30111.”
So, the act was enacted in 2021, and even accommodating for the deadline extensions, we’re about at that deadline, which is why everyone is talking about this now, since, according to the law, these standards will have to be enforced starting late this year or early next year.
What are we talking about here, specifically? According to the Federal Register’s report, these are what the driver impairment prevention systems are supposed to do:
Section 24220 defines “Advanced Drunk and Impaired Driving Technology” as a system that
(A) can—
(i) passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected; or
(B) can—
(i) passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration described in section 163(a) of title 23, United States Code; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit is detected; or
(C) is a combination of systems described in subparagraphs (A) and (B).[97]
So, basically, they are systems that will be watching you, how you drive, how you behave, attempt to determine your blood alcohol content, if any, and based on these results, the system can “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.” There’s your kill switch.
So, how will your car determine all of this? Some of this technology is already in cars for sale today, like driver monitoring cameras and software that attempts to detect when you’re drowsy or driving erratically, according to the computers in the car. For detecting blood alcohol content (BAC), Section 24220 requires that detection methods be “passive,” so no blowing into tubes. The system would use the commonly accepted BAC limit of ≥0.08% to determine if you should be driving or not.
Is the technology there to passively detect BAC? There are commercially-available devices that can detect alcohol in the ambient air around the driver, though it’s not clear just how accurate these would be if, say, you were sober but had a drunk friend in the passenger seat. There are also infrared spectroscopy touch-type sensors that are being developed, as described here by a man named Skip Church, which sounds a bit like a new youth-targeted atheist outreach initiative:
How well do these actually work in practice? I’m not sure yet. A 2023 report to Congress predicted these devices would be viable, but so far, I’ve not found any confirmation of that. Would I want my ability to drive my own car to be at the mercy of these devices? Hell no.
These systems aren’t free, of course, and some estimates suggest their implementation into cars would increase prices by $200-250 for passive breath-based systems or $100-$500 or so for more advanced infrared systems. And then there’s the huge question of how well they’ll actually work in practice. I’ve been in plenty of vehicles that felt far too quick to give me the little coffee cup icon and suggest I take a rest whenever I decide to steer a little bit more than it likes; what if the car could choose to just turn off if it doesn’t like my driving?
And that’s another huge issue – what is the behavior plan for a car that decides the driver is too distracted or impaired when driving? Will it shut off immediately? Navigate to the side of the road and park? Because that is a significant technical hurdle that, so far, no production car with any level of autonomy has solved. Not starting for a drunk driver is one thing, but dealing with an impaired driver while already driving is a massive separate issue.
Personally, I hate this idea. I absolutely understand not wanting people to drive drunk – nobody should be doing that, ever – but I don’t want to cede control of whether or not I can drive the personal car I own to some sensors and software or AI. There are far too many opportunities for misinterpretations and false positives, and where does that leave you? Stranded somewhere? Unable to leave a bad situation, or get to somewhere important, like a hospital?
There have been attempts to introduce a bill to repeal this aspect of the law, but it didn’t seem to get any traction. And it’s not clear at all that automakers are ready or willing to implement these systems by the end of this year or early next year. Also, for those of us uncomfortable with relinquishing so much control of our cars, there is this ray of hope:
The Safety Act also contains a “make inoperative” provision, which prohibits certain entities from knowingly modifying or deactivating any part of a device or element of design installed in or on a motor vehicle in compliance with an applicable FMVSS.[91]
Those entities include vehicle manufacturers, distributors, dealers, rental companies, and repair businesses. Notably, the make inoperative prohibition does not apply to individual vehicle owners.[92]
While NHTSA encourages individual vehicle owners not to degrade the safety of their vehicles or equipment by removing, modifying, or deactivating a safety system, the Safety Act does not prohibit them from doing so. This creates a potential source of issues for solutions that lack consumer acceptance, since individual owners would not be prohibited by Federal law from removing or modifying those systems (i.e., using defeat mechanisms).
Based on this, it doesn’t look like the owner disabling these features will be illegal? That seems like a nice big hole; perhaps this is a sort of hedge, in case these systems do, in fact, turn out to be doing more harm than good? Is this even going to happen at all? I’m really not sure.
