What if cars could stop you from driving drunk? | Hacker News Reader

What if cars could stop you from driving drunk?

npr.org

Cars should not be in the business of deciding who can or cannot drive them. Period. What if I've had a few drinks, and my companion all of a sudden has a serious accident or illness and needs to be driven to the hospital? How would you weigh my somewhat greater probability of having a driving mishap against my companion's serious and immediate need for treatment?

I'm sure other similar scenarios could be imagined. This is a wrong-headed application of nanny technology.

I agree, and my state's criminal code even specificies that "Necessity" is a legal defense.

> A defense that permits a person to act in a criminal manner when an emergency situation, not of the person's own creation compels the person to act in a criminal manner to avoid greater harm from occurring.

https://lawshelf.com/coursewarecontentview/necessity-and-dur...

Just like fair use, these kinds of rights will disappear once enforcement is automated.

All scenarios can be imagined. But you need to look at actual probability of these scenarios. For one person saved by driving drunk thousands must be killed by drunk driving.

The scenario that tends to be omitted from the deliberations is the scenario where 100 % of cars get an alco-lock, even though 95 % of the drivers have never driven drunk, but the manufacturer of the alco-lock has a nice racket producing them. Even more if some kind of certification is needed and only the Senator's cousin's firm was somehow able to be certificated in Sleepy Hollow state.

The quest for security is potentially endless and endlessly expensive.

Sure, same with seatbelts. Barely any people ever need them. Yet you have to manufacture and install them in all cars. What a racket.

If the problem is nepotism, fix nepotism.

I think your comparison is off. First, I believe seatbelts are relatively straightforward to manufacture, and so no one small company is likely to make a profit from their manufacturing in a monopolistic anti-competitive manner, hence no racket. Compare to breathalyzers, which are more complex and require complex certification which would likely be gamed by the senator and family member.

Nobody is complaining of nepotism around child safety seals on medication.

> Nobody is complaining of nepotism around child safety seals on medication.

If there's nepotism there then people should complain. Not about the seals. Just nepotism.

> Compare to breathalyzers, which are more complex and require complex certification ...

Sure. That's we don't have them yet. But if you could detect drunk driver with few dollars worth of camera and chip running some NN. Then ballance would change.

1. Not wearing seatbelts won't render your car inoperative. (At least in the older cars I know. Maybe it already will...)

2. You can become participant of an accident even if you are an attentive, careful driver, through no fault of your own. But you cannot accidentally drink and drive. People who do that act deliberately criminally. I admit that this is just my opinion, but we shouldn't treat everyone as a potential reckless criminal by law. This kind of insulting paranoia coupled with governmental power breeds nightmares in the long run.

Add an emergency button that self reports to the next PD. The hazard lights turn on. You can drive now, explain later. You'll be given the benefit of the doubt, though if it happens three Saturdays in a row, that's a bit odd.

This logic kind of reminds me one I heard where someone argumented why he needs a gun. It was because if his child is sick he thinks he should have his gun so he can hijack the plane to fly his kid to the place where he can be treated.

a lot of leaps and equivalencies being made there that weaken the comparison.

Training for driving a car is common place, use of force and threat of violence, aviation disasters are many times larger scale than automotive accidents, cars have a fairly limited passenger capacity compared to certain aviation options , list goes on.

I don't think that the message is "any and all means must be executed", but rather that gambles being made for the judged 'greater good' should be a human faculty rather than an automated decision making process that has taken the human factor out of the question completely.

I don't see any quivalence. It just reminded me of that argumentations. By being far fetched, emotionally appealing story (even to me), which is completely insane when you look at the problem and claims rationally.

> I don't think that the message is "any and all means must be executed", but rather that gambles being made for the judged 'greater good' should be a human faculty rather than an automated decision making process that has taken the human factor out of the question completely.

Preventing people wholesale from taking some gambles is a decission made by human faculty on the basis of statistics. Technology just enforces that decission.

I think those laws are designed for places with working emergency services. If there is an emergency, call an ambulance. Don't drive drunk.

Yes, sometimes ambulances are not very convenient - but if I had a choice of a person having to waste a few hours because ambulance took them to wrong hospital vs them driving quickly while drunk and nervous, I would choose former. I am sorry, your convinience is not worth the extra risks to bystanders.

Laws should always take into account a possibility of a non-standard situation. No one on Earth is exempt from hard to predict crises.

For example, even in places where emergency services are usually good, Covid peaks strained their capacities quite seriously.

The same can happen during a mass casualty event. If a plane crashes with a lot of survivors, there may not be an ambulance available for your spouse who just went down with a heart attack.

Which is just bad policy, not everywhere is urban. Even in an urban area with generally good emergency services that is not a guarantee 100% of the time. For instance some reason 911 could be down. Ambulances could be short if there is some other event is going on that is occupying them all or made them not operational. There are numerous examples of things happening like this in cities where normally they are operational.

A vehicle that has the potential to not operate either due to false positive or not handling a legal exception that a lot states have on their books. Is not a vehicle you want to rely on for emergencies. It even becomes more risky if one lives in area that does not have responsive emergencies services.

This is even before we consider possible privacy issues and concerns depending on how this is implemented. Let alone legal and moral considerations of essentially monitoring and scanning of people who have not committed a crime to try and prevent some people from breaking the law.

Drunk driving is not _that_ dangerous. Even at quite a high BAC level you end up around 10-100x more likely to have an accident. I believe that, at least in terms of personal risk, unless you're ten drinks in it's more dangerous to ride a motorcycle sober.

