Sensor Measures In Fingertips If Driver Is Drunk

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Economic Times reports on the first working prototypes of a new technology that would measure blood alcohol content in a driver's fingertips, using sophisticated touch-based sensors situated in steering wheels and door locks and engineers say that unlike court-ordered breath-analyzer ignition locks, which require a driver to blow into a tube and wait a few seconds for the result, their systems will analyze a driver's blood-alcohol content in less than one second. Anti-drunken driving crusaders believe that almost 9,000 road traffic deaths could be prevented every year if alcohol detection devices were used in all vehicles to prevent alcohol-impaired drivers from driving their vehicles. 'We believe this might turn the car into the cure for the elimination of drunk driving,' says Laura Dean-Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But not everyone is enamored of the device which could be available to automakers in eight to 10 years. 'For ordinary, law-abiding citizens, it's an invasion of their privacy,' says Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea Party."

Comments

Its Winter.

[icebike]

My fingers get cold. I drive with gloves, at least till the car warms up.
I imagine drunk drivers would do the same.

Re:Its Winter.

[drtsystems]

I think the goal with this is to stop responsible drivers who had more to drink than they should have but don't really realize it. Most people who are thinking to themselves yea I'm OK to drive really think that. If the car says YOU ARE LEGALLY DRUNK then a huge segment of those people would 1) be embarrassed in front of anyone else in the car and 2) not drive.

Similar to the systems that detect when you are falling asleep. Responsible drivers don't drive when they are tired and it is not hard to tell when you are getting tired. But again its one of those things where even responsible drivers can have tiredness sneak up on them and be thinking "yea I'm OK to drive" when they really aren't

Re:Its Winter.

[nurb432]

Wear glove, then you don't get to drive your car. Its not like they really give a damn if you are cold or not. They want to invade your privacy and control your daily life, at all costs.

Re:Its Winter.

[jdpars]

Give up the privacy invasion argument. If you can't turn a key because of your physical state, then the issue is with you and the lock, not Big Brother or anyone else. Now, if the car were connected to the internet and submitting its readings to a database, you might have an argument. But if it's just to stop you from driving, hell, I'd put one in voluntarily. Sober you can't directly control drunk you, but you can put in good preventative measures.

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fill windscreen washer fluid - and you are stuck.

May even be enough to just spray the windscreen.

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to end drunk driving, then it'd help to have actual public transportation that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and is readily available in most areas. Cabs are ridiculously expensive, buses and light rails are only in metro areas.

Re:Its Winter.

[icebike]

A Findlaw article suggests that Falling Asleep, is much more prevalent than most people know. NHTSA estimates that as many as 100,000 accidents each year are caused by fatigued drivers, resulting in 1550 deaths, more than 40,000 injuries.

Yet this pales in comparison to distracted driving. In 2008, distracted driving accidents resulted in 6000 deaths and more than 500,000 injuries. (Not all distractions are cell phone related, but you would never learn that from the press).

That, in turn, is nothing compared to an estimated 10,839 people who died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2009. (32% of all traffic deaths).

So I hate to see solutions like skin alcohol sensors proposed when they are so easily defeated by gloves or simply wiping ones hands. Especially when it won't detect the "one for the road" drivers, where alcohol has not yet even reached their fingertips. It trivializes the problem. I firmly believe that People who are not "OK to drive" always know it, or always suspect it. A device that guesses alcohol content simply provides an excuse for people who marginally should not drive, and provides no deterrent to those who intend to drive anyway.

Re:Its Winter.

[icebike]

Providing public transportation "readily available in most areas" is the perfect definition of "costing an arm and a leg".
This only works in dense urban areas.

Re:Its Winter.

[Eightbitgnosis]

This gives new meaning to the phrase "driving gloves"

Re:Its Winter.

[mysidia]

They can develop a version of the biometric and alcohol sensors that can be embedded into a glove and be powered by inductance from an antenna on the 'hand scanner' plate used to authorize startup of the engine.

Then it's no problem, you just have to be wearing an approved set of gloves

Re:Its Winter.

[Genda]

Such safe and free transportation is made easily available in many places during the holidays, proms, graduations, and there are still countless people who are arrested for DUI under these circumstances. The availability of even free rides, a simple call away, doesn't stem the tide of drunk driving and the endless tragedies associated with the behavior (or the significant legal and financial personal consequences for infraction.) The problem is that once you're "Under the Influence" your ability to make rational, logical choices, weighing consequences and being able to effectively judge outcomes is diminished to the point of virtual nonexistence.

Putting safe guards into the vehicle to prevent operating a vehicle unsafely makes perfect sense. People complain about the "Nanny State" and my only response is, when people stop behaving like infants, we can dispense with the Nanny. Until society is willing to elevate the bar on personal integrity and responsibility (including such training being a mandatory part of public education and let's toss ethics in for good measure), we will continue to see a society of people who are more interested in instant gratification than long term social satisfaction. So you can either address the problems, or you can address their cause, but you'd best address something because things won't be getting better by themselves.

Oh, and as for gloves, that's just silly, add a galvanic sensor, so the thing knows it you're touching the car with bare skin, or trying to circumvent with some kind of cover. You wouldn't have a problem with pulling keys out of your pocket? Taking your gloves off to open or start the car would be no more inconvenient. It would however chafe your sense of self governance.

Perhaps self governance should be a privilege that is earned. As a person demonstrates the ability to govern themselves, they get fewer and fewer devices limiting their freedom. As others demonstrate the lack of self governance, they get more. For the benefit of society, and the dignity of the individual, freedom should be earned. There are simply too many people walking the planet today to let folks run around raising hell without some way to limit the damage they can and do cause.

Re:Its Winter.

[PalmerEldritch42]

How many of these people fell asleep because they were drunk?

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just:
1) Station plain clothed police officers inside pubs and pub carparks, to watch who DRIVES to the pub, and then drinks, then when they leave, arrest them if they drive.
2) Incarcerate the aforementioned scumbags for decades, so that they can't kill anybody.

Problem solved.

Oh, and I forgot: deport ALL Mexicans.

Re:Its Winter.

[Shihar]

The vast majority of people don't drive drunk. You don't punish the entire population for the action of a few. I live in the Northeast. It was -5F (-15 C) the other day. I wore my fucking gloves at all times. I never drive with any alcohol in my system, period. I picked where I live for the fact that I can walk wherever I need to go, except for work. If I want to go drink myself into oblivion, it is a short walk away to get the job done. No car is needed. It is stupid, wasteful, annoying, and flatly unfair that I have to shoulder the cost of this stupid system, suffer my car being incapacitated if it fails, and have to take my damned gloves off every fucking morning in the sub-zero cold to prove to my car that no, I didn't wake up and do a few shots before work.

If you want to install these things on first time drunk driver offenders, I am all for it. Installing these stupid things on the car of every single citizen on the other hand is wasteful, insulting, and frankly, fucking stupid. Save the money you were going to waste on this asinine system on something that might actually be helpful. A sleep detection system that you can fucking turn off if it is malfunctioning or not working for you would be wonderful. Better yet, just take all of the money you were about to piss away and use it to improve health care, or make better roads, give the damned money back, or do something that benefits all citizens, not punishes the vast majority because of the actions of a few.

Re:Its Winter.

[darkpixel2k]

How many of these people fell asleep because they were drunk?

How many of these people drank because they were distracted?!? OMG!

Re:Its Winter.

[nurb432]

Give it up hell. If I'm not a convicted drunk driver they have ZERO business testing me every time i get in my car. It IS an invasion of my rights, regardless of any 'tracking' that may or may not occur.

As a private citizen that has not been convicted nor under court ordered investigation, i refuse to have my rights invaded.

Re:Its Winter.

[cvtan]

Obligatory: Think of the children!

Re:Its Winter.

[cayenne8]

I'm just wondering how the hell I"m supposed to get my car home after we've been to the bar? I mean, you pick up a chick....how are you supposed to get her home...walk to find a bus stop?? Talk about a mood killer.

:)

Wow..if this goes through...I guess you can pretty much kiss the bar business goodbye....I mean, the number of people that leave all those bars you see while driving by full of cars have VERY few of those patrons that leave legally sober, especially in light of the ridiculously low BAC they have now....0.08?!?! One grown man haveing only 3x glasses of wine with a meal can be dangerously close to the legal limit, without being any type problem on the road.

Re:Its Winter.

[Genda]

You're right, its not fair, but you don't live in a cave. You live in a society chock full of people, and a whole bunch of those people neither care nor appreciate the fact that their drinking and driving will impinge either directly or indirectly on your life. You're responsible, and thank you for that. We don't regulate or manage safety based on the responsible. We establish what we decide is the minimum acceptable standard of operation and we key that against those who are irresponsible and negligent.

Right now you say taking off gloves on a cold morning is too much to ask for preventing drunk driving. What will you say if a drunk driver plows into your car, leaving you for the rest of your life a quadriplegic on ventilation and having killed your spouse or child in the passenger seat. Would it surprise anyone to think your tune might change dramatically. Its all a matter of personal experience and what you're willing to pay for yourself and others.

One study suggested that before a person get's caught for a DUI they may have driven impaired hundreds in some cases thousands of times. A significant number of first DUIs are at the scenes of devastating accidents. It seems to me, awfully self involved and cavalier to say to society at large, I'm not taking my gloves off, to hell with all y'all. It seems to me the cost of a sensor interlock would be small compared the lives it would save, and the damage to society it would prevent. There needs to be a sane balance between what serves the desires of the individual and needs of society.

Re:Its Winter.

[s73v3r]

Is it really an invasion of privacy if no one else is notified of it? It doesn't report you to the authorities, it just stops the engine from starting. I agree there are other problems with the system, but privacy is not one of them.

Re:Its Winter.

[s73v3r]

I like how your post was full of "Me, me, me." "I did this" and "I did that". Completely ignoring that there are other people in the world.

Re:Its Winter.

[Grishnakh]

Impossible. There's no way that buses or other mass people-movers will be economically feasible in non-urban areas.

Even in urban areas, they aren't very practical, except in very high-density places where the buses come along every 5 minutes.

Here in suburbia where I live, there's buses, but they only come every 15 minutes (if they're not running late). Then of course, since this area (Tempe AZ) is built in a big grid, you have to get off and switch to other buses to actually get where you're going, and there's a delay each time you do that. So a simple trip to a store 2 miles away could take you a hour round-trip easily, whereas getting in your car, you can go there and back in 10 minutes.