There’s very little about any sort of kill switch for a person’s car that I’m comfortable with, really. I get that stopping drunk driving is incredibly important, no question, but I’m not sure this is the way to do it. Personally, I accomplish this goal by driving a car that I simply couldn’t drive while drunk. I mean, that manual choke is finicky enough when I’m sober; there’s no way I’m getting that thing going while drunk.
I recently had to swap out a service rental that kept jamming on the brakes every time I tried to back out of my not very steep driveway. If it doesn’t get repealed first, I expect that this will last as long as the required seat belt interlocks – that experiment lasted for about a year before being yanked by popular demand.
When I was in Italy for work last year my Kia rental had similar parking sensors that I just had to turn off almost every time I wanted to park. The hotel garage had HVAC over the parking spots, so the car’s sensors insisted I was going to hit a wall, and the parking lot at the office was edged with very tall grass, that again the car insisted was a wall I was going to hit.
Back in 2018 I had a RAM 1500 for one day as a loaner that would not let my back out of the driveway. The concrete apron was fairly steep, like 20 or so degrees, and concrete, whereas the street was was blacktop. Had to turn it off to get out of the driveway.
The 2020 Cherokee I had for a year would randomly start screaming at me to PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE WHEEL when they were both on the steering wheel. The Lane Keep assist would regularly fail on highways with Michigan lefts. Twice it engaged the automatic emergency braking when a vehicle was waiting in an intersection, and not moving. Almost got me rear ended, which is Alanis levels of ironic.
I’m no luddite, but these systems don’t fail properly, and it doesn’t lower the risk FOR ME. I’ll stick with my lower-tech vehicles for now, and upgrade the features I actually want in a car without paying the extra few thousands all this safety tech adds on to the base price that I cannot opt out of.
Stuff like this is one of the big reasons why I refuse to accept a dongle from an insurance company. My emergency braking activates Every Single Day when I back into my very tight garage. It’s fine, I tolerate the system and its intent but no way an insurance company will interpret that data with any sort of nuance. Forget that I have 0 lifetime car accidents, even not at fault ones, I’m clearly a menace on the roads because my garage sucks.
The sheer level of privacy invasion makes it a no for me, the addition of an insecure 3rd party connected device to the vehicle network; which already have a track record of vulnerabilities makes it even worse.
My VW adaptive cruise control will slow down on a bend in the road if the car in the lane on the outside of the bend is going slower than my lane.
Yeah, because mandating technological “solutions” to societal problems has always worked out so well before.
Especially when those technological solutions are crafted by… the government!
Japan has achieved largely the same result this legislation is aiming for with a combination of massive fines and the risk of jail time for all driving-age (18+) people in the vehicle, plus temporary closure of the establishment that provided the alcohol and, if applicable, possible penalties for the lender of the vehicle.
Annual road fatalities are down from well over 10,000 during the Bubble Era, when DUI was almost socially acceptable, to 2,547 last year.
Thankfully, since I have judged new cars to not be worth buying, this will have no effect on me. I already turned off the “coffee cup” warning on my ’14 Mercedes, that was annoying and random enough.
“where does that leave you? Stranded somewhere? Unable to leave a bad situation, or get to somewhere important, like a hospital?”
Counterpoint: Someone too inebriated to drive safely could not only get to the hospital but could also get their friends, their family, even complete strangers there too. As for leaving a bad situation, again if that person is too inebriated to drive safely adding fight or flight to that could end up being far worse for everyone if that person were allowed to operate a high speed, multi ton death machine.
To your point the system can automatically call 911. If someone is truly stranded somewhere, unable to leave a bad situation or needs get to somewhere important, like a hospital they’re the best option.
You are making the rather invalid assumption that this system will work properly and reliably.
Oh I’m sure there will be recalls, fixes, redesign, recalibrations, all that. But my guess is it will err on the side of doubt, only activating in extreme situations rather than erring to vigilantism.
It could – hypothetically – also ask the driver if they’d like to summon a LEO for a second opinion.
LEO’s can’t even consistently and properly identify drunk drivers.
Then the drunk has nothing to worry about.
But as kept happening in TN, the not-drunk ones sometimes do.
If they can blow clean then they don’t have anything to worry about either.
Other than the expense and hassle of defending themselves. Ask James Comey about that.
Apples, meet oranges…
Driving While Black/Brown is treated as a crime in many jurisdiction and incurs significant risks to the driver and possibly passengers, drunk or not.
