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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

Don’t know why you put safety in quotes. You’re implying that this won’t make streets safer, by reducing drunk driving. But reducing drunk driving would in fact make streets safer.

Our goal should be to have zero deaths related to common car usage and driving. For example, the backup camera is there to help reduce the number of people backing up over their own kids. This is a good thing.

You can argue that this system may not be the correct implementation to reduce drunk driving. You can argue other things might actually be better. But don’t claim that personal liberty is at stake for people when 43,000 people lost their personal liberty when their lives ended. Why don’t you care about their personal liberty?

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I'm not aware of any technology reliable, trustworthy, affordable, and quick enough to accomplish said goal without regularly inconveniencing a significantly larger portion of drivers who may need their vehicles in other emergencies. If you could provide a mechanism that didn't infringe non-drunk drivers rights I'd be more apt to accept this idea.

I'd also need to know an override mechanism exists because it seems like certain rare situations could arise where you need to operate a vehicle intoxicated, e.g. fleeing for your life in defense with a relatively low risk of injuring someone comparatively. I'm sitting at home sipping a scotch and hear an intruder come in who for some reason is an abusive person after me specifically in my life. I phone the police but also decide it's best if I can safely flee the area. Maybe the police could override it remotely, I don't know. Overall the edge cases seem difficult to deal with and infringe on others liberties. We start talking about the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few and trolly problems with different counts of people on different tracks.

I'm just throwing some hypothetical out, it may not be good, but my point is that rare situations can occur and because you were partaking in a legal activity like drinking, due to an emergency change in situation that wasn't predictable, you suddenly need to drive because the risk is now higher than drunk driving. Perhaps a tornado is approaching your house or abusive spouse is out to kill you...

An override mechanism seems reasonable to me.

How about: when you engage the override, a light on your car turns on, as a signal to everyone else on the road that you may be under the influence. Cops who see the light can consider it "reasonable suspicion" to pull you over.

That sounds awful.

Why? This fixes the problem of "what do I do if I can't start my car in an emergency?"

...until you get pulled over

> Cops who see the light can consider it "reasonable suspicion" to pull you over.

In what kind of emergency would this pose a problem?

If you're fleeing a natural disaster, the cops will be fleeing too, so they aren't going to pull you over.

If you're fleeing someone who wants to kill you, you want to be pulled over so you can receive police protection.

I don't think you gave this any serious thought. There are a lot of situations

https://www.nfl.com/news/officer-apologizes-after-delaying-t...

https://www.ems1.com/airway-management/articles/video-man-be...

I'm sure you could come up with many more possible scenarios

So I'm expected to waive my Fourth Amendment rights because it's an emergency? Maybe you trust cops to not be power-tripping assholes, but I sure as hell don't.

Many states have quite low legal limits and it's broadly acknowledged that being tired, distracted, angry, stressed, etc. is almost or as bad as driving over the legal limit. https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/best-cars-blog/20... In California it's .08. If for example I was at a party and a friend had some kind of medical emergency I feel it would be reasonable to take them to an ER despite being at .08 or .10 while being very cautious (assuming others were also not sober).

I know many people that live outside the US take a zero tolerance policy to drinking and driving in the sense that if you are going to drive you don't drink at all and I applaud that. I take the more practical approach of knowing how many drinks I can have at my body weight and can for example have a glass or 2 of wine during a 2 hour dinner but no more because my BAC with 2 drinks is under .08 and each hour 1 drink is metabolized.

I do fully acknowledge the more people drink the worse their judgement as to whether they are safe to drive so I expect many will get angry at me for the above. From what I recall most DUIs are for multiples of the legal limit but I can't find a source at the moment.

FYI, the way it works in most states is that 0.08 is the "per se" limit. this means that having a BAC >= 0.08 is enough for a conviction. it does not mean you're guaranteed to be fine if your BAC is below that. if you get pulled over for any reason with a BAC >= 0.04, there is a good chance that you get arrested and face charges anyway. it's just a bit more work for the prosecution.

During the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, tens of thousands of people escaped by driving through the fire. Statistically some of them were probably over the limit. And the police were most likely too busy at the time to override lots of alcohol detection systems.

And how reliable are the Alcohol Detection Systems in a smoky environment?

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