Cabs aren't ridiculously expensive; they're fairly priced for the luxury of having a personal driver., and a car you don't have to share Eliminate the driver, and it's much cheaper, even though you have to buy the car yourself. Labor is extremely expensive in this country.

The best answer is SkyTran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran): there, you get a personal car you don't have to share, it's automated so you don't have to pay a driver, and it's on-demand and goes anywhere so you don't have all the delays of other modes of public transit. It's also fast, since it doesn't have to stop for traffic lights, and is safer since it's elevated off normal roads and eliminates human error. The only problem is initial installation costs, but even there it's a lot cheaper than things like light rails and monorails and subways. But even this isn't likely to be viable for rural areas for a long time; you'll always need a car if you live too far from other people. (Of course, the biggest problem is it requires some capital for the entire system to be engineered, but once that's done, building it won't be that expensive.)

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

.... i refuse to have my rights invaded.

Good luck with that....

Re:Its Winter.

[DudeTheMath]

OTOH: After one Christmas party, I knew I wasn't in shape to share the road with other drivers. But that's a reaction time problem (the problem with alcohol impairment); our car had been nearly parked in by other party-goers. With no other moving vehicles, I was far more capable of extracting our car from the surrounding vehicles than my (entirely sober) wife. I did so, then turned the driver's seat over to her.

With this system in place, I would not have been able to do so, and we'd have had to find the owner of one of the surrounding vehicles (and hope they weren't impaired).

Re:Its Winter.

[mug funky]

.08 is pretty generous.

the legal limit here is .05, and i can tell when i'm approaching it. generally i'll consider myself not OK to drive before i'm even at that limit.

if you feel like chugging 3 glasses in quick succession, good luck to you. if you feel like staying out a bit longer you'll find you can put a LOT away before you hit the limit.

try alternating glasses of water/coke/whatever with beer. helps avoid hangovers, too.

years ago i very stupidly drank 11 beers in a night and drove. i can tell you my judgment was impaired - i ended up going home with a Socialist Alternative girl. the last thing you want to wake up (late for work) to is a hangover and a lecture about Trotsky.

Re:Its Winter.

[Lusa]

I'm not trying to be funny but I am curious, what rights are you referring to that would be violated by having a test to determine if you are fit to drive a vehicle. Most places consider driving a privilege, not a right. If you abuse that privilege, by drinking, doing drugs, driving stupidly, causing death etc then you lose it. At that point what right do you have to allow you to drive?

Re:Its Winter.

[DudeTheMath]

An hour round trip, ach, you're lucky. I live in the minimal pair of Tempe (Tampa, that is), and we're lucky if buses come by every half hour (I've vacationed in Scottsdale, in the summer!, and had no problem with the bus system in > Phoenix). Bus trips can take three to four times the duration of the same trip by car (due to transfers, mostly, and we don't get free transfers!). We're dying for a light rail system that goes from the airport through downtown to the area's largest employer (Univ. of S. FL and its medical center).

Re:Its Winter.

[Grishnakh]

Light rails suck. We have one in PHX and it's pretty lame. There's several problems with it: 1) ours doesn't go to the airport. You have to get off at a stop a good distance from the airport, and then take a shuttle. 2) it's slow, because it stops at lots of stop lights. 3) there's lots of accidents, again because it shares the street with cars, and in a way that car's aren't used to (it's between the directions of travel, and people frequently turn left into it). And 4) it's expensive as hell. Day passes are > $5 (one-trip passes are much lower). Worse, however, is it's subsidized heavily. According to one study I saw, light rail costs about $5 per passenger-mile, because of the enormous capital costs of construction, and also the high operating costs. Ticket fares don't begin to cover all that cost, so the rest comes from the government.

Raised monorails would be a big improvement. They have something like that in Vancouver, called the SkyTrain. But these still have high operating costs, but at least they eliminate the problems of stopping at traffic lights and hitting cars.

The answer is simple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran personal rapid transit. Why bring a giant train, weighting tens or hundreds of tons, to transport you, when you can do it with a small car weighting a few hundred pounds? Trains weigh too much and require too much energy to move, so they're only efficient if they're fully loaded with cargo. Passenger trains 1) are rarely fully loaded, and 2) even during rush-hour, people still don't pack in as tight as cargo does, and require too much room between them.

Re:Its Winter.

[manofherb]

screw worrying about wearing gloves or putting a cover on your wheel, blah, blah, blah, just disable the thing, you're DRUNK remember I once took a breathylzer device off a vehicle in ONE minute without studying it before hand it's no different than car audio

Re:Its Winter.

[drtsystems]

The way I see this system functioning is that it doesn't actually stop you from driving but just alerts you to your drunkenness. The same way the seatbelt alarms don't stop you from driving without a seatbelt but constantly beep at you if you are not wearing it.

Now I'm sure MADD would want it implemented as an interlock device.

Now what I would 100% be against is this feature being illegal to tamper with (like emissions control devices are today in many states). If I buy a car I damn well want to be able to swap steering wheels if I want to, regardless of whether this disables the system.

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

> It IS an invasion of my rights...

PLEASE explain this right to drive without being tested for impairment. I have never heard of it.

What exactly are you objecting too?

That you may not be able to drive after drinking?

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really can't tell if you are joking in this post or not.

Invade your life? How? Nobody gets sent any results of the test so where is the privacy invasion? If you are above the limit, according to your fingertip, your car just refuses to start.

Control your life? "They" are not coming into your house telling you what you can and can not do in private. "They" are simply saying you can't do it and then drive.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. The law says if you want to drive, you can't drink. If you disagree with that, you are an idiot and should not be allowed to drive. If you do agree with it, this idea should be a no brainer.

Re:Its Winter.

[adolf]

...and on August 29, Skynet gained self-awareness...

(Is it too early in this discussion to start a slippery-slope argument?)

Re:Its Winter.

[Shihar]

There are countless stupid things you could do to try and minimize the risk of harm. You could mandate that speed limits can not be higher than 30 and that anyone caught breaking the speed limit gets a 10 year jail sentence. That would pretty much end car based fatalities. If you really want to save lives, you could make food that is bad for you illegal. You could bring back alcohol prohibition. You could do all of these things and save lives. Of course, you would be pissed when it takes thee hours to get to work, you can't enjoy a chocolate chip cookie, and having a pint gets you tossed in jail.

There are trade offs. The best way to deal with any such social ill is to start by targeting people that do harm. Perhaps after you have ruthlessly gone after people who do harm, then you start to think about collectively punishing the rest of society. We have hardly been 'ruthless' in how we go after drunk drivers. American laws are extremely weak. How about we target criminals first, then go and brutalize the rest of the citizenry?

The tubes say that each year roughly 20,000 people die in alcohol related car accidents. That is tragic for sure, but it is also only 0.006% of the US population. Now, if you are willing to force every single person who owns a car, regardless of their record of responsibility, to install a device that, besides being a pain in the ass, probably costs a couple of hundred dollars, and consider that a reasonable way to reduce the risk of death, you have just set a very fucking low threshold to doing stupid and asinine things.

As an American, you are almost certainly going to die of heart disease or cancer. Those two alone claim over a million lives each year. Drunk driving sucks for sure, but it is small change in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't even make the top 10 list of ways to die America. It well below blowing your own brains out intentionally. As Americans, we need to get a fucking grip on reality and realize what are the real dangers in this world. The terrorist are not going to kill you. Drunk drivers are very unlikely to kill you. All of the stupid shit that you fear and mew to the government to save you from WILL NOT FUCKING KILL YOU*. You are going to die when your own body turns cancerous or when your heart clots up. Further, these two things are probably going to happen to you because you ate too much fucking food and didn't exerciser enough. If you want to fear something, fear that. Beg the government to throw money at those things save you from those REAL killers. Instead of pissing away a few hundred dollars annoying everyone who gets up to go work in the morning without downing a few shots of vodka, save the money, and spend it on safer cars or research into real killers like heart disease and cancer.

*...probably. Hey, shit happens.

Re:Its Winter.

[TheRealGrogan]

You know, a lot of these fucksticks who get laws passed, and those that empower them (like the M.A.D.D. shills) are rather vain to think that citizens have to submit to their whims.I would never submit to nanny state sensors on my vehicles. I'd get that circumvented right quick.

Biometric IDs for authorized drivers mandated on all vehicles? I don't think so. That will never work, for it will render vehicles inoperable in emergency situations.

Laws are for people who can't think for themselves. The rest of us go about our lives deciding on our own what is acceptable and what is not. The police are little better than adversaries that we have to watch out for, just like street thugs.

I'll be the one who decides whether or not I'm driving. Not M.A.D.D., not the police, not The Law, and not some machine.

Re:Its Winter.

[noidentity]

Or, it's an emergency and I need to get someone to a hospital, but the damn mechanism is refusing to allow me to start the vehicle. Or I'm driving on the freeway and it's malfunctioning and shutting the engine down. Or I never drink alcohol and do not want to pay extra for this bullshit.

Re:Its Winter.

[imthesponge]

You know cars have heat nowadays right?

Re:Its Winter.

[Hangin10]

I'll have to hit the "agree" button on that. OMG, the gov'ment knows I'm sober. I think I'm ok with that. They can know whatever they want as long as I get to plead the third (I hate having sleepovers with soldiers against my will in peacetime).

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear with me, as I am too lazy too dig more than 2 Google searches, so I don't have the link to support this...

I recall reading somewhere that one proposal for systems like this is to not allow the user to drive at a blood alcohol content of something relatively low like 0.02, specifically because of those "one for the road" drivers. The thing is, that sucks for people who have been waiting, never reached an illegal limit anyway, and are just at or barely above 0.02. Some people would love it if it was illegal to drive after one drink, I'm sure, but not being able to drive just because I had a glass of wine or two with a nice, fine dinner would piss me the hell off, and I'm one that generally won't get in the car after my first drink of the night.

I'll take my freedom with a little danger over protection and unable to do a damn thing any day...

Re:Its Winter.

[Dr Max]

Hell yeah lets give all the fat people fines or make them where a computer controlled trapdoor over their mouth (they aren’t only hurting them selves the kids learn the habits as well so you could put them in jail for child abuse). We are almost at the point where you don't have to think for your self anymore (which is great for people that can't think), the only thing you need to keep on top of is what laws are changing this week.

