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Comment by chuckee | Hacker News Reader

Is this the first legally mandated user-hostile feature? Will it be the last?

No and no. The car industry has learned that they can increase profits by making legislators mandate things in the name of safety and security. See tire pressure monitoring for example.

> See tire pressure monitoring for example.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. I appreciate knowing when my tire pressure is low.

I don't appreciate being forced to pay for a feature I don't need. The modern car is FULL of such features, and it's caused the price to skyrocket. The median price for a new car in 1968, adjusted for inflation, was roughly $25,000. Pre-Covid, the median price was something like $36,000. All while wages stagnate or fall accounting for inflation. Stop driving up the price with all this stupid unnecessary crap!

This seems to be in the same category as seatbelts

Can a seatbelt strand you on the side of the road in the middle of the night? Can a seatbelt turn off your car in the winter? Can a seatbelt collect private data from you? Can a seatbelt record everything you do?

Can a seatbelt hug? Can a seatbelt love? Can a seatbelt … feel?

Carefull what you wish. A seatbelt maybe not yet but a seat for sure.

not to worry i will fart the free will out of that chair

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/automatic-seat-belt-terrible-id...

Automatic seatbelts we’re tried. Was a horrible idea. I still have bad memories of those things as a kid.

IIRC it was a cheaper option of supplemental restraint system that the driver didn't control as a phase in period before airbags became the only acceptable SRS.

Seatbelts don't make judgements about my cognitive ability or sample and record health data.

Seatbelts don't stop the car from working.

I suppose as long as the built in breathalyser merely makes a loud beeping noise the whole time you're driving if your over the limit, this would be fine.

What feature is that, exactly?

Is it user hostile to prevent the user from killing someone? I've seen a kid sentenced to jail for DUI driving and killing people. I doubt the car was acting in his best interest when it let him do that.

Is it user hostile to prevent the user from speeding? From parking in front of a fire hydrant? From driving to an illegal gathering? All of those can result in jail and death (including the last one, as those protest epidemic studies can attest to).

How about driving without a license, or past curfew?

Any action contrary to the user's wishes is user hostile. You are welcome to give inanimate objects (and those who control them) power over you, but don't drag the rest of us into your utopia of begging our cars and appliances for permission.

Ah but I'm committing the slippery slope fallacy. I'm sure that unlike all the other surveillance state creep, this particular genie, once out of the bottle, won't spread.

If you define anything against the user's wishes as user hostile I don't know why you are using that term. If you had said "I don't like this technology because it operates against the drunk driver's wishes and technology should not do that." then at least your position would be clear.

If you need a poorly defined buzzword like "user hostile" to make your objection sound more convincing, maybe it wasn't so great.

I just looked up the definition of user hostile and it doesn't seem to matcb your usage, either.

> Is it user hostile to prevent the user from killing someone?

yes

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