It's restricted because in aggregate or when done repeatedly it would be a disaster (particularly when drunk driver A interacts with drunk driver B), not because doing it once in an emergency would be problematic.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433627/

(at 0.08% BAC fatal accident risk is 13x - what's the risk of waiting ten minutes for an ambulance if your friend is dying?)

It's also not illegal to drive drunk in many jurisdictions. It's illegal to do so while on public roads (or roads accessible by the public).

Which means you'll need to add the lack of perfect geofencing to the list of potential failure modes.

What’s the mileage driven on private roads vs public roads?

Can they stop you from speeding? Breaking quarantine? Driving without a license? Violating parole? Driving onto a private road? Violating curfew?

Once you open the door to mandating that "our" possessions disobey us, there's really no bottom to this slippery slope. But that's a logical fallacy, and surely this time it'll stop at the first step.

Can they stop you from speeding?

They can and I wish they would.

There are valid safety reasons why you’d go faster than allowed in an area with a speed limit. They’re emergencies but those situations do exist. And let me be honest with you - I find the speed limiter the most useful button in my car.

Let’s not conflate speeding with reckless driving.

I am definitely against drunk driving but I am more against the introduction of such technologies, whether compelled by legislation as in this case, or voluntarily built by car manufacturers. People need to have a high degree of choice and agency over their lives, and they need to be able to make decisions for themselves. For example, lots of people drive their cars after having a beer or wine at a meal and are totally safe to do so. Will they be prevented by such technology? What about false positives? What about the additional cost to all car owners - why does a small number of deaths (10000 a year per this article) need to compel hundreds of millions of people into paying hundreds more for such technology?

The introduction of this technology is also going to normalize this type of intrusion into our lives and private spaces more broadly. Slippery slopes may be a logical fallacy in that one decision does not automatically compel another, but such changes sure do make it much more politically expedient to broaden this type of statist expansionism. Why can't the tools we own just be the things we own, instead of being hijacked to not perform the tasks we need them to? We see incremental legislative changes like this all the time - for example a new tax that might start at a low rate and is slowly increased. Why do we think this will be any different?

Because you aren't hiring people to sit on legislators 24/7 and drive agendas, and industry is. That's why. Is it any surprise the only ones who seem to lose out in this game is the consumer?

All mechanical (no computer) motorcycles and electric assist bikes are going to get really popular when people realize that self-driving and automation in vehicles was never about freeing them from the drudgery of traffic, but instead controlling and limiting their freedom to travel.

Before that “all mechanical” vehicles will be illegal on public road

I really wish this was a humorous spin, but I think this is exactly how things have been progressing. Look no further than the forthcoming ban on small ICE engines in California.

Why are we outsourcing drunk driving prevention to car manufacturers? We have the police and the courts, that's enough tools in the toolbag, they just need to be used!

(Yes, I know, the cops are corrupt and let their friends off, and if you kill someone while under the influence you'll get a slap on the wrist. Shouldn't that worry you?)

What if cars included a short range cell phone jamming system?

How about we just make it so phones won't light up or make noise if they're moving at say, more than 10mph... Distracted Driving is a scourge too, innit?

We could end car theft by having every vehicle require a DNA sample and a match to a central database before it would allow entry (or exit!). Think of all the wonderful social benefits we could harvest with that database in place.

I'm hoping you dropped this: /s

Yes. Except about the cell phone jamming.

Is restricting passengers worth it?

Absolutely. They should ride in attentive terror, not placid ignorance.

Its possible my views are a little extreme.

And what happens when the car thinks you're drunk but you're actually sober?

It will be fixed with the next OTA update. /s

Text version: https://text.npr.org/1065246981/

Once in Montreal I had parked my car behind a friend’s place for the night and we were all about 8 beer deep when… the landlord called us to move our car out of the parking lot so the plow could get in. I edged around the block (passed by a cop car!!!) at about 15km/h until the plow was out.

Not sure how that situation would have resolved itself with a drunk-proofed car.

I never EVER drive drunk otherwise; if I’ve had a drink I’m only travelling under my own power or getting a lift except in extreme circumstances like this.

What if we took the unused school buses sitting around at night and had a school bus at every bar to take everyone home?

This solution doesn't reward enough money to service providers, it doesn't put enough personal responsibility on individuals, and it doesn't involve enough punishment for people to take it seriously. It would also be too much fun riding the booze bus home and we can't have that.

Cameras/behavior monitoring which will produce interesting results. The system will either have to be sensitive enough to produce 'false' alerts due to tired & distracted drivers while it will certainly allow a chronic drinker and alcoholics drive well above the legal BAC.

Measuring passive cabin air seems nearly impossible. A highly intoxicated passenger would easily produce false positives. One option I guess is to measure the BAC at every single seat to establish a baseline. I still don't see how this could work if the windows are down.

There are a few other options such as measuring sweat (doesn't work if you wear gloves or some skin conditions), thermal/blood flow imaging (inconsistent between individuals and would have race/genetic biases), etc.

IMO anything beyond detecting erratic movements of the steering wheel and accelerator is going to have a lot of problems.

Instead of regressing, “What if cars could drive you when you’re drunk?”

   Sh*t Tier: Driving drunk
   Bad Tier: Car that stops you from driving drunk
   Good Tier: Car that drives you around drunk
   God Tier: Bar you can stagger home from.

Dystopian. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I will not purchase a vehicle with big-brother spyware like this installed.

Don't mean to detract or go off topic, but the first thing that popped into my mind reading the title: "What if cars could stop you from driving as C19 positive?"

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