Re:Its Winter.

[bemymonkey]

Heated steering wheel. Only a $1000 extra, but comes with the (mandatory) fingertip drunk-sensor...

Re:Its Winter.

[bemymonkey]

Not to mention buses and rails don't run very far past midnight unless you're in a very big city. Even here in Germany, in a city with 300k inhabitants (I know, tiny compared to an actual city in any other country [I say this having spent the majority of my life in Houston TX, Bangkok and Jakarta], but pretty much medium-large here), buses don't run past midnight. Yeah, there are night buses, but they only come like once every two hours... and as soon as you're out of the city limits, you're pretty much SOL without a car. No buses at all past 11PM (8 or 9PM Sundays!) or so...

Trains usually run regularly til about 3 AM around here, but that often means a 30-60 minute walk to the train station, and, depending on where you live, another 30-60 minute walk home.

Hell, even getting a taxi on Friday or Saturday night is absolutely horrid... it's not like in a real city (Oh how I miss Bangkok in this regard), where you can just step off the curb and flag down one of the 20 taxis that drive by every ten seconds. You actually have to call the dispatch and ask them to send a taxi to your address... and on Friday and Saturday night, they're usually all busy, meaning they take ages to arrive or don't arive at all.

Re:Its Winter.

[julesh]

You know cars have heat nowadays right?

Don't know about your car, but mine tends to take at least 5 minutes before it starts to get warm, at least if I don't get in and drive it. Also, the heater won't work until the engine is started, so if this device won't let you start it without running a test, you're clearly going to have to take your gloves off in the cold in order to make it work.

Re:Its Winter.

[julesh]

Or, it's an emergency and I need to get someone to a hospital, but the damn mechanism is refusing to allow me to start the vehicle. Or I'm driving on the freeway and it's malfunctioning and shutting the engine down. Or I never drink alcohol and do not want to pay extra for this bullshit.

Or it reacts with a false positive because of the alcohol-based hand cleaner I use.

But, from TFA:

The systems would not be employed unless they are "seamless, unobtrusive and unfailingly accurate," [head of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] Strickland said.

Which is as close as a bureaucrat ever gets to saying "this isn't going to happen".

Re:Its Winter.

[ZDRuX]

I'm sorry.. are you saying the cops can pull anyone over at anytime, just so the driver can prove he is sober? Because this is essentially what you're saying, because it's a privilege to drive, the cops can ask me to verify that I still qualify for that privilege.

Doing this is illegal right now, I don't see why it would be any different when these "sensors" are put inside your car.

I can have a suspended license, could have just murdered someone an hour ago, have had 30 beers, and the cops STILL can't pull me over unless there is a good reason to believe I have done any of these things. So unless I'm swirving all over the road, I can continue to drive.. THOSE are the right he's alluding to - have you so quickly forgotten you have them too?

Re:Its Winter.

[Chrisq]

...and on August 29, Skynet gained self-awareness...

(Is it too early in this discussion to start a slippery-slope argument?)

No. If this catches on the next thing will be detecting if you have taken heroin or cocaine. This will naturally lead to the imposition of a police state. Its obvious isn't it.

Re:Its Winter.

[Ginger Unicorn]

driving drunk on your own land is a right.

Re:Its Winter.

[drinkypoo]

The device might actually work better at a fixed temperature, if it does, one solution is to just heat the @#$@#% wheel.

Or, you know, not get a DUI.

Re:Its Winter.

[pitkataistelu]

Nope, privacy doesn't enter into it. I access my Thinkpad using the fingerprint reader. It's not the authorities registering the fingerprints, it's me, so the machine won't let me log in if I'm not me. No third party involved. You'll just need to take off your gloves for login/ignition, then you can put them on again. Good idea, I say, let's make it mandatory.

Re:Its Winter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wear glove, then you don't get to drive your car. Its not like they really give a damn if you are cold or not. They want to invade your privacy and control your daily life, at all costs.

who are "they," exactly? did it ever occur to you that maybe "they" really don't give a shit about controlling your life, and just want to make a buck off an idea that hasn't been capitalized yet?

i know this is slashdot, but this rampant paranoia bullshit really grates my nerves sometimes.

Re:Its Winter.

[Tom_Yardley]

This is an engineering problem. Drivers like to drink. A ton of steel, hurtling down the road at a mile a minute, should not be controlled by a drunk. Letting politicians, lawyers and judges solve an engineering problem is stupid. Building a machine that does not hurt people is not an invasion of privacy. Drunk driving is an engineering problem; if we turned it over to the engineers, perhaps it could get solved.

Re:Its Winter.

[EMCEngineer]

How about the right against improper search and seizure? It is performing a search of your person every time you enter your vehicle, and seizing your property from being used.You see to be ok with the government searching you every time you get into your car. That's bullshit. Why do you think the government should have that ability? Are you so concerned with your safety that you are willing to give up personal freedoms? This also is ripe for a slippery slope. If not alcohol, why not marijuana, meth, or coke? How about gunpowder residue? What happens when your friendly, only thinking of safety, federal government decides that stopping your car isn't enough? With the ubiquity of wireless devices, it could easily report you to your local police station. Attempted to drive drunk? You're losing your license. How good are these sensors? Are they going to kill my car at .08? Has it been tested against breathalyzer data? How does it actually measure impairment? What happens when it breaks, like so many things do on modern cars? Congratulations, you now have a $20,000 paperweight until you can get a tow truck.

Re:Its Winter.

[cayenne8]

"years ago i very stupidly drank 11 beers in a night and drove."

Wow..that isn't even considered a binge bout of drinking down here in New Orleans...that's pretty standard fare.

:)

Re:Its Winter.

[Ol Olsoc]

It's not an invasion of privacy, but it's a big liability risk. If you aren't drunk, but it malfunctions and won't let the car start in say, Frostbite Falls Minnesota, and you freeze to death, at least your family can rest secure that the Mothers agains Drunk Driving are happy. Of course, such a device would never malfunction would it? I'll bet with a nice wipe with ethanol you could keep the car form starting for a while. Depending on the sensor, it might just overload it. It reminds me of the Seatbelt interlock systems they had for a few years that wouldn't let the car start unless you were belted in. What ever could go wrong?

And don't think the MADD won't press fro some way to identify you to the authorities. They are actually about prohibition, you know.

Re:Its Winter.

[Quirkz]

Not for the first 5 minutes of driving or ~15 minutes of idling.

Insert comment about warming up the car inside the garage ...?

Re:Its Winter.

[Ol Olsoc]

Go to the interior of Alaska in mid winter, and grab your Steering wheel without gloves. We'll come back in the spring to pry you out of the car.

Re:Its Winter.

[Ol Olsoc]

Perhaps people should be locked up until they demonstrate they can be trusted?

And as for your "What would you say if a drunk driver plowed into your car?" What would you say if a texter plowed into to you, a person who was tired, a person who was taking medicine? A mother who looked back to make sure her children were safe in the back seat?

Most respectfully Genda, you have some very totalitarian ideas. Living in your world would be a worse nightmare than dealing with drunk drivers.

The problem with this thing is that you are presumed guilty until you prove yourself innocent. The car is in a non started state, you must prove you are not at a .08 alcohol level before you can start it. And your statement that a person may have driven hundreds or thousands of times before getting caught for DUI is actually an argument against you. If they've been driving for years at say a .08 level without an accident, it means that something is wrong with a system that turns people into criminals for something that isn't doing harm.

And the thing is, the real problem, the people who get so drunk that they can't drive right, have other options to circumvent this besides gloves - like not turning the car off, or remote starting it.

We have undertaken a bad turn in the war against drunken driving. Punishing people who aren't actually drunk, while the real problems are out driving completely drunk, without their licenses, no insurance, and killing people.

Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijuana

[commodore64_love]

Problem solved. The marijuana/cocaine/etc ban makes it illegal to imbibe these substances. So let's just do the same with alcohol, and all our problems will disappear. No more drunks == no more drunk driving.

Note:
I'm being sarcastic.

Privacy?

[numb7rs]

Surely the car wouldn't send the data anywhere; it would just be used to disable the ignition. How is this an invasion of privacy?

Re:Privacy?

[sznupi]

Just one of standard "concerns", I imagine...

Also - nvm how driving drunk is not exactly "law abiding" - being killed or losing somebody, all in the name of some drunk who wanted to have a ride, is a much, much greater invasion of privacy.

Re:Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the data is collected then someone will find a way to abuse it.

Think about your insurance company or employer. If they could go back and pull your auto's history of your intoxication logs. They would find a way to use this to their advantage.

The collection and retention is data is generally to the disadvantage of the little guy...

Re:Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Colorado, the data captured by the interlock device is periodically downloaded by the installer and sent to the Department of Revenue. If the driver has failed the test 3 or more times in a 12 month period their license is again suspended regardless of the cause of the failure.

False positives are a common occurrence and result in more than just the inconvenience of not being able to start the car.

The device itself is a point of failure that can render your car useless until you have it towed to a shop for repairs.

You might believe that repeat offenders deserve the hassle of the interlock device but requiring all vehicles to have some sort of alcohol monitoring system is costly, ineffective, dumb and wrong.

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

I don't really see a problem with this. If you drive drunk, you are probably an unacceptable risk for an insurance company. Here in the UK, many people convicted of drink-driving find that after their ban has expired they still cannot drive, because no insurance company will touch them.

Re:Privacy?

[arnoldo.j.nunez]

If the data is collected then someone will find a way to abuse it.

Think about your insurance company or employer. If they could go back and pull your auto's history of your intoxication logs. They would find a way to use this to their advantage.

The collection and retention is data is generally to the disadvantage of the little guy...

How is that an abuse of data collection?
After all, insurance is a way to spread the risk out over a larger pool of people.
In fact, it's only fair that people who take stupid risks like driving drunk share more of the burden.

Re:Privacy?

[jamesh]

I don't get that either. If you are caught drink driving then you are firstly lead into a police car, which all the passers by will see. Then once you are at the police station your privacy is invaded even further. I don't know if they take fingerprints for a dui but they most likely take a blood test.

I'm not sure if they are proposing this for everyone or just convicted drunk drivers. If it's the latter then I can't see how anyone could complain about it.

Still... this would be a good case for "let the lawmakers trial this for 6 months before it becomes mandatory for everyone".

