Congress mandates new car technology to stop drunken driving (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Congress mandates new car technology to stop drunken driving (2021)

apnews.com

18 pointshammock50 comments

I am really dreading the day my current car from 2015 that has no fancy tech features fails beyond repair and I have to get a new car. I will first attempt to get an older car with low mileage, but old cars won't last forever.

>old cars won't last forever.

The Cubans would like a word

The Cubans don't have to deal with snow and ice that requires a corrosive brine on the roads.

Their corrosive brine is natural and all year. Maritime environments are hell on cars.

> old cars won't last forever

Depends how old. Older cars have better survivability than newer ones, almost exclusively due to the simplicity[0] of the design and parts. If you want a car that can last forever (with maintenance and from an odysseus ship perspective) then an old car with a diesel engine and manual transmission is the way to go.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxSNT1bmEQY&t=75s

Technically old cars can last forever if you simply keep repairing and replacing parts.

Got an engine with 200k miles on it? Swap it with a new one!

Obviously it’s not easy and can be very expensive (and many mechanics will look at you weird if asking them to do $20k of maintenance on a 20 year old car, but they won’t say no!)

I'm not opposed to having a car of Theseus, but I'm not particularly wealthy so like most people I would have to replace it once the cost of maintenance exceeds the cost of monthly payments on something newer.

I've been dreading this about my 2007. You probably have some time ;)

This is going to be so awesome when I can't drive my car because I just used hand sanitizer. Or won't let me drive because i just cleaned the windows with window cleaner.

Solution is cars that drive themselves.

So people who live in Minnesota just don't get to use cars for 4 months of the year? Autonomous vehicles cannot handle snow covered roads with emergently defined flocking based lanes and road edges. There's a reason the vast majority of autonomous vehicle testing is done in the arid southwest of the USA.

If you read the article, it speculates that the most likely mechanism will be IR cameras that detect distracted driving/sleep. This technology is already widely used in commercial truck driving.

I knew there was telescreens in every workplace and home in 1984, but Cameras in every vehicle observing the drivers action perpetually is something even Orwell couldn't come up with

OP article is from 2021 and is news this week because the House recently voted(1) to reaffirm the mandate that automakers include equipment in all vehicles by 2026 to detect driver impairment and automatically disable vehicles when it is detected

(1)https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/08/house-republicans-help-...

If it's news, why isn't it in the news with a reasonable source? Most proposed regulation is OT-ish on HN and most proposed regulation takes a lot longer to turn into reality than originally scheduled.

One might leave the answer for why the only articles covering this regulation in mainstream sources are fact checking misinterpretations of the law (as opposed to a headline with what the law actually says) as a worthwhile exercise for the reader

Posting an old news article without year to slide in your unpostable URL is just lame, not any kind of exercise for the reader.

The laws are already in place to convince (most) people against impaired driving. The threat of losing your license and being fined is already there. Increase the punishment along with naming and shaming the criminals publicly. Imprison second time offenders as they clearly have a drinking or substance problem that needs treatment and they can't be trusted to operate motor vehicles.

This is just a slow creep towards total governmental and manufacturer control of vehicles under the guise of ~safety~. I hope I can still buy offline vehicles for a bargain well into my life but with society and the law pushing people towards electric vehicles, I feel like that window is slowly closing because electric vehicles are even more guilty of this.

I hope the government will force these companies to release the algorithms used to determine whether someone is driving impaired so the public and other auto companies can work together to improve reliability of systems and also help up-and-coming automakers to implement these systems without another expensive barrier to entry to get past.

But they won't - and we'll be stuck with sub-par programming that doesn't account for edge cases, dirty sensors, broken cameras, electrical problems, and requiring expensive first-party repairs at your "authorized (st)ealership" whenever a part of the system has a slight problem.

Owning things is getting more and more expensive - no need to tack on more governmentally forced features that would really only prevent the die-hard drinkers and drug users from driving when they should be locked up in the first place.

I think this is a horrible idea, and I really hope someone like EFF files a lawsuit against it. If the government can simply turn off your car whenever it feels like it, what else could they turn off that they don't want you to use? How about an off switch for your bank account for "unsafe" purchases? Turn off your internet for speech the government wishes to censor?