I’m a white male law-abiding person who doesn’t drive impaired, and even I don’t want a cop near me in the best of times. I can’t imagine people who don’t look like me would welcome LEO getting involved in determining if they should be driving.
Which is another reason to use colorblind AI to gauge whether someone is ok to drive.
You are funny if you think AI is truly color blind. Go look at the wealth of examples about how prejudice AI is.
AI can sometimes detect a user’s race. What inputs will it get in this application to do so?
how do I know? My point is that you are wrong that AI has been “colorblind”. It is trained by humans who have inherent prejudices.
That wasn’t the question. The question is how do steering wheel and throttle inputs gauged against local speed limit signage and lane markings lead to race based decision making.
The AI is as colorblind as the training data, at best. More often, it’s not actually colorblind or unbiased, but it does provide “AI-washing” cover for that bias.
Again given those limited inputs where the potential.for bias?
Or use the situation to exploit and racially persicute.
A fear that is *wildy* overblown by the media. And I say that as somebody who isn’t white.
Right, because summoning a cop turns a situation to your favour so much of the time!
Oh it probably won’t since the only reason a cop would be summoned is because the person trying to drive is so blitzed it’s obvious to a robot.
You go right on believing that. I work in AI IT at this point – I know better about how well it *actually* works.
You do you.
I always do.
Good.
AI can’t even get basic web searches right. The other day, I Googled “Kawasaki Z400 weight,” and the stupid AI that Google forces on you gave me weight figures for the Nissan Z.
The AI justified the stupid answer by claiming that the Nissan Z is sometimes called the Z400, which isn’t even true. It’s sometimes referred to as the 400Z!
No chance in heck I’m trusting an AI to guess if I’m drunk.
It definitely has it’s uses, but at this point it is too often AS – artificial stupidity. And the scary part is if you are using it for something you don’t already know well, you will have no idea if what it spits back is correct or not.
They can’t even get lane assist working right in most cars.
And yet it works so well idiots have posted videos of themselves napping behind the wheel.
So if I’m in a life or death situation, sober, with high adrenaline, what happens if the system thinks I’m impaired and won’t let me drive to safety? I’m sure the first automaker to have a car leave someone stranded in a deadly situation is going to love the publicity that comes along with it.
If you’re in a life or death situation you should be on the phone with 911 anyway.
I’ve lived in a place where on a good day emergency services can be an hour away. And cell service is spotty at best. Have you?
Oh many times. Sometimes there aren’t even roads.
The solution there is a temporary override. If the car can’t reach 911 it goes into a reduced capacity limp mode till it can.
Great. More things to randomly make a car not work correctly. Just what we need!
OK grandpa.
I freely admit to being an automotive Luddite.
Last time I called 911 (I was witnessing a girlfriend get absolutely beaten by her boyfriend), it took them 42 minutes to arrive. I was 5 minutes from the police station in a Chicago suburb. She’s lucky that the guy was only interested in hurting her and not worse.
It happens. There aren’t unlimited numbers of cops, and they CAN all be tied up already – and likely not sitting around in the station.
Unfortunately, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
Especially in rural areas, there are medical emergencies that can’t wait a half hour or more for an ambulance. If I need to drive someone to the hospital, I don’t want to risk having my car not start because I’m stressed.
If someone is being attacked, should they stay in their car that won’t let them drive to safety while they wait for cops to show up? Or would it be better to drive to safety?
In my state, there was a recent train derailment with an evacuation order. People would no doubt be stressed out trying to grab essentials and get the heck out of there. If my car mistakes my stress for impairment, do I need to wait until I calm down before trying to drive to safety? Calling 911 isn’t going to help, the emergency services are already going to be overwhelmed by the situation.
If help is too far away the answer is activating a limp mode and contacting 911 call e.g. OnStar so help can be alerted like bringing in someone to a hospital. Limp mode would only be activated once contact is assured.
If the mothership is unreachable and/or the emergency is dire enough the driver should have the ability to completely restore full capacity, at least temporarily
BUT
Doing so should also trigger an official post incident investigation on the order of a traffic stop. It should be easy enough to prove the emergency was escaping rising floodwaters or a maniac with a knife rather than *reasons*.
So when a town of 5000 needs to evacuate because the dam is about to fail, assuming two people per car on average, there are going to be as many as 2500 people who need to deal with a post incident investigation to prove that they were actually sober when they were trying to get out of town in a car that didn’t want to start?