Re:Privacy?

[Seumas]

That doesn't make any sense.

First of all, if the driver has this installed because they have been convicted of driving drunk . . . WHY ARE THEY BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE AT ALL?

Second of all, if the device is preventing the person from driving, who cares if they fail the "test" a thousand times in a year?

This kind of stuff reminds me of the bullshit in Oregon. In Oregon, we have the OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission). In Oregon, a shop keeper is not allowed to directly purchase alcohol. The state purchases all of the alcohol and then marks up the price and sells it to retailers who then mark it up and sell it to customers. Until just a few years ago, one of the OLCC's laws required that customers provide a DRIVER'S LICENSE as identification at a bar. Not a state ID card. It had to be a LICENSE. In other words, if you had absolutely no way you could be driving yourself home, then you weren't allowed to drink. I think this was changed only about five years ago.

Of course, the OLCC is a whole other story, frankly. In Oergon, all liquor is owned by the state. The entire inventory in your store is owned by the state and you are working on commission, essentially. And only liquor stores can sell liquor (ie, nothing stronger than beer in your grocery store). There are about 200+ of these in the state. They also don't allow places to serve more than one drink at a time. Or drink from a pitcher (even if you ordered a pitcher).

Re:Privacy?

[sulfur]

Required liability insurance should not work as punishment. I can understand why insurance companies may want to increase the premium, but outright denying coverage should not be allowed.

This is similar to the issue of sex offender registration. If a guy has paid from his crimes (fine, driving ban, jail, whatever), then he should not have to suffer any more.

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

They're not "denied coverage", it's just priced well out of their reach. Tough shit, shouldn't have driven drunk.

Re:Privacy?

[orphiuchus]

In Colorado, the data captured by the interlock device is periodically downloaded by the installer and sent to the Department of Revenue. If the driver has failed the test 3 or more times in a 12 month period their license is again suspended regardless of the cause of the failure.

False positives are a common occurrence and result in more than just the inconvenience of not being able to start the car.

The device itself is a point of failure that can render your car useless until you have it towed to a shop for repairs.

You might believe that repeat offenders deserve the hassle of the interlock device but requiring all vehicles to have some sort of alcohol monitoring system is costly, ineffective, dumb and wrong.

This sort of thing would be a deal breaker for this device. For it to be a standard safety feature you would have to lack the ability to store or transmit data.

Re:Privacy?

[adamofgreyskull]

Wow. Oregon is messed up. Suddenly Cholera doesn't sound like a bad option...

Re:Privacy?

[dr2chase]

WHY ARE THEY BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE AT ALL?

Because when they're sober, they're good drivers? Or maybe, probation? You have to decide where to set the punishment-vs-prevention knob.

Re:Privacy?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Hey, at least there wouldn't be any drunk blind people walking into traffic...

Re:Privacy?

[twidarkling]

Er, why shouldn't it? You'd rather force insurance companies to take risks that as honest businesses, they shouldn't? Introduce either additional legislation forcing companies to provide insurance to high-risk individuals, or starting up a separate government insurance for individuals who can't get insurance from private companies?

The insurance is required because otherwise innocent individuals would need to pay for the damages caused by others, but drunk drivers are regarded as a high risk by companies, and so coverage is costed to reflect that high risk. Allowing them to go without insurance is a terrible idea since they're the ones most likely to use it, and mandating affordability is terrible since it punishes those who are forced to insure them, or those who are soaking up the cost being passed on to them by their insurance company. Personally, I think the system's working, and is completely separate and unlike the sex offender registry in any way.

Re:Privacy?

[strength_of_10_men]

what if you weren't the one driving while intoxicated? good luck trying to prove that to your insurance company.

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

If it's your vehicle, it's your responsibility to keep drunk people from trying to drive it. The situation isn't really any different there.

Re:Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. It is against the law to pump your own gas in Oregon. That state is the enemy of freedom. It should be nicknamed "The Nanny State." That being said, it's actually a pretty nice place to live if you can put up with the residents. They are more snooty than hybrid drivers through the eyes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Re:Privacy?

[BitterOak]

Surely the car wouldn't send the data anywhere; it would just be used to disable the ignition. How is this an invasion of privacy?

Yeah. And I also don't see how this is any more of an invasion of privacy than existing breathalyzer ignition interlock devices. Isn't this just a more efficient way of doing the same thing?

Re:Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY ARE THEY BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE AT ALL?

Other wise you will just raise an angry mob. What do you think will happen when people that were barely over the limit in the first place are forced to catch an overcrowded train for the 10 000 time. They will snap and start blowing shit up or shooting people. I would recommend all police peoples cars to have this installed finger print thing installed (I saw a bumper sticker on this cops work folder that said don’t drink drive unless your a cop) because you'll never be able to trust random breath testing when its their work mates doing the test.

Re:Privacy?

[Golddess]

Awesome, so now my insurance company can refuse to pay out on stolen vehicles because "it's my vehicle, it's my responsibility to keep thieves from stealing it"?

Re:Privacy?

[WillDraven]

What? No. No it isn't. I'm not saying it isn't bad or shouldn't be illegal, but you can't really call somebody dying an "invasion of privacy." It just doesn't make any sense.

Re:Privacy?

[sznupi]

Really? Think in context sometimes. Say, a vehicle driven by a drunk violating the privacy of the insides of another vehicle. Or, going further, of a human skull.

(and you know, in a broadest sense it obviously takes away any meaning the privacy has for killed individual; as far its invasions go, this one is rather severe)

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

If you leave your keys lying around, that's pretty much what they'll tell you.

Re:Privacy?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

WHY ARE THEY BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE AT ALL?

Because driving is a necessity for most people in the country due to our crappy public transit infrastructure.

Re:Privacy?

[Golddess]

Yes, obviously if I give my keys to a thief, then insurance would be within its right to deny my claims. But I figured we weren't talking about me giving my keys to a drunk.

Silly me.

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

Well, don't give your car keys to drunk people. How hard a concept is this for you to grasp? Maybe if you regularly have people round who drink too much then "borrow" cars, you should keep your keys somewhere safe. Otherwise, you haven't really got a lot to worry about.

Re:Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to invade the privacy of your thick skull.

Re:Privacy?

[Golddess]

How hard a concept is this for you to grasp?

Again, I did not realize that you were talking about giving ones keys to a drunk/thief. It's an easy concept to understand, I was simply stating that I was unaware that that was what we were talking about.

Re:Privacy?

[Gordonjcp]

Oh okay, I'm sorry - we've obviously been talking at cross-purposes.

Just to be clear, over here you are responsible for your vehicle. If you've taken reasonable care to secure it (locked it and taken the keys with you) and someone steals it, well, you did what you could. If you leave it with the keys in the ignition and someone steals it and then ploughs a bunch of schoolchildren at a bus stop, then you must take some of the blame for leaving your car insecure. Most people are not (despite all evidence to the contrary) total dickheads and won't help themselves to your car when they've had a few drinks at a party, but if they did you'd be somewhat responsible for leaving the keys lying around and not actually stopping them taking it.

gloves

[Anonymous Coward]

would it work while wearing gloves ??

Too mild...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot more lives would be saved if a person would lose their right to drive for life on the first offense, that and some jail time.

Re:Too mild...

[Kilrah_il]

Well, according to this, about 32% of all car accident-related deaths are due to drunk driving. That means, that 68% are due to non-drunk driving! People, if you want to lower the number of people killed in traffic accidents, start drinking, because the sober people are more dangerous.

Re:Too mild...

[Travelsonic]

Yeah, I'm sure the unreasonable/cruel/unusual punishments bit would thwart your good-intentions-but-way-overbearing idea.

Re:Too mild...

[Gordonjcp]

Yeah, I'm sure the unreasonable/cruel/unusual punishments bit

I don't see how that would apply. You do not have the right to drive - it is a privilege. If you abuse that privilege, you don't get to drive any more.

What, you don't think that your actions should have any consequences?

Re:Too mild...

[curio_city]

Just like how the single decision of a 17 year old that has sex with a consenting 16 year old partner should make him forever after inform employers and neighbors that he is a sex offender? Oh, that and some jail time?

Re:Too mild...

[realityimpaired]

Compared against what happens in, say, El Salvador, I'm sure that people would be willing to accept losing their license for life.

Norway is probably the most metered and acceptable to US audiences... first offense = 1 year loss of license, second = lost license for life. Though I'd prefer to see El Salvador's approach to drunk driving enacted....

Re:Too mild...

[curio_city]

That means, that 68% are due to non-drunk driving! People, if you want to lower the number of people killed in traffic accidents, start drinking, because the sober people are more dangerous.

Presumable and hopefully, there are many more sober drivers on the road. A more relevant stat would be accidents/accident-related deaths per drunk/sober driver.

Re:Too mild...

[Kilrah_il]

You do realize I was joking, right?

Re:Too mild...

[Nuskrad]

That article is bullshit. El Salvador doesn't have capital punishment for anything but exceptional crimes, and hasn't since 1983

Re:Too mild...

[Opportunist]

Yeah, yeah, and drive far, far away from where you're living because statistics show that the majority of car accidents happen within 100 miles of your point of residence. Also, stay away from hospitals when you are sick, in developed countries most people die in hospitals!

Re:Too mild...

[orphiuchus]

If this actually worked it would simply make the crime impossible(well, unless you use gloves). Nobody has to go to jail, nobody has to lose their license, it seems like a pretty good solution to me.

Re:Too mild...

[Kilrah_il]

Funny anecdote, in Israel we had a doctors' strike in 2000. During the strike, the national death rate went down! True story.

Re:Too mild...

[twidarkling]

I did, and yet I'd still be interested in the stat curio mentioned.

Re:Too mild...

[TheGratefulNet]

this will not be popular with the breeders out there, but I see more 'family shit' going on in cars, causing the driver to swerve or not stay in their lane than I do see drunks on the road.

its ALWAYS some lady screaming at her backseat brat that is causing the car in front of me to be erratic. I just don't see that many drunks driving. is it just me being 'lucky' or is this a much more made-up problem, like the boogeyman from arabia who is going to make us all pray 5 times a day when they conquer us?

I worry much more about the distracted driver. the ones with cellphones and a car full of kids.

but those breeders are voters and they carry weight. (no, that was not a fat old soccermom joke, although...)

find a group of people you can easily hate and blame your problems on them. but I just don't agree that 'drunk driving' is anywhere near the epidemic the enforcement crowd makes it out to be.

