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Comment by thedaly | Hacker News Reader

> The kill switch mandate forms a critical element of the 2021 infrastructure law. Car manufacturers are bound by the legislation to incorporate advanced driving technology designed to proactively assess a driver’s performance and, if deemed impaired, limit or completely prevent the vehicle from functioning.

I see no way that could go terribly wrong...

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Not only that, but it's another mandatory system in cars that are already bloated with systems and features. More curb weight, more cost - both to purchase and to repair.

Not necessarily. We won't really know exactly what these systems will need to look like until the NHTSA releases their standard, but its possible that the standard will be satisfy-able while piggybacking off of already very common (and soon to be mandated) ADAS functionality like lane monitoring and automated emergency braking.

IF the standard goes that direction then automakers would probably need a little more compute but that's about it. If it mandates eye-tracking, breath or touch analysis, or anything like that then that will be a totally different can of worms.

Indeed. Comma.ai [1] does this [2] in a very open way. Including eye-tracking (which doesn't work for everyone yet apparently [3]).

Unfortunately existing manufacturers are unlikely to implement this in a local-first way.

[1] https://comma.ai

[2] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/m...

[3] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/2436

Now it's time to play the fun game of "which politician has a spouse/sibling that owns a company that makes the stuff that is now illegal not to buy?"

More like, let's play a game which VIP person will get kidnapped for ransom thanks to this kill switch feature.

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