How would you suggest handling the cases where there isn’t an emergency but the system throws up a false positive and won’t let a person leave for work, pick up their kids from school, etc? Are we going to tie up law enforcement to verify all of these? If (and this is a big if) the system is 99% reliable, that means that every day, there would be as many as 6 million false positives that would need to be cleared. I’m sure law enforcement and taxpayers would love to deal with that.
“How would you suggest handling the cases where there isn’t an emergency but the system throws up a false positive and won’t let a person leave for work, pick up their kids from school, etc?”
Exactly the same as if the car had a flat tire or any other malady. The car still works in limp mode just like it does on a space saver.
“? If (and this is a big if) the system is 99% reliable, that means that every day, there would be as many as 6 million false positives that would need to be cleared. I’m sure law enforcement and taxpayers would love to deal with that.”
If that offset 6m+ DUIs on the road I’m sure LEO and taxpayers would indeed love it.
If I have a flat tire, I can throw on a spare and be on my way. I don’t have to wait for someone to show up to verify that my tire is flat and approve me to put a spare on.
6 million service calls a day would be over 2 billion calls for service a year. There aren’t over 2 billion drunk driving trips a year, the police aren’t going to want to handle 2 billion calls to check if someone is able to drive. That’s two billion complaints to automakers every year. No, I don’t think LEO, taxpayers, or the auto industry would love that. Especially people in rural areas, where there might only be a sheriff’s deputy available to respond, which might take a half hour or more, especially since these wouldn’t probably be considered priority calls.
“If I have a flat tire, I can throw on a spare and be on my way. I don’t have to wait for someone to show up to verify that my tire is flat and approve me to put a spare on.”
And in pretty much any car built in the past 30 years that spare would be a space saver which limits your safe top speed to 50 mph. That’s a limp mode. To restore full capacity you need to fix or replace your tire which is typically done at a shop or by a mobile service.
The system should be designed to be locally disabled in cases of regional emergencies, poorly covered rural areas or your 1% scenario until the problems are fixed.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Don’t let stupidity take hold trying to make things better in the dumbest way possible.
Of course, this country is already proving that Idiocracy was a how-to documentary, so I guess why stop now?
Progress can be a two edged sword. In this case I think the potential for safer streets makes this tech worth exploring
I think trying to do that with technology is a fool’s errand in this case. The Japanese and Europeans are doing it correctly. Draconian punishment does actually work, and is much harder to defeat. Also works with my old crocks, unlike this crap which will take many years to be even a majority of vehicles.
It can’t be worse than the existing system of never a cop around when you need one.
Given there are a million DUI arrests per year in the US, I would say there are plenty of cops.
The problems are the before and the after. Bars should be massively penalized for over-serving, and particularly, a DUI should have REAL consequences, not wrist slaps and “I’m so sorrys, I promise I won’t do it agains”.
It IS possible to change culture – remember when half of adults smoked everywhere?
The problems are the before and the after. Bars should be massively penalized for over-serving, and particularly, a DUI should have REAL consequences, not wrist slaps and “I’m so sorrys, I promise I won’t do it agains”.
I agree and I think this should be true for speeders as well. I cannot understand why cars that are capable of 50 mph over the absolute maximum speed allowed publically anywhere on the continent are allowed to be sold for use on public roads or why anyone would buy such a car to use on public roads except to speed.
A million dented up Altimas say you are wrong about the top speed of a temporary spare.
Top speed is usually faster than the top safe speed.
As if 911 responses are timely, reliable and correct for the situation.
Far more so than every speeder having a valid emergency.
I don’t have a problem with this system if it works, but I highly doubt this system will be accurate enough to distinguish mildly impaired drivers from merely bad drivers. I also think some medical conditions could trigger this system in drivers who are not impaired at all.
I wonder if it might be better to target only the most impaired drivers? Driving at .08 isn’t safe (realistically, you are better off not driving at 0.04), but data show that drivers 0.15 and above are the most dangerous. I presume it would be easier to detect someone driving at 0.15 or higher than borderline cases. I would also have no problem with a system that occasionally bricked a car for 0.10, unlike a system that occasionally bricked cars for unimpaired drivers.
Of course, though, none of this would be necessary if our drunk driving laws weren’t a joke. My understanding is that most first offense DUIs result in a small fine, and every now and then you hear about drivers on their 10th+ DUI that continue to drive. I would make the penalty for first offense DUI six months in the joint and the penalty for second offense DUI would be summary execution – that might be a little extreme, but third offense DUI wouldn’t exist if I could make the laws.