Re:Too mild...

[DudeTheMath]

Most accidents occur within fifteen miles of the bathroom!

Re:Too mild...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't drive much after midnight, I assume.

Re:Too mild...

[smellotron]

You do realize I was joking, right?

Unfortunately, many people use the same argument without joking. I've heard that more black dogs are put to sleep by animal shelters than any other fur color. Does that mean black dogs are unloved? Well, I don't know, it depends on how common black dogs are. But it's "heartless" to bring up the topic of conditional probability.

Re:Too mild...

[monkyyy]

hopefully because only doctors who cared were working, or maybe sick people left the country to get care

Re:Too mild...

[Opportunist]

Most likely because no risky operations (that were no emergency) could take place but EMTs were still in effect. Correct?

Re:Too mild...

[Kilrah_il]

It all depends on when you are driving. During the daytime, you mostly see distracted driving problems. If you drive during the night (esp. at the wee hours), I bet your statistics will be different.

Re:Too mild...

[sznupi]

Somebody who is unable to abstain from driving drunk seems generally ill-suited to functioning in modern society... (I'm not sure if we can talk about the initial existence of freedom / free will in such case anyway; hence also privacy having less meaning)

Re:Too mild...

[Travelsonic]

Of course, just because it is better than what occurs in another country doesn't make it ok by proxy.

10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

If cars are still able to be crashed in 10 years, I think something has gone wrong. Isn't the real solution to drunk driving to get rid of all people controlled driving? That could be the great selling point of more automated cars: "Feel free to drive home drunk."

Re:10 years?

[icebike]

To error is human.
To really foul things up, you need a computer.

Re:10 years?

[Aranykai]

Yet we have been expecting self-driving cars since the 70's. Man is driven by the irrational fear of being not in control. Our minds are programed to think we can do better for ourselves than relying on another to not screw up.

Self driving cars = public transit. I highly doubt we will see self driving cars for individuals for at least another 50 years.

Re:10 years?

[newcastlejon]

To error is human. To really foul things up, you need a computer.

Which one are you?

Re:10 years?

[sznupi]

Don't forget to mention: 80+% of drivers think they are in the top half (also: "anybody faster than me is a moron; anybody driving faster - a maniac")

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a computer. Stop all the downloading!

Re:10 years?

[Opportunist]

Dude, the way I drive, anyone driving faster than me is a maniac!

Re:10 years?

[thisnamestoolong]

Yet we have been expecting self-driving cars since the 70's... I highly doubt we will see self driving cars for individuals for at least another 50 years.

I'm not so sure that it will be as long as you think -- the tech was a long way off in the 70's but it is very close to solid enough. It just needs to be cleaned up and implemented. Hell, it is already being implemented in the self-parking cars and the intelligent cruise control. There will be some resistance to self-driving cars, but I think that the results will speak for themselves very shortly after they are implemented.

Re:10 years?

[HangingChad]

>If cars are still able to be crashed in 10 years, I think something has gone wrong.

No kidding. We got totally ripped out of flying cars, the least we should get in return is self-driving autos.

Re:10 years?

[Seumas]

Are you kidding me? In America, the only thing harder to pry from our hands than a slice of pizza or a twinky is our cars. Any fuel other than petrol is for pussies. Automation is for pussies. And it's more important that the nearly blind 94 year old great great grandmother continue to feel as if she's "independent" than to prevent a soccer field full of children from being run over when she mistakes the gas for the brake.

Re:10 years?

[twidarkling]

Also the fact that a lot of people drive because they *like* driving. It wouldn't matter how much better the computer was, those people would still want to be in control.

Re:10 years?

[$pace6host]

Check out SARTRE.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

But could the first step be a car that lets you be in control except when you are about to screw up. Don't they already sell some cars that nudge you back if you are about to cross the center line. Add something that forces people to stop at red lights and stop signs and it would seem like one is getting close to stopping lots of the more dangerous accidents.

And also, lots of people like driving. But lots of people also like doing other things while driving. If having one of these cars means being drunk, talking on the phone, sending text messages, etc is OK I would bet a lot of people would eventually start to like them.

Re:10 years?

[Dcnjoe60]

>If cars are still able to be crashed in 10 years, I think something has gone wrong.

No kidding. We got totally ripped out of flying cars, the least we should get in return is self-driving autos.

One major problem -- until you can control the unexpected, animals darting into the road, black ice, tire failure, etc. self-driving autos won't eliminate crashes. Most accidents, according to the reports still involve something outside the control of the driver.

Re:10 years?

[smellotron]

To error is human.
To errno is divine.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to kill these billls quickly? add a rider that says pilots of the program will target police, firefighters and public officials. Go a step further and say all government vehicles must have this technology and it'll never get out of committee.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

To error is human.

Hahaha classic! Was that noun-as-a-verb error made on purpose? I think 'err' is the verb you were looking for.

Re:10 years?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Yet we have been expecting self-driving cars since the 70's

It's called a train.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting Anonymously because i just modded you up,

Just want to say i wholehaertdely agree, whenever i'm not stuck in traffic / behind some slowpoke granny, i enjoy driving a lot, and i wouldnt want to miss it. A world where i wouldnt be allowed to control my own vehicle, is a world i dont think i will enjoy living in

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Taking responsibility for their actions out of the hands of the people is always a great idea.
 
I got very sad when I saw the Ark-like spaceship in Wall-E. All of those fat, filthy, lazy lumps of mess stuffing their face with soda and fried food, riding around in electric chairs and fiddling with electronic devices, oblivious to the world around them.
 
I was about to say "That's where your driverless cars are taking you" but I realised that I just pretty much descibed Disney Land Florida. Yay America!

Re:10 years?

[w_dragon]

We're getting there though. There are cars that will parallel park themselves, ones that will alert you if you're drifting over your lane markings, ones that will beep at you if you're about to back up into something. Each of these things is a small step towards getting a car to drive itself. It may be quite a ways out before a car can navigate busy city streets, but I could see one handling highway driving within the next 10-20 years.

Re:10 years?

[w_dragon]

That's fine, have a manual mode and an automatic mode. Or have some roads be for human drivers and some for self-driving cars only. At least on the highway it should be possible for some cars to be human driven and others to be machine driven. Some people today like to drive cars really, really fast. That's why we have racetracks. Eventually it will probably be the same way with driving a car yourself.

Re:10 years?

[Half-pint HAL]

"To error" is grammatically impossible. To point this out is pedantic.

Re:10 years?

[eiMichael]

Of course you will then have thousands of traffic cops serving no purpose. Good luck getting your job killing car approved for public roads.

Re:10 years?

[icebike]

http://www.easydesksoftware.com/news/news17.htm

English is fluid. Verbing the language is mainstream.

Re:10 years?

[Half-pint HAL]

In which case:

To err is human, to error is computer.

;-)

HAL.

Insane libertarian

[BasilBrush]

'For ordinary, law-abiding citizens, it's an invasion of their privacy,' says Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea Party."

Provided it's between you and the car that the car refused to transport you because you were drunk, that isn't an invasion of privacy.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

As a libertarian, I have very little problem with something similar to this. Guns and cars can kill other people. If you want to kill yourself, more power to you. If you want to drive in our society, more power to you. If you want to risk my life and liberty because you can't drink socially _or_ drink like an alcoholic and get home safe, fuck off.

If you want the privilege of being allowed to drive, you can have it as long as you don't risk my constitutionally protected right to be alive.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, whoa, the right to life is not constitutionally protected. It's inalienable. The constitution does not need to protect it because nobody can take it away from you.

Re:Insane libertarian

[fermion]

If it is put into every car, and mandated for use, then it is an invasion of privacy. It is prior restraint which is frowned upon by liberals except in the case of those sad little excuse for weapons the conservatives are always ranting about, and by conservatives except in the case of publishing embarrassing facts about other conservatives.

But if one is convicted of drunk driving, then it is not so much a invasion of privacy as much as security theater. The appropriate penalty for drunk driving is temporary revocation of the privilege to drive.If this does not work permanent revocation and prison. Ideally, drunk driving, like other drug abuse would be a felony, thereby giving more negativite incentive.

The big reason this is not done, and unnecessarily complex technology is used instead, is because the convenience of these criminals is given more importance than the population they wish to murder. The other reason is that a lot of important people think it is their god given right to drive drunk, and no one wants to risk the child of some really important politician to end up with a felony for what could at most result in the death of some nobody.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin

Freedom to travel is a right, not a privilege, regardless of what the state has conditioned you to believe. If the ability for Americans to set out in carriages, stagecoaches, or wagons (covered or uncovered) in order to travel unimpeded to any part of the country still existed I might accept your contention that driving is a privilege. Carriages, stagecoaches, and wagons were however supplanted and replaced by the automobile, which is now, and has been for many decades, the embodiment of personal freedom to travel.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Nadaka]

I am pretty sure that 2 tons of steel traveling at 70 miles an hour is entirely capable of alienating you from your right to life. Same goes for a half ounce of lead at 900 miles an hour.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Seumas]

Except for the death penalty or when a cop shoots you in the face point blank at a light rail stop in Oakland without justification or when a SWAT team breaks down your door and blasts away at everyone inside, before realizing they had the wrong address, or when we want to test some horrible new drug on a segment of our population that is disenfranchised and unlikely to seek recourse.

Re:Insane libertarian

[dr2chase]

There's no constitutional right to drive a car, so I don't think that prior restraint enters into it. Most places, cars need registration, plates, insurance, inspection, and a licensed driver. Lack any of those, and you don't get to drive.