It is already illegal to drive on public roads or third party property while intoxicated. Drunk driving interlocks which you have to blow in are pretty much the only way this could possibly be implemented. But https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/business/drunk-driving-in... "The Unforeseen Dangers of a Device That Curbs Drunken Driving".

In some states merely sitting on driver's seat with no intention to drive while intoxicated can lead to DUI charges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgOekbY8Sqs

Sitting in a lawn chair next to the car with the keys in your pocket can count. You have "effective control" over the vehicle.

I am doubtful that unless a car is fully autonomous anyway having the car try to pull itself over against driver input will be that much safer. I can see many iterations causing accidents by suddenly slowing down or merging into another vehicle or parking on blind corners. Plus I imagine the 'drunk' driver would then leave the immobile vehicle, opening a host of pedestrian on road risks

I've already driven a rental car that warned me when my eyes were narrowing slightly? Is this just me? This was I think a few years ago now

Also, I picture a person fleeing an abusive partner having their car decide it's better to pull over and let them be killed.

Can't wait for the inevitable cases of people in extremis trying to drive themselves to a hospital from far out in the country dying on the roadside because their car decided that their driving was erratic or their behavior inside the car was unusual.

Could the system that disables a vehicle when impairment is detected also be triggered remotely in vehicles that are always "connected"? If so, under what circumstances could this take place?

This is terrible. All such systems will have false positives. It's wrong to treat everyone as a criminal instead of reserving such systems for people who actually have been convicted of it.

I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but then we have to be consistent with it.

No TSA. No license plate scanners. No fare gates for trains. No locks on doors. No anti-shoplifting tags.

EDIT: Is there some Emerson convention in town? You can look at my comments for some of his other quotes (It's actually not very surprising to me that an Anglo abolitionist who also believed that Anglos were the 'best' race wasn't a big fan of consistency!)

The difference is that you own your car, but not those other things. Things you own should always do what you want, not try to enforce laws against you.

I was under the impression that 99.9% of people take their cars out on publicly owned roads when they drive. Am I mistaken?

But this would go in the cars, not in the roads, so that's irrelevant.

Well it wouldn't preclude your use of the car (you can still enter it and turn it on), you just can't drive it on public roads (Essentially the entire use-case of moving a vehicle).

TSA is at the airport lobby and technically only precludes me from entering the airside of an airport, but its purpose is to prevent me from getting on a plane with a gun.

I don't think point of implementation is a strong argument here.

Wouldn’t an closer equivalent be DUI checkpoints staffed by government-accountable law enforcement officers at the entrance to the road? Not an automaker forced to privately police you in your own vehicle

And the TSA rules apply to my suitcase, not to the plane. What's the difference?

Your suitcase isn't required to have a built-in X-ray machine.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds - Emerson

Consistency is not a primary value. It's important, but it shouldn't be the only driver to do something.

Right! Right! Also, we can't require railings on stairs or prohibit electrical wiring from being attached to doorknobs as a trick, or stop people from driving on sidewalks.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and this commenter exhibits the smallest of them all.

We already have the third amendment.

> No TSA.

Yes.

> No license plate scanners.

Yes.

> No fare gates for trains.

Sure. A lot of places will do the fare check on the train.

> No locks on doors.

Well, no mandated locks. I hope I'm able to leave my front door unlocked if I choose. It's my door.

> No anti-shoplifting tags.

Ok. Again, I don't see why these should be required by law.

And mine:

> No compliance surveillance built into my possessions.

Yes.

It also increases the cost of every new car. People complain about housing, and goods like cars being expensive. But many fail to realize that every do-good law has a cost.

"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."

Cities hate cars, and cities dominate the legislative process at the state and federal regulatory levels. Cars are a constant problem for cities, it makes sense that they'd rather spend their time and money on things other than fixing congestion and maintaining existing roads.

They can't attack cars directly, it would be political suicide, but they can boil the frog by making them increasingly expensive. That's what they're doing.

I wonder if this is being downvoted because it's

a) off topic b) low quality c) true

> It also increases the cost of every new car.

It can probably be pretty cheap, since it looks like it does not have to detect actual drunkenness. It just has to detect impaired driving. That might be mostly doable with hardware already being built into new cars.

This website is unviewable on mobile, I don't know about desktop.

It would be much better, and more effective, to have police everywhere so you could ask their permission. Or, this would work, prohibit cars so nobody would ever die.

Stupidest law ever.

Is it a train?

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