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Comment by sebazzz | Hacker News Reader

> If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work

Wait, wearing a seatbelt is not mandatory?

Legally it's required, but I think their point is it should be required by hardware. Right now most new cars just beep at you, but you can still operate them.

You can buy clips that prevent the beeping.

The top result is also a bottle opener... https://www.amazon.com/seat-belt-buckle-alarm-stopper/s?k=se...

Or people just buckle the belt and then sit on top of it. As insane as that is, I've seen plenty of grown ass adults do it. An older person I knew went so far as to find a seatbelt at a junkyard, cut the buckle off, and leave it in the holster permanently.

We never pushed for it politically because it wouldn't change anything but it would piss people off. You can simply buckle the seatbelt with nobody in the seat, then sit down, and the requirement is defeated.

On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from driving drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs, so we should make them mandatory for all cars.

>> We already have them for people with DUIs, so we should make them mandatory for all cars.

Yes, because the idea that every single person should now start doing what historically only a reprehensible convicted drunk driver was required to do will go over so well.

> On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from driving drunk. We already have them for people with DUIs, so we should make them mandatory for all cars.

I don't drink often, and I have never and would never drink and drive, but please no. Mandatory breathalyzers for everyone is an immense expense and a huge inconvenience and I suspect would be easily bypassed by those who choose to drink and drive. And I don't want to live with the consequences of making it hard to bypass such a device, because it likely makes working on a vehicle nearly impossible.

My understanding is that many people drive above the legal limit for DUIs and do not get caught. DUI prosecution is somewhat the story of selective enforcement.

What would piss people off is coming into contact with the fact that they're driving illegally. I think many drivers are unaware of being above legal limits and would probably be angry when confronted with it.

I guess playing devil's advocate... There's probably some odd scenario where driving above the limit for an emergency circumstance could be justifiable. So perhaps the car should not be disabled in this way.

Or you could simply make it so that the threat of driving drunk was so high that people actually thought twice.

Get caught in a DUI? You simply never. drive. again... Ever. No 2nd chance. Hurt or kill someone as a DUI? Mandatory minimum jail time.

The difference is that this encourages personal responsibility and has personal consequences, rather than attempting to police the entire population for the bad deeds of the few.

> Or you could simply make it so that the threat of driving drunk was so high that people actually thought twice.

Every jackboot says this but in reality it does nothing because everyone thinks they're good and won't get caught.

Well, then we just have to accept is as a cost of doing business and not try to stop it, because the same could be said about anything short of a full all-knowing surveillance state. People commit murder because they think they're good and won't get caught. Some don't. Better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent be convicted though. So we just have to decide how far down "convicted" really means, and if I need to ask the tech gods in the sky for permission to start my car every time I want to go somewhere I'm feeling rather convicted...

Personally I'd rather live in a world with consequences than live in the lowest-common-denominator big-brother world.

Why does the DUI body count need to be so low that the only options for getting there running out society like 1984 or running it like ISIS?

I don't think it does. So I think we actually honestly agree that the current situation is probably fine and that neither mandatory breathalyzers built into all cars nor mandatory loss of driving privileges are desirable outcomes. :-)

People who frequently drive under the influence tend to have a strong habit. Those would just keep driving an old car if such a device is introduced in new cars.

For most other people, such a device would be seen as a very annoying.

For it to have the desired impact,it needs to be fitted in all old cars, and then we're adding a significant expense on top of the annoyance.

Now, MAYBE if the device can be used to reduce insurance fees, it might be doable, but only in countries without public healthcare.

Had a friend dumb enough to drive drunk a few times and get multiple DUI's resulting in a breathalyzer in his hopped up WRX. I will never forget the pure frustration of him dealing with stalling out a manual car and having to grab the breathalyzer while also trying to get started again. I wish he would have had to deal with that for years instead of 6 months, but at least he cleaned up his act.

FYI, one of the recent giant bills that passed in the US requires automakers to implement passive systems which detect impaired drivers.

The breathalyser is a lovely idea but couldn't it be defeated with a pair of bellows?

> On the other hand, a mandatory breathalyzer for ignition would be useful to prevent a lone driver from driving drunk.

That would do nothing accept waste countless man hours of productivity, consume a great deal of money, and ensure that the next generation of politicians would be Libertarians.

> Wait, wearing a seatbelt is not mandatory?

Not in New Hampshire.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has published this document I have found with some statistics from 2018. I'm not sure if there's newer stuff published. It might be interesting to look at.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

They are, but cars will function without them being used.

At least in Europe, there is a very annoying beep if you don't wear the seatbelt. You can still drive, and there are ways to disable it, but most people just wear their seatbelt.

I don't think it is mandatory, but it counts in the EuroNCAP score, and since it is one of the easiest safety feature to implement, they all have it.

The beeps in the US are not that annoying. Ding ding ding ding ding for 30?seconds at start up, again when you put it into drive, and then again when you hit a certain speed (around 7-10 mph) and/or periodically. It's not pleasant, but it's tolerable when I'm moving cars around between my house and my barn. Yeah, I probably should still buckle up, but it's not critical for sub 15 mph, private road driving for a minute or two.

My first car didn't have a seatbelt reminder, and it needed a bit of time to warm up, so I got in the habit of starting it and then buckling, and 20 years of driving with seatbelt reminders hasn't trained me to switch the order.

You are right there are ways to disable it easiest being a seatbelt delete that clips into the buckle and disabled the annoying beep and you can clip into that should you choose. Who would choose to not wear a seatbelt is strange to me but I also rode a motorcycle so we are dead meat anyways if something goes wrong.

US cars are the same way. If you move faster than 5 mph (which is really slow) and aren't wearing the seat belt, the car will start with uncomfortable beeping. It eventually climaxes to a nigh unbearable screech.

My brother does this and it drives me crazy when I'm a passenger in his car, I can't fathom how he just deals with it.

It was fun when people were sitting on engaged seatbelts to prevent the beep :)

My brother in law still does exactly that.

It's mandatory but the car will still operate without it buckled. Many newer cars will beep at you if it isn't buckled, but older cars don't.

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