The problem with your incentives-based approach to this is that when you are drunk, incentives don't work so well. It lets us establish a moral system whereby we can determine after the fact that people are bad and smite them, but it does not undo the harm that they did, or prevent it in the first place.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Genda]

At one level I agree with you, however there are serious problems with your logic. Might I point out several just for instance;

1. Assuming people should be uncontrolled until they do something wrong, suggests that the many thousands of innocent people who are killed and injured by drunk drivers as they weed themselves out of the driving population is a justifiable price to be paid when we have the technology in hand to save those people from death and suffering. Have you no consideration for these innocent victims and their families.
2. Giving people multiple attempts at getting it wrong or right just exacerbates the problems associated with the behavior.
3. Driving is virtually mandatory in many places in this country. Urban sprawl makes it vital for people to drive to shop, drive to work, and drive to have a good time. Are you suggesting we come up with another way for people to function usefully without driving, and if so, isn't that an even bigger intrusion into how Americans lead their lives? In the system being suggested, the person can drive as soon as they sober up. If they can't sober up, the inability to drive is probably the least of their problems and in the meantime society is protected from the worst of their irresponsible inebriation.
4. Finally, drunk driving laws are clearly not enforced in a consistent way. Belong to a wealthy or famous family or be so yourself, and you can drive under the influence with virtual impunity. Placing safeguards into our vehicles would be infinitely more democratic, and by removing the arbitrary personal judgment from the process fair beyond reproach.

Don't get me wrong, this is a thought exercise and I'm playing devil's advocate. Personally I believe in personal freedom, however, I'm clear that with freedom comes accountability and responsibility. Another possible way to look at this, is to start citizens at a nominal mix of rights, privileges and controls, and have behavior determine who has the judgment, integrity and maturity to receive more rights and privileges, and who by their lack requires more control. The only question then remains, what should that nominal mix of rights and controls be and what is society willing to pay for them. Perhaps beginning the process early in the teenage years, when people naturally have limited rights and privileges might be a good place to start.

Re:Insane libertarian

[phantomfive]

I don't see where in the constitution you are given a right to be alive.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

People die, we need o get over it. We can't legislate zero risk. If we were to try, limiting the privileges of driver under 25, particularly males, would likely have more an impact. Many thousands of people die so while the incompetent young driver learns. There are many stories of entire families being killed by the fallacy that driving is a necessity, and giving multiple chances

Driving is not a neccesity for most people. It tends to maximize income, but like other crimes, such pursuit of happiness is one way we motivate persons not to commit the crime. Not driving is not an inrusion because it depends on he social contract: roads, police, bailing out of auomotive companies. No person is guaranteed a car anymore than in 1776 everyone had a horse. People took responsibility. I live in a city where everyone drives, and I have a car, but there were many times when I was working when it stayed in the garage. Even now it would easy enough o find a job where I did not need to drive. When I was younger I walked and rode my bike a lot. Then i was busses . We can come up with creative soluions when we have to.

Re:Insane libertarian

[s73v3r]

Freedom to travel is a right. Driving is not, however. There are plenty of other ways to get where you want to go. Buses, taxis, bicycles, trains, planes, etc.

Re:Insane libertarian

[tragedy]

I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not. The right to "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence is clearly delineated in the Declaration of Independence which is one of the founding documents of the United States along with the Constitution. In the Constitution itself, the right to be alive is in the Bill of Rights, in the fifth amendment where it says "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Now, the government has gotten a lot of mileage out of obfuscating what counts as "due process of law" (for example the idea that due process doesn't need to involve the judicial branch of government and that due process can occur without the person it's affecting getting to defend themselves), as well as just who due process applies to (taking it away from non-citizens on US soil, playing around with just what constitutes US soil, such as Guantanamo Bay, taking it away from US Citizens not on US soil and taking it from US Citizens who are on US soil but who are somehow argued to be allied with an enemy). Despite all this, the right to be alive is clearly there.

Re:Insane libertarian

[tragedy]

Right to travel would seem to be covered under the right to liberty that cannot be deprived without due process of law laid out in the fifth amendment. There are many places in the US that you can't practically walk to given the distances involved not to mention the ones you simply can't legally walk to, since you would have to cross all kinds of non-pedestrian government-built roads. Therefore, you have a right to drive (although it's limited by age class, like many other rights) as long as that right hasn't been deprived by due process of law, otherwise the government is constructively removing your liberty by building all these roads.

Re:Insane libertarian

[phantomfive]

It's been repeatedly demonstrated that the declaration of independence, while a nice document, is in no way law.

The fifth amendment is not giving you a right to life, it's giving you a right to not be actively killed by the government, except in some cases. If you can't see the distinction, you might want to spend some time doing logic puzzles to help you out.

Re:Insane libertarian

[Fulcrum of Evil]

1. lots of things kill people, and despite the hype, DUI isn't a major factor; it's hard to say how much, though, because any fatal accident where someone had any booze in them (driver, victim, passenger) is alcohol related, which is what is tracked. DUI is no longer socially accepted (except where there's no other way to drink socially). Make it easier to not drive and people will.

2. sure, no sweat, but let's stop treating it like a cash cow - lock people up for injury accidents and obvious problems - most of the people you worry about are .15 and over, and that hasn't changed in 30 years. Ever wonder why?

3. Hey, I'd love that. Probably go to bars more if I never had to worry about drinking a bit much. Hell, I'd go for trains and subways if it meant I could leave my car at home most days - that'd be awesome.

4. money makes problems go away - don't expect this to change in your lifetime.

Re:Insane libertarian

[krazytekn0]

I agree, I can't see how this is an invasion of privacy, that's like saying your toilet is invading your privacy cause it can see your genitals.

Re:Insane libertarian

[dr2chase]

Believe it or not, I think the answer to "how can I travel without a car" is supposed to be (a) you can buy a bus ticket and/or (b) bicycles. There are interstates out west, I am told, where bicycles ARE allowed (unlike most places) because of precisely the access problem you describe (*). And as you note, this is clearly a conditional right -- so what's wrong with one more condition, if it serves a public good?

Recall that cars have been in wide use for only about a century, and my grandmother never got a license. Lots of people are too disabled to drive (blind, e.g.) or ought to be (dementia), or are too young, or never learned, or cannot afford the expense.

(*) Whether this has any bearing on attempts to require license, registration, insurance, tags, etc for bicycles, I leave for real lawyers to argue.

Re:Insane libertarian

[tragedy]

The point I was trying to get across though, is that there is, actually, a right to drive. As you point out, you can ride with someone or take the bus, and that would seem to cover your right to travel except that you're also guaranteed equal protection under the law. Therefore, everyone has a basic right to drive, or they have to take it away from everyone. Now, as we've both pointed out, rights can be conditional. In the case of a right to drive, it's conditional based on safety. Too young to be considered safe or responsible (still old enough to be charged as an adult if you go for a joyride and kill someone, of course) and you don't get to exercise the right. Not competent enough to pass a driving test and you don't get to exercise the right. Proven dangerous by a court of law as a drunk driver or other menace and you don't get to exercise the right. These things are reasonable. It's even reasonable that a license can be taken away before trial, in the same way that you can be jailed before trial, provided, of course, that there's a speedy process in the judicial system, based on presumption of innocence, to appeal.

I just feel I have to speak up whenever anyone says that something that is a right is just a privilege. Also, I also have to say that, as driving is a right, then the only things that should curtail it are safety issues. So, you shouldn't lose your right to drive if you didn't pay your child support, or you didn't pay some tax, or you didn't pay a parking ticket (there may be an argument that, by having been shown to be a danger to the sanctity of public property in the form of parking spaces that you're a menace, but it falls pretty flat to me), or you're a convicted felon (for something non-driving related), etc. The fact that you can is a problem, and it's only exacerbated by people saying things like "there's no constitutional right to drive a car".

Re:Insane libertarian

[tragedy]

I do just fine on logic puzzles already. I really don't see the need for attempts to insult my intelligence based on my perfectly valid response to your post. Also, you should bear in mind that individual posts on a thread are not operating in a vacuum. You can't just respond to one part of my post and ignore the larger context and then congratulate yourself for scoring some sort of coup.

What you're ignoring is that your statement "I don't see where in the constitution you are given a right to be alive" was in response to a statement from an AC that "If you want the privilege of being allowed to drive, you can have it as long as you don't risk my constitutionally protected right to be alive."

Now I actually disagree with that statement, because driving is also a right. Driving is a right that may be curtailed for reasons of public safety, but it's still a right. Bear with me, because this has some bearing on the "right to be alive".

When you mentioned a "right to be alive", clearly that has to be interpreted slightly. Obviously the government can't guarantee you continued life. That's patently absurd as it would effectively mean a constitutional guarantee to immortality. I gave you enough credit to assume that you weren't just being an idiot when you wrote it, so it's a pity you didn't extend the same credit to me.

Anyway, if you'll notice the language of the amendment, it doesn't just say that the government can't kill you, it says you can't be "deprived of life". It doesn't even specifically say that it's only the government that can't deprive you of life (which is good, because otherwise it would open the door for a private court system that could execute people). That's actually a pretty good constitutional foundation for programs like welfare, but I'm not going to go there right now. The point is that the government can't deprive you of life either directly or constructively. If you're not sure what I mean about constructively denying the right to life, liberty and property, here are some examples:

"We're not executing you, we're just releasing you from prison 3 miles offshore."

"We're not punishing you cruelly and unusually, we're just putting you in a cell with this muscle-bound convict who has violently raped every cell mate he's had so far. Hur hur hur."

"We're not denying you your property, we've just built a wall around it on public property. Incidentally, if you try to climb the wall, you'll be thrown in jail with a convict who will rape you and then we'll execute you"

So, basically the government is not supposed to take actions that have a high chance of leading to your death. This, in fact, conflicts with some other constitutional provisions such as the military draft, and even with some constitutional rights enjoyed by others.

The law isn't written by programmers, it's written by messy lawyers, and even more more messy economists and MBAs. It's also written in some sort of mutant legal language based on interpretation by case law. It would be better if it were written in something sane with proper ideas of precedence and inheritance of legal principles with everything clearly delineated, but it isn't.

(NOTE: The paragraph following this one is the part of the argument that's actually in context with your statement as it relates to the AC you originally replied to. So, although I stand by the other parts of this post where I say that you really do have a right to be alive within the reasonable boundaries of human lifespan and factors outside the governments control, this is part where, if you can find gaping logical flaws you get to tell me that I'm a mental defective who needs to go and brush up on his thinking skills. This is where I discuss whether you have a "right to be alive" contrasted against a right to drive.)

So when legal principles conflict, "reasonableness" rules. Even if the law were well written and thought out, it still couldn't anticipate every situation. So, when your right to not be "deprived of life" reasonably conflic

Re:Insane libertarian

[phantomfive]

I would feel amiss if I did not reply to your post after you went to all that work to write it.

It seems your way of looking at law (or, as it were, society), is to give everyone rights and then figure out how to balance them. That is an interesting way of doing things, and it may be better, but I don't think any courts currently take that approach.

