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Steering Wheel Checks Alcohol Consumption
karvind writes "According to washingtonpost, Inventor Dennis Bellehumeur has made a $600 sensor that can be installed in a steering wheel or in gloves and will test a driver's skin to determine alcohol consumption. Bellehumeur, a real estate agent and deli owner in Wilton Manors, spent 12 years developing his sensor after his then-teenage son crashed into a utility pole while driving drunk and suffered minor brain damage. He received a patent this month and the sensor should complete testing this year."
Drunken driving accidents increase in winter because every senselessly drunken teenager not properly educated by their parents will be wearing branded non-sensored gloves.
And will the car come to a stop if a person only starts drinking (and got drunk) after the car's moving?
And will those drunken teenagers just steal some non-sensored cars which they're not familar to drive with?
I think this "invention" is as good as the censorship card on cable TV, or that running shoes that power the TV. However the only "reactive invention" that I would like to see is a law punishing parents who cannot educate, manner, guide and monitor their children.
If I had to go to jail when my kid killed someone under the influence, I would have had one kid instead of five, and spent more time on that one kid. If I can't afford the time, maybe I am not qualified to have kids at all?
Actually while we are at it, maybe XBox 361 or PS4 can have a built-in features where parents create home work and children must complete them to get to the game?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Before anyone goes off about freedom being limited, rights, etc... come on. Nobody has the right to drive drunk.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
"I'm not sure the auto industry is prepared to accept that for cost reasons," he said. "Neither will the driving public because the majority of them don't drink and drive. We're not there yet."
This is -exactly- why we have government-mandated safety equipment. Think of it as a safety device mounted not just in your car, but outside it as well --- every one of these devices is another potential drunk driver kept off the road.
One more thing to break preventing my car from working and leaving me sober and stranded in the middle of nowhere, with a broken part that's only available from the dealer thereby leaving my car unrepairable by the local garage off the freeway in Idaho.
As the number of gadgets that have to function correctly for cars to run increases, the probability of getting from point A to B decreases to zero.
..but there's already something out for people that got a DUI, it basically forces you to take a breathalyzer test before your engine starts. Google won't spit out a proper link though, so if someone could give me the link...
It'd probably be much cheaper than $600 a car.
after his then-teenage son crashed into a utility pole while driving drunk and suffered minor brain damage
A technical solution to a behavioural problem... yeah, those always work.
Trolling is a art,
Now for my opinion, I am in high school, probably the age group this is intended to protect. First of all what is the point in installing a 600 dollar sensor in a 300 dollar car. Also there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions high schoolers who can drive. Most of them are safe drivers, who don't drink and driver but it is that small number who give the rest a bad name. I will admit there is drinking in high school, probably more than most studies suggest, but it is not necessarily the parents fault.
I have seen some of the smartest people, most atheletic, and having the greatest potential get messed up. Partially it is the culture but it also is the life, having a tough life never seeing the affects of alcohol, like some have.
I would hope that as a bartender you are aware of the concept of washing your hands :)
I can't be the only person who immediately contemplated swabbing their friends steering wheels with rubbing alcohol.
No driving for you. ONE YEAR!
Please, first of all... speak for the city you are in maybe, but around here we dont wear gloves int hwe winter.... 60 degrees just doesnt need it. And the occurences that you speak of.... the time its really cold and the drunk kid gets into his car (assuming its the glove setup and not the steering wheel one, which makes more sense) the car would probably just report back it cant get a reading.
And then the work around is that most kids will STEAL A CAR??? please, what part of town do you live in that this is your "obvious" alternative??
This may work, it may not, but those are just rediculous examples of what might go wrong.
It's much more likely that the tech gets circumvented, hacked, or whatever than it it becomes the reason kids steal cars.... lol.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Here's a rational thought:
One shot of hard alcohol = one wineglass of wine = one bottle of beer = one FULL hour not driving.
Or if math is too hard:
I've been drinking alcohol tonight. It does not matter how much, I will not be the driver.