I agree with you 1000%. DUI is 100000% a choice that people make, and there should be no excuses for it. It is REALLY easy to simply not drink at all if you need to get behind the wheel. That is actually the law in a bunch of countries – effectively zero tolerance.
It is incredible that the US is an outlier with 0.08 given how recently the legal limit was 0.1 in most states. I would be in favor of going to 0.05 or lower like, you know, almost all other countries.
I’m always shocked by how many people think it is a normal, inevitable part of life to drive after drinking. I don’t drink much now, but when I did I never got behind the wheel. There were times I went so far as to…. walk if I knew I was going to drink. I even ***gasp*** called a cab once or twice back when those were a thing. My friends and I also had this strange, unheard of concept called a “designated driver.”
It wasn’t that hard to avoid driving drunk (or even slightly buzzed, for that matter) twenty years ago. Drunk driving is especially frustrating now that Uber is ubiquitous. I’m not sure why it is an unreasonable burden to pay $25 for an Uber when people don’t think twice about running up a $50+ bar tab.
The challenge still exists in rural America. No taxis, no Ubers, and you may live 10-15 miles away from anyone who may tapped to be a designated driver.
Not that any of that excuses it- just explaining why it still happens so often, especially in the Midwest. I strongly believe that the laws need to be tightened, and consequences should be much more severe and communicated. Drive drunk once? No license. Second time? Special ID which prohibits you from buying. Third time? Mandatory service as NHTSA crash test dummy, and organ donation. At least we should get something useful from the execution.
If you drink enough to get caught DUI three times, I don’t know if your organs are worth donating.
Yes, display the liver…
Are you prepared to pay significantly more in taxes and accept a huge increase in LEO presence? Otherwise, how is a lower limit to be enforced? Education, in the US, does not work.
Not necessary. Just appropriate punishment. Other countries don’t need massive police presence (or ignition interlocks) to enforce drunk driving laws. The US just isn’t that special. But we are special in too often giving *repeated* slaps on the wrist and finger-wagging about this. There should be no such thing as a 10th drunk driving arrest.
Ponder for a moment that fully one-third of all vehicle-related deaths involve drunk driving in the US. Drunks only get real punishment if they kill somebody – and not always even then. And at that point it’s a bit too late. And they tend to disproportionately kill other people rather than themselves.
I just wanted to say I enjoyed reading your well thought out arguments in this article.
I I know a lot of people are going for the angle of what if this doesn’t work and the car won’t start when the driver is ok to drive, but I’m gonna say something different. What if it works perfectly and you end up with far more impaired drivers, think people who are borderline by the legal threshold and decide, well if my car starts I must be good to go, but may have otherwise found another ride.
I knew a dipshit in college that bought a $50 breathalyzer off ebay and used that to determine when he was “safe” to drive (i.e. he kept blowing until it was under 0.08).
I’m sure there are plenty of dipshits like him who would use their car starting as evidence they were safe to drive, so I share your concern that this system might make things worse.
“you can decide on the most precise and appropriate level of freaking out you’d like to employ.”
I’ve turned my back on anything made after 2017 or earlier if it has the ability to contradict my inputs for steering or braking other than traction control and anti lock braking.
Good, we need less of these drivers. Everyone acting like their privacy is being violated, get over it- you’re probably the one driving drunk.
It’s not the privacy, it’s the false positives and being left disabled in undesirable locations.
Exactly. I read one scenario about what if someone is being attacked and/or chased by a madman, and they’re predictably upset with dilated pupils, enhanced heart rate, rapid breathing, etc. They make it to their car, slam the door shut, turn on the engine/power up the vehicle (if it’s an EV or something), and boom. Vehicle detects “impairment” and refuses to let them move.
Well, that, and the privacy.
Why am I supposed to feel ok with giving up my privacy for this?
Yes, on the continuum of things that suck, but we’ve already given away our privacy to our smart phones.
Sure, but that’s my choice. I can buy a dumb phone, or there are brands of smartphone that try to respect user privacy more.
With this law, there will be no choice if you want/need a new car. I guess you could buy a old car, but that’s not the same.