Also, you said that the government cannot deprive you of life. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but it's pretty clear they can kill you once they go through all the necessary legal steps. The supreme court has affirmed that several times, although I don't particularly like it.

Re:Insane libertarian

[tragedy]

Phantonfive wrote:

I would feel amiss if I did not reply to your post after you went to all that work to write it.

I wouldn't worry too much. I tend to get pretty verbose.

It seems your way of looking at law (or, as it were, society), is to give everyone rights and then figure out how to balance them. That is an interesting way of doing things, and it may be better, but I don't think any courts currently take that approach.

Although the courts may not take that approach, it's the one they're supposed to take. The foundations of US government is the US Constitution and its amendments. The first ten amendments are referred to as the Bill of Rights. The idea is that there are "inalienable rights" that everyone automatically possesses. If those rights come into conflict, then the courts get to do some balancing and interpretation. The constitution is full of loopholes, as well, although the spirit of the document is pretty clear in most parts. It even has some bits that probably aren't as good an idea now as they were at the time. Nevertheless the idea behind it is that it lays out explicit rights and lays out the powers of government.

Also, you said that the government cannot deprive you of life. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but it's pretty clear they can kill you once they go through all the necessary legal steps. The supreme court has affirmed that several times, although I don't particularly like it.

That's right, the government isn't allowed to deprive you of life "without due process of law". I thought it was pretty clear. Going "through all the necessary legal steps", as you say, constitutes due process. I'm not sure how we're in disagreement on that one. The government is forbidden from directly or constructively depriving you of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Sure, they do anyway sometimes, but they're not supposed to.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[theaveng]

Problem solved. The marijuana/cocaine/etc ban makes it illegal to imbibe these substances. So let's just do the same with alcohol, and all our problems will disappear. No more drunks == no more drunk driving.

Note:
I'm being sarcastic.

I certainly hope so. People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free.

Deal with the abuse of the drugs (DUI) not the banning of them, or alcohol.

A whole new world of excuses.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry I'm late, must have shaken hands with an alcoholic."

Re:A whole new world of excuses.

[monkyyy]

or handled rotten food, or walked near a bar

More nanny garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Note to the nanny state: DIAF.

Sincerely,
The peons.

This is no solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no better than the Interlock device.

Because there will be a buck to be made here and someone's pet crusade will be satisfied, we'll all have to deal with it.

Everything malfunctions

[Anonymous Coward]

When the sensor eventually goes bad, the car won't start for sober drivers without gloves. That is not acceptable.

You can work around this by designing it to allow the engine to start if it can't get a good reading, but then any drunk person can just wear gloves to start up the car, which defeats the purpose.

So, bad idea all around.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[mysidia]

You can work around this by designing it to allow the engine to start if it can't get a good reading, but then any drunk person can just wear gloves to start up the car, which defeats the purpose.

Not if car manufacturers change the way cars are started to a biometric fingerprint reader.

Every driver would then have to remove their gloves and place their finger on the bio scanner, which can have a dual purpose --- verify that the person is an authorized user of the car (not a car thief), AND verify blood alcohol content.

Make the penalties for DUI much more severe for any driver who pressed the "I am wearing gloves" override button and used keys to start the ignition or who otherwise defeated or didn't have a working spot check system.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[inanet]

great. so then If im being robbed i can't just give the thief a dongle or my keys.

now he's going to cut my finger off as well.

biometrics aren't that great anyway, a majority of Fingerprint readers especially are rediculously easy to circumvent.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[mysidia]

now he's going to cut my finger off as well.

Liveness detection was solved a long time ago. Cut off fingers won't be able to activate a proper fingerprint scanner, because they won't have a thermal signature that at all resembles a finger.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[kwark]

Or they will just use gummibears.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[Shadow of Eternity]

So they'll just kidnap you and murder you AFTER they're done with you?

Re:Everything malfunctions

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable microwaves.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[FatdogHaiku]

now he's going to cut my finger off as well.

Cut off fingers won't be able to activate a proper fingerprint scanner, because they won't have a thermal signature that at all resembles a finger.

So the perp stores your cut off finger in his ass crack until it's needed....
checking for pulse and O2 levels is a better bet than just temperature and it's been checked at the finger tip for a long time.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, Even the latest sensors still have not gotten around the gummi bears. So until basic stuff like this is solved, fingerprint sensors are more of security theater than anything that offers actual protection.

If I'm wrong, correct my ass, but as of now, I've yet to see one that doesn't happily accept a gummi bear mold as an actual fingerprint.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[adolf]

When the system eventually gets released, it will be trivial to bypass.

The "analog hole" is not limited making 1080p rips of DirecTV feeds, but extends to everything that can be perceived.

Including, incidentally, BAC sensors.

("Why is that steering wheel taped up under the glovebox, with what looks like a rubber hand tied to it?" "Oh. That's just to fool the computer." [...])

Re:Everything malfunctions

[ZDRuX]

because they won't have a thermal signature that at all resembles a finger.

Yes, I'm sure every thief out there is perfectly aware of this.

Re:Everything malfunctions

[mysidia]

Yes, I'm sure every thief out there is perfectly aware of this.

They can be made aware of this quite easily. Someone has to explain the fingerprint scanning technology to the car buyer audience, before people can use it.

The thieves will definitely figure out about that, as well as any mechanism(s) for defeating the scanner and starting the car manually

Re:Everything malfunctions

[das3cr]

LOL ..... Half the thieves out there will still argue with you that the moon landing was hollywood fiction and the entire reason they are behind bars is all about trying to stem the spread of whatever religion they claim. I'm sure we wont have problems convincing them that cut off fingers wont work.

Why not just put them

[future assassin]

on the house door knob or car door handle so you can us from ourselves.

Re:Why not just put them

[karnal]

I think you accidentally a verb.

Re:Why not just put them

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole verb!

DUI Hysteria

[Frosty Piss]

For sure, deaths as a result drunk driving are both preventable and tragic.

But folks, let's have some perspective with the hysteria: 9000 death a year are in fact one of the smaller numbers in the world of preventable deaths.

The hysteria far outweighs the threat, much like TSA and air travel.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[sl149q]

Yes, but, there are 9000 est. deaths a year...

Which is FAR FAR FAR more than the number of deaths you can attribute to terrorists ....

Hysteria certainly describes TSA and Homeland security.

Given the resources being allocated to reducing drunk driving (compared to TSA and Homeland security) I'd say it is better spent.

Most likely though at this point it would not be unreasonable to start looking at just making all cars and passengers safer regardless of whether there is any alcohol involved as there are more potential lives saved that way.

Just think of how safe you could design an automobile if you directed half of the TSA / Homeland security budget into R&D.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Mashiki]

You can blame an organization that started good, and went bad for this problem. They're called MADD. Even police hate dealing with them these days they're down right bat shit insane.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[kemapa]

Indeed, the hysteria surrounding intoxicated driving seems to outweigh the threat. As you mentioned, the number of yearly deaths attributable to intoxicated driving is a drop in the preventable death bucket. However, several (but not all) of the other types of preventable death are brought upon oneself, such as death from prolonged tobacco smoking. With intoxicated driving the victim is not necessarily the intoxicated individual, it can be a passenger or another driver/pedestrian. Those individuals often have families, which introduces a very emotional and tragic aspect to preventable death by an intoxicated driver. That's why you have such powerful lobbying groups like MADD, which leads to (in my opinion) overzealous pursuit of intoxicated drivers and the prevention of intoxicated driving.

It would be refreshing if some of the more substantial causes of preventable death received the same attention and lobbying.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the overzealous pursuit of intoxicated drivers, as you put it, is because it's such a thoughtless and easily preventable tragedy. In particular, the people who bear the ultimate price for drunk driven are most often the innocent. This makes it especially heinous.

To which "more substantial causes of preventable death" do you refer? In particular, how many of those cause death to others, and how many cause death to oneself? Your tobacco example fails this criterion: you don't kill someone who happened to enter your frame of reference for 20 seconds (wrong place at the wrong time) and did absolutely nothing wrong with your tobacco smoke.

We can't prevent everything. All the regulation in the world wouldn't have stopped the events in Arizona of a few weeks ago, unless every person was subject to a TSA-like search at all points in time. We can't stop "bad people." However, of most concern are otherwise good people who do bad things. Drunk driving is an example of this; the people who do it and injure someone think only of themselves in that moment.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[willy_me]

But those 9000 deaths a year are distributed across the entire demographic of people. The common cold might kill more people each year but if those people were all over 90, it really is not as bad. As it stands, automobile accidents are the number 1 cause of death for people in their 20s. Not all of these deaths are alcohol related, but many are. I have personally known people who have died in the following ways:

1 - avoiding an animal (or so we assume)
2 - due to being intoxicated
1 - hit by a train - alcohol a likely factor
2 - oncoming incapacitated driver - likely fell asleep at the wheel

So of the 5 fatal accidents, 3 have been related to alcohol, 1 related to incapacitated driver, 1 unavoidable accident.

I do not think that sensors present in steering wheels will work, but trying to find ways to curb those 9000 deaths/year is a good idea. Comparing this to the hysteria of air travel / TSA is ridiculous - we are talking about two very different scales.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[MacGyver2210]

They are nuts indeed! It's gotten to the point where I can't tell them apart from the Tea Party.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[makubesu]

How is 9000 deaths a year small for preventable deaths (keep in mind, we're talking about just in the United States). Sure it's dwarfed by deaths caused by smoking or obesity, but it's right up there with homocide, suicide, stds, drug addiction, etc. Drunk driving deaths represent 40% of traffic related deaths. The 9000 number is only about half of deaths caused by drunk driving every year. Seems like a problem worthy of attention to me.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[empiricistrob]

Less than 3000 people died on September 11th, which triggered two wars, the patriot act, erosion of privacy in many ways ,etc. This, for a change, is a *pragmatic* way to improve our society with not a lot of money and energy (again, compared to the cost of the war on terror for 3000 lives). 9000 lives per year and a measured response vs 3000 lives one time and mass hysteria and fundamentally changing society.... This does not even come close to being placed on the scale of "hysteria".

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Black Gold Alchemist]

More people die in the USA from colds and flus than from traffic deaths, but I don't see MAPNUHS (Mothers against people not using handsanitizer).