Or if an obsessive-compulsive "drinking and gadgets" disorder is present in the person:
There's fifty thousand different types of alcohol analyzers out there that you can buy already. Buy one.
Think about it: how many adults are going to pay $600 for something that restricts the use of their car, good idea or not? But I'd personally pay that much for something that TELLS ME if I'm about to break the law.
Such a device would be a powerful educational tool for people--they'd actually learn what .08 means in terms of their subjective experience! A lot of people have several drinks and think "oh, I feel good to drive," but if they had an easy way to check this against "reality" (their BAC) they might develop a much healthier attitude about it.
Trying to restrict the use of somebody's car is kind of a silly idea for a lot of reasons (say they're waiting for their friend to pick them up and want to use the heater while they listen to music, for example) but I feel like increased awareness and some kind of concrete reality-check couldn't hurt and would probably save lives.
$600 per car is not a lot to spend to ensure road safety.
Depends: on a $300 Yugo, it might not be such a good idea...
Then again, with a Yugo, you're very safe in the first place, since the bus driver is never drunk.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
wow man, doomsayer extereme!
All that doom and gloom, OR they could be pretty standard, universal, very reliable, available in most places... do you feel that your air bags break down all the time and set off sensors, etc?
yes, i realize this is applicable to the ignition system, but so are alot of things that work jsut about every day just fine.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
It's a priveledge, fetterd by many rules and regulations, including an allowable limit of alcohol in your bloodstream.
The patent text shows that the inventor thought of gloves. One embodiement has the user wearing gloves with sensors, another the steering wheel needs periodic contact for the engine to keep running. US Patent Text from uspto.org
what happens when it's not alcohol?
- It is simple to make something complex, and complex to make it simple
I see this as maybe needed for the few repeat offenders, and not the general population. It is a little extreme, and might be best applicable for those extreme cases where the idiot just doesnt learn.
It could also be available, like the portable keychain analyzers, to people who would like to know themselves. I know I dont trust my judgement all the time when I'm drunk, but its too late when I wake up with her!!!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
one word... Gloves
You should have posted anonymously, now you are bound to be hunted down and jailed for 20+ years for violation of the DMCA and being un-american.
So, in order to circumvent:
Steering wheel version: Wear some gloves
Glove version: Don't wear gloves
TFA doesn't exactly say how it works, but would it be possible to fool the sensor by wearing gloves or using some hand lotion or something?
If the sensor works by checking the pH of the skin, a lot of things could throw it off (false positives/false negatives). If it works by checking the galvanic properties of the skin, would sweat or lack of sweat not throw it off? If it is looking for a specific molecular signature, wouldn't a good scrubbing of the hands with soap and water just before starting the car not get rid of it?
If all these issues are foolproof, there is still the factor of the alcohol permeating the skin. I'd assume it would take a little while for the alcohol (which has a fairly low boiling point btw, so how much of it would remain on the skin at any given time) to work its way through the dermis and then through the epidermis.
I'm not certain all legally intoxicated drivers would have enough alcohol on their skin to trip the sensor, but perhaps those who could barely stand could be better served with a simple reflex test (get the driver to push and hold one button, wait random amount of time, turn on a light, calculate how much time it takes the person to let go of that button and push a separate button, repeat 10 or 20 times, compute an average and compare it with that driver's norm).
The 'blow in the tube' type checks the alcohol being expelled from your lungs. Since it checks the blood/alcohol level, it's a direct path from the blood to your breath through the lungs and is hard to fool. I don't know how well this through the skin version could realistically work.
This wheel is in no way compareable to a seatbelt. It's more comparable to a catalytic converter or an O2 sensor.
The breathalyzer-style in car test is targeted at people convicted of a DUI. Thus, it has a very small target population. As soon as something similar occurs on all consumer vehicles, modifications to remove the wheel without consequence will pop up for those who want it. You can replace the emissions equippment on a car with commonly available kits. Your car PCU and the happy folks at the inspection station will be none the wiser. This wheel is no different.