I mean, yeah, if it works flawlessly 99.7% of the time, I’m all for it. But, based on my experience with other tech safety “improvements”, I don’t have any faith that a passive system is viable. Forget being stranded in a bad part of town, or being unable to get to the hospital in an emergency; I don’t want my icecream to melt because my car won’t start when I leave the grocery store.
Also, don’t accuse people with valid concerns of being drunk drivers. At best it devalues your argument. Some people care about their privacy more than you or I do.
This has to be accurate 100 percent of the time. That .03 percent that it could be wrong? Nope, that’s not gonna fly if it results in me being late.
Yeah, I get that. I chose 99.7 because I remember it being on an antibacterial soap commercial or something.
No one has mentioned the fact that you know this data will be collected and sold back to insurance companies along with damn near everything else in modern connected cars.
Imagine the fun of paying increased insurance rates because your car’s software is particularly buggy and frequently incorrectly flags you for attempting to drive impaired. Or even worse, and more likely, all new cars have buggy software and throws thousands of false-positives, skewing the possible DWI rates used to calculate market insurance rates and everyone gets screwed.
Curtailing DWI’s is an admirable goal, this is not an acceptable means to accomplish that goal…
99.7% accurate is going to result in thousands (probably tens of thousands) of people being locked out of their cars every day. There’s no way people are going to accept that as an error rate.
I work in the software industry. There is no way to make this 100 percent. No code is bug free. Look at how awful bugs are already in car infotainment. Like how can you look at that and say this is a good idea? People are idiots and unrealistic.
Agreed. In case I wasn’t clear, I don’t support this idea at all.
Stopping drunk driving is an admirable goal, but the ends don’t justify these means.
And you can keep accusing everyone who opposes this law of being a drunk driver if you’d like, but be aware you sound like a jerk.
Fuck all the way off. This is such a shit argument- “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide” is just a shortcut for “give us infinite power to determine who gets rights and who gets jailed.” There is a legal bar for invasive searches, it requires a judge signing a warrant, and ultimately is contestable in court.
We need less statist who care nothing for personal privacy and rights.
No way this turns out well. The coffee cup malfunctions enough. Some Chinese market cars have a similar system minus the alcohol sniffers. Lots of reports of it shutting down for people with smaller eyes. Because it couldn’t see their eyes. Coding these things out will be common place.
Or if you are hot boxing in the car and the camera cannot see you because of all the smoke?
But jokes aside I will get constant hands on the wheel alerts in my car when my hands are on the damn wheel especially in the cold or if I have gloves on.
I find cars that use steering wheel torque to sense hands on wheel absolutely infuriating. No doubt ones that use some kind of pressure or skin sensor are every bit as bad. I get CONSTANT alerts while having both hands on the wheel. Sorry that I actually know how to steer a car?
I get these a lot too for the exact same reason (no torque on the wheel but hand(s) are on the wheel). Sorry I’m actually able to steer and aren’t fighting the steering assist because we are in agreement…
I love the lane centering on my Volvo for long highway drives but the hands on the wheel alerts drive me crazy sometimes. I get it when I’m on a curvier stretch of highway but I shouldn’t need to be giving it really any steering input when I’m in Ohio and the highway is arrow straight for as far as I can see.
What about people who have a lazy eye? Or people who have eye damage. There are so many ways this can go wrong.
Yep, all sorts of conditions and syndromes along with anything different from lab conditions they are trained on will probably drive it haywire. People with tics or other motorlogic conditions are likey to set it off as well.
Sunglasses too, will drunks defeat this system that easily?
Check out this one neat trick the local drunk uses to defeat the nanny state. Congress hates him!
Congress feeling the need to “do something” is how we end up with useless things like the TSA.
It might be time to make my dream of daily driving an antique a reality. And by antique, I mean 50’s or earlier.
Sounds dangerous.
Don’t care. Worth it.
Hell yeah!
Well I hear you can build one using parts from eBay.
Now who would be crazy enough to do that??
Rust is a hell of a drug.
At this point 90s cars are antiques while still having reasonably modern performance, reliability, and safety, at least if you aren’t buying crapcans.
And the system faults out and kills the car because it does not know if the driver is drunk or not so better not let a person drive especially in an emergency. Hell since it says it is monitoring you and how the vehicle is behaving I am assuming it will think any sort of distracted driving is drunk driving and will shut down the car. Kids fighting in the back seat and you turn around for a split second to tell them to stop? Nah your drunk shut down the car. You look down at the giant tablet every vehicle has now just to turn on your wipers? Sorry drunk shut er down.
Honestly parents should be stopped and fined excessively for their driving, I see soooo many drivers tending to their kids while they need to be paying attention to the road. Get caught distracted with children in the car? Wreckless endangerment. Get child protection involved, make them take courses, make their kids go to so they know how crap their parent is. Make it a painful process Parents use the “parent” excuses too much.
Oh I agree some of the distracted stuff going on is ridiculous I see it no different then the idiots and ride with their dogs on their laps. My comment is just for the slight moment and I would say most of us as kids in years past especially those with siblings where we were being little crotch goblins in the back seats annoying the hell out of our parents who are trying to focus on the road and they just needed to take a split second to tell us to stop whatever the f we were doing hah
*reckless*
We can only hope they remain *wreck-less* while dealing with the backseat chaos.
Your idea while it might reduce some crashes will be a net negative for society. Statistically fewer crashes are caused by people in the “parents” age bracket (vs young and old’s). And who decides you are distracted? A cop? So if a cop doesn’t like you your next few months are going to be a living hell.
Meanwhile the emotional burden of ripping kids away from their parents for a few weeks can be massive. And can cost real money in lost wages and court costs.
All while an actual drunk driver gets a slap on the wrist for his 4th DUI and kills a family. Or the teen on their phone rear ends you.
Reckless endangerment. They are most likely wreckless too.
I doubt it would be that responsive. More likely it will shut down after multiple warnings and even more indications that person has no business driving.
Like the telemetry antennae, it will be ripped out day 2. And if any bedwetting Big Brother apologists want to come in with dumb assumptions, I don’t drink or do drugs. I’d rather they execute OUI drivers than force this crap on all of us. More infantilization and assumed guilt and there’s no way the incompetent morons who program everything nowadays would even be able to make this work correctly. Even worse than drunks, though, is the damn people on their phones and the degenerates high on weed. I actually miss when drunks were the big problem because they were largely predictable in their time and place, but weaving junkies thanks to legalization and phone addicts who desperately need to send that thumbs up emoji in some vapid text convo while they drive are far worse menaces, they’re everywhere at all times, and seem to face no consequences for driving impaired.
I also highly doubt the real reason for this. Populace control is often framed as safety or “for the good of…” because it puts anyone arguing against it on the back foot and more easily screamed at as paranoid or a baby-hater or whatever other garbage to dismiss critics and distract from their true purpose.
I don’t see an issue w/ cars which won’t operate when the driver is intoxicated.
Can we have cars which won’t operate when they’re texting, gabbing on the phone, eating a sandwich or doing their makeup too?
Thank goodness I can still post on Autopian while I drive!
(For the grumps out there, distracted and impaired drivers – which seems to be about 70% of drivers anymore – are the reason I sit a stop lights with one hand on the clutch, in gear, staring at the rearviews for the driver that finally just does not stop before turning me into manwich)
How do you manage to see the rearview mirror when you’re bent over enough to have your hand on the clutch?
I’m guessing motorcycle. I used to do the same.
When I rode, I always overlapped my front wheel with the car in front’s left rear corner. The idea being that if I missed a car behind not stopping that I’d be knocked foreward and to the left and not trapped between the cars (fortunately I never tested this theory).
The fact that it was something I had to actively think about and have a plan for is (along with the increase in sheer idocy I see on the roads every day) why I quit riding.
What exactly are these people on here so worried about? I think they must be the ones in violation most often!
The lady doth protest too much, methinks
That comment matches your fedora collection.
You should see my neckbeard.
I think they’ve seen the results of what constitutes ‘production-ready’ over the past 10 years, and recognize limitations of sensing and a system that will likely be vide-coded and only tested in ideal conditions.
I’m sure they will be coded in a (self-reinforcing, happy path only, we totally got this right on the first try you guys just trust us) vacuum.
In the abstract, it’s great as long as you ignore the invasiveness. In practice, it’s going to work less reliably than things like the existing driver alertness checks and the “hands on wheel” monitors for steering assist, but with way more severe consequences when it gets it wrong. People who consistently repeatedly drive drunk are going to just disable it, while everyone else gets caught by surprise and stuck somewhere or in danger when it screws up.