All this works on the same flawed principles of DRM, though not in the same moral vein. An engine is a mechanical device, not a digital one. Slap a digital restriction on an inherently mechanical device, and it's a small step to remove it and make it run properly.
Folks (especially teenagers) who want to go fast have always removed emissions equippment for a few cheap extra horsepower. People who want to drive "after only a beer or two" will remove this wheel. Young adults are adept at changing and installing things on cars. Twenty-somethings, the group most likely to drink and drive (even above teenagers) also have the money to get the proper modifications done.
I don't disagree that it won't have some measureable effect. I do think the effects of mandating this particular bit of saftey equippment on every new car will go far into the effects of diminishing returns. I don't want to see the gap bridged from "specialized knowledge of engines required to circumvent" right into "commodity workarounds available" for the devices judges use to keep drunks off the roads.
The Model T sold for $825 in 1908 when it was first sold to the public.
The Model T sold for $575 in 1912. According to Forbes magazine: "When it sold for $575 in 1912, the Model T for the first time cost less than the prevailing average annual wage in the United States." (link)
Using the CPI:
$825 in 1908 would cost $16327.82 in 2005
$575 in 1912 would cost $11383.77 in 2005
(link)
The buying power of the average American family is much greater than it is today. There is no real good way to bring the price of the Model T into "2005 Dollars", but $32000 is probably really close.
studies have found that people who did a lot of binge drinking when they were kids develop a kind of resistance to alchohol whereby they are immune to its depressive effects (i.e. they retain their adolescent response). they are also at least an order of magnitude more likely to be chronic alcoholics as adults.
this change in brain chemistry explains why many severe alchoholics can drink all day and still function normally, it also validates the grandparents assertion to some degree--its quite possible that his brain chemistry has a greater resistence to alchohol (not that this excuses one from driving over the limit but who knows, it might be admissible evidence in a trial given an objective test).
I think there should be passenger-side gloves that the girl has to put on to make sure you aren't taking the wrong one home, and to not let you out of the parking lot until she leaves.
There are always perverse situations created by this sort of thing, even if they may be rare. It isn't hard to think of one here... me and my buddies have a few to many off hunting. Someone hurts themselves badly, and I can't drive them to the hospital, because my intent and responsibilitie for my own actions and to those around me have been thwarted by a machine. This sort of thing removes human agency from precisely the sort of hard to choose situations in which we should be encouraging it.
I forget what 8 was for.
...and groovy tunes.
Assume for the moment you could build a device that could accurately read the driver's impairment level from any source - alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, cell phone, nudie magazine, screaming kids in the back seat, whatever. Assume for the moment this device is failure proof, fool proof, and cannot be misled.
Now, there are two primary use cases for this device:
In this case, the person it will be checking has proven they are willing to accept responsibility for their actions, and so the need for the device is fairly minimal - such a person is likely already going to limit their driving if they have been chemically altered, and all this device is going to do is allow them to drive when the are a little altered, as they will not have to leave the "safety margin" they otherwise would have left.
In this case, you open up the whole barrel of worms of legal rights, but most importantly the person being checked will either be
www.eFax.com are spammers
His kid gets injured driving drunk and gets brain damage. He works on a device that will alert a driver that they are drunk, possibly preventing needless injuries and deaths like what happened to his son. Then he patents it, driving the cost up. Then he makes noises about wanting it standard on all cars, and they make noises about it being too expensive... Hey asshole, if you want to make an invention and make have it standard everywhere because you think it will benefit humanity, try NOT patenting it and driving the cost up so no one gets to use it, you piece of shit. If anyone should be in a position to rise above their greed and just share an idea with society, it OUGHT to be this guy. This just makes me fucking sick.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't want to pay for a $600 gadget that can be defeated by a $10 pair of gloves! Cars are expensive enough already without sticking worthless tech into them for the sake of putting on appearances.
Nothing to see here. Move along.