This has come up a few times recently, and the concensus has been that it’s unlikely to happen until closer to 2030. Lots can happen in 4 years, as we know.
Agreed. That’s how I understand it as well. If this was really supposed to be implemented for MY2027, there’s no way we’d still be asking questions about what meets the requirements like it’s still 2021 if MY2027 cars are supposed to be going into production in the next few months.
Congrats on being the only person in 119 comments to understand that this isn’t actually happening.
That said, The Autopian got the clicks they wanted from the clickbait headline – so job well done.
My car beeps at me when the guard rail is in the blind spot on an exit ramp and my turn signal is on. My car beeps at me when there’s a dark shadow and it thinks I’m going to have a forward collisions. A prior car would beep excitedly to tell you the traction control was kicking in on an icy patch, diverting your attention from the task at hand. Do I think they would design and implement this better than those functions? No. No, I don’t.
Better solution: Don’t drink and drive kids. Nothing good comes of it.
And that’s the thing – many of today’s systems are marginally better than a terrible, irresponsible driver, but not better than a good one. My Camry is really, really bad at driving, to the point where my wife knows exactly when I’ve turned on something like lane-keeping and immediately asks me to turn it off (most of the systems are choppy enough to make her carsick). I can’t imagine that this new nanny is going to be any better than the ones running already, and the worst part is that the real degenerates that should be off the road will almost immediately find a way to disable it.
Uh-uh, nope, no-way. Now excuse me while I head over to Craigslist to peruse vehicles with a three-on-the-tree.
It’d be nice if vehicles would automatically slow down and pull over whenever the driver pulled out their phone to look at the screen.
https://risk.lexisnexis.com/insights-resources/blog-post/is-distracted-driving-the-new-dui#
Fines are huge for DWI, yet fines for looking at your phone while driving can be as low as $25.
Can they do this, also, when emergency vehicles turn on lights & sirens too?
A few months ago, I was in bed recovering from a surgery and decided to watch some police chases on YouTube, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. There was one where after seven or eight minutes, I had to turn it off because the behavior of the traffic on the road when emergency vehicles was approaching was so infuriating. Instead of pulling over for lights and sirens, many drivers froze like deer, and the perp was able to get ahead of the cops for a good while. Having my blood pressure elevated like that from anger couldn’t be good for healing, so I turned it off.
I wonder how many of them had warrants themselves.
Cops have shown time and again you don’t need to be a criminal to fear for your safety when they’re around.
It’s amazing how many people who make that argument do stupid crap like they’re trying to get LEO attention.
Absolutely not. Never. If I owned a car with this kind of surveillance tech, my only goal in life would be permanently disabling the feature or disposing of the entire vehicle. No.
Glad you’ll be off the road soon!
Privacy is a fundamental human right.
But driving isn’t. (For argument sake…I don’t agree with this person orwellian bullshit either)
True! However, my problem isn’t the idea that people could lose the privilege to drive under certain conditions, it’s invasive, constant, warrantless surveillance of everyone who drives a (new, for now) car, especially since that’s most people in our society.
I currently own one car that is 52 years old. I would cheerfully buy more of them. I need a new car about as much as a need a couple of ex-wives, and at this point ex’s might actually be cheaper.
You make a lot of comments showing your love of a boot in your mouth. Maybe you’re just trolling. Maybe you actually believe this stupidity. Government overreach is a real concern and the use of technology that has been proven not to work or can be used for purposes other than it’s publicly stated intentions should not be tolerated. If you are not breaking the law then you have nothing to worry about, right? If we just put everyone in a cage and don’t let them make bad decisions we also wouldn’t have anything to worry about. That is where we are headed. Enjoy your cage.
You probably voted for Newsom.
Hard no. Like you I understand and agree with the motivation but not the implementation.
I’m just psyched that the new Renault 4 is coming to America.
Not interested, guess I’ll just keep my current cars. Sucks that I won’t have a choice with rentals.
Rentals at least are never my money.
Easily solved. Never buy a car that has this sort of technology. Car makers will complain to the recipients of their “donations”, and this law will go away.
I already do that — I don’t buy cars with unwanted tech. It hasn’t slowed them down even a smidgen.
So what? My cars have been doing that for years. Decades, even.
Fiat driver, eh?
The kill switch industry salivates at the the prospect of the upcoming proliferation of kill switches and countermeasures for same, starting with kill switches for the factory kill switchs, etc….