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Frosty Piss]

but it's right up there with homocide, suicide, stds, drug addiction, etc.

No, no it's not.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. Their propagandists go around telling you you have an alcohol problem if you even have 1 drink a day. I feel bad for them, but they strike me as people who can't find a healthy way to deal with their grief, so they instead go off the deep end. Kind of like Cindy Sheehan.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[makubesu]

There's a nice table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_death#Leading_causes_in_the_United_States

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Genda]

If you want to actually get a real sense of the impact, look at the number of people who are needlessly killed. Then the number who are injured and how many of these people are severely injured (i.e. will never be able to live up to their original potential due to physical or mental disability.) Then the wives, husbands, children, and close friends and family, and businesses who will be adversely impacted by the death or permanent disability of the victims of drunk driving. That number you originally mentioned suddenly mushrooms up to hundreds of thousands of people every year. These accidents impact entire communities and the senseless nature of the loss makes them all the more distasteful. We used to live in a country where our nearest neighbor was a mile away, and you had to protect yourself and family from dangerous critters that threatened your home and your property. Being drunk on your own property or shooting your gun as you pleased not only didn't hurt anyone else (save the rare mishap), it was a justifiable right to hold your land and protect your family as you saw fit. Those times have gone.

We now live elbow to elbow in ticky tacky houses built so close together you can hear your neighbors in the throws of passion, or tell what they had for dinner by the gas they pass. Trading in a bit of that freedom for social security and public safety might be a necessary concern in this century. It at least needs to be looked at for all our benefit.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[$pace6host]

I'd prefer it if we could invent a device that would assess your reaction times and gauge the quality of your snap decisions... that should stop people from driving drunk, stoned, with a concussion, with dementia, when too tired, etc. It'd probably stop a few people from driving when they're perfectly stone cold sober, because they're just not capable of safely operating a motor vehicle - but hey, THAT's what we really want, right?

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Dcnjoe60]

Yes, but, there are 9000 est. deaths a year...

Which is FAR FAR FAR more than the number of deaths you can attribute to terrorists ....

Hysteria certainly describes TSA and Homeland security.

Given the resources being allocated to reducing drunk driving (compared to TSA and Homeland security) I'd say it is better spent.

Most likely though at this point it would not be unreasonable to start looking at just making all cars and passengers safer regardless of whether there is any alcohol involved as there are more potential lives saved that way.

Just think of how safe you could design an automobile if you directed half of the TSA / Homeland security budget into R&D.

A much simpler and cheaper approach to adding more technology to cars is to lower the speed limits. Lower speed limits give more time to react, both for the driver and others. It also lowers fatalities, saves fuel, saves wear and tear on the pavements (which means lower road maintenance costs) and lowers CO2 emissions.

Talk to any highway patrol man/woman and they will tell you that excessive speed is the cause of most accidents and fatalities (and that does not mean going over the speed limit).

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Dcnjoe60]

Advocacy groups eventually have to drift from their original purpose to one of organizational perseverance. They need to stay relevant to stay in existence. One common way they do that is to run around crying out the sky is falling. Keep people alarmed and your organization will still be perceived as needed. MADD, is no different.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the hysteria surrounding intoxicated driving seems to outweigh the threat

50+% of all deaths on roads are a result of someone DUI. Those are the real stats. So not sure how you can minimize that as much.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[danbeck]

Numbers, statistics and logic doesn't matter to the MaDD crowd. They couldn't give a damn about your freedom. Their children were killed by some drunk ass and we all have to pay the price. These people would probably love to see the death penalty for only being caught drunk driving. Never mind the fact that people eating, women putting on makeup and people playing with the radio could easily kill the same person.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[gregor-e]

Well then, let's select 9000 innocent people at random and line them up against a wall. We'll give everyone who is not in favor of a blood alcohol testing in cars a gun. Most of the guns will have blanks, but some will have live rounds. Would you point your gun at these 9000 people and pull the trigger? Because that's exactly the same result as we end up with if you vote against blood alcohol testing in cars. Sure, it might not have been YOUR vote that failed to save those 9000 people (this year), and it might not have been your gun that fired a live round. Is there any ethical difference?

Re:DUI Hysteria

[tragedy]

Excessive speed certainly does make accidents more dangerous. I have to strongly disagree with your statement that lower speed limits give more time to react. It does depend a little on what you're reacting to. Clearly if a tree falls across the road in front of you or if you're in fog and a 20 car pileup suddenly comes out of the fog then you'll have better chances of avoiding it at 10 mph than at 65 mph. For the most part though, you're going to be reacting to other traffic moving along at the same speed as you. In that case, the deciding factor usually isn't how fast you're going, it's how fast you can hit the brakes. Then it's all up to how well your brakes work. That critical issue of reaction time has more to do with following distance than raw speed. In slower traffic, cars tend to draw in much closer. With lower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least), but probably fewer fatalities (at least below a certain threshold).

The problem is, you're talking about a slippery slope, not some sort of absolute. Increase speed limits and you'll get more fatalities, decrease them and you'll get less, decrease them even more and you'll get less, and so forth. The problem is, you won't eliminate fatalities until you bring the speed limits down to 0 MPH (in other words, eliminate driving). You'll always be able to make the argument that making people drive more slowly will save lives, even after you've lowered speed limits below the point of practicality. Also, there won't be a linear relationship between speed and fatalities. It will be a curve, and not a steadily increasing one, either. Above a certain speed limit, fatalities won't really increase much partly because you'll hit the level at which most people are uncomfortable driving faster, not to mention the point where people hit the physical limits of their vehicles. The shape of the curve is also a moving target due to increases in technology. If someone invents super brakes with a Star Trek inertial dampening system, fatalities would soar overnight from all the cars on the roads capable of stopping on a dime being rear-ended by cars without such new systems or even cars with such new systems but who were following without enough distance to hit their brakes before passing the point the car in front stopped.

Deciding on a speed limit is a complex issue since you'll never achieve a "safe" speed limit until you eliminate driving. Even when you come up with a good consensus on practicality vs. convenience vs. safety, it will be obsoleted by advancing technology. However, you also potentially have to support 100+ years of automotive technology on modern roads along with newer, more advanced and capable cars.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[epp_b]

Indeed.

We only really need to worry about it if it's OVER NINE THOUSANNNNNNND!!!

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Charcharodon]

yawn...

and Liberals think everyone that disagrees with them to be racist Nazis.

At least the Tea Party guys don't want to take 3/4 of my paycheck and give it to some mouthbreather.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Charcharodon]

Natural selection is a good thing. If we kill off all the wolves in the world then the herd will grow retarded....

....damn it too late.

I'm pretty sure if we eliminate a main cause of death for people in their twenties they'll just come up with a new one. They're a pretty creative bunch I'm told.

If anything we should make it more dangerous. The whole herd being retarded thing and all.

How about not being allowed to drive anything but a motocycle till you are 21. I wonder how many could actually make it through that gauntlet.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't do residential construction work or you would witness how many people get up in the morning and drive to the work site with a 40 oz. between ones legs. I use to be an assistant to one of these fools and quit the job that week.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry for your losses, but I Thank you for your anecdotal evidence. I am quite swayed. Also, just hit the animal... avoided. Unless it's a moose. Then God hates you.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

9000 deaths are year due to DUI is the equivalent of having a September 11 attack EVERY 4 MONTHS.

And I'd heard it was 40000 deaths on US roads a year, 1/2 of them due to drunk driving, so isn't that 20000 a year.

That's like 9/11 EVERY 7 WEEKS.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Sort of like the Republican party.

They used to stand for small government, BTW, remember those days?

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously because i'm moderating,

I for one would not drive safer with lower speedlimits. I need a certain level of speed (depending on the road/situation) to stay focussed. If i am driving on a 5 lane highway with very little traffic, i find that at 100 km/h i get distracted / doze off much easier then at 120. While driving on the german autobahn i also experienced that driving longer stretches at 150-160 raises my concentration.

Sure, at 160 the allowed reaction time is much lower, but i am sure that (situation permitting) 120 is a much safer speed for me then 100

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

9000 per year in the US alone. Now multiply by 10 to get world total, and multiply by 10 years.
Now you're looking at a problem that's beginning to look like World War III

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. There are far fewer annual deaths during air travel from any cause, and a significantly larger portion of the annual budget is spent on preventing that lesser quantity of deaths.
 
Like putting poison down for a rat, but throwing a grenade at an ant.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

You can blame an organization that started good, and went bad for this problem. They're called MADD. Even police hate dealing with them these days they're down right bat shit insane.

That's because when it was founded it genuinely was a bunch of mothers who wanted to cut down on DUI-related deaths.
Now it's just a front organization that Prohibitionists can hide behind. After all, if you can't just make it outright illegal you can make it effectively impossible to legally do anything while you are drinking, which is almost the same result. And if they can make it socially unacceptable enough, then people will let them pass Prohibition in increments just like they're doing with Tobacco right now.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Dcnjoe60]

You stated "...that with slower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least)..."

However, the actual data shows that at slower speeds there are fewer accidents. I'm not talking about driving 30mph instead of 70mph, but something as basic as 55mph or 60mph.

The reason fatalities drop with lower speed limits are twofold. First, fewer accidents means fewer opportunities to be killed in the accident. Second, slower speeds equates to less force being applied, thereby reducing what isn't absorbed by the vehicle to the occupant.

Advanced technology still does not change the results. Brakes that let you stop in 80% of the time at 70mph, will still let you stop sooner at 60mph, thereby still giving the benefit to the slower speed. Or put a different way, an innovation like ABS works better for all speeds, not just high speeds.

The physics are always the same, slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Twanfox]

The biggest difference between alcohol and tobacco is that if you drink enough to get drunk, that doesn't mean that I will be drunk too if I'm next to you. With tobacco, if you smoke enough to give yourself cancer, then you've created enough second hand smoke (the kind that does NOT pass through the filter) for me to breathe and give me cancer too. Alcohol carries with it other problems, and yes, those that are drunk can inflict themselves on others in ways that are annoying or dangerous. There just isn't that health factor involved outside of dangerous activities, eg driving.

Tobacco is getting the shaft because, in certain situations such as work, the answer of 'just walk away if you don't like it' cannot be done.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefere the term "Neo-Prohibitionist Hysteria".

If MADD were truly concerned with safety on the roads they would be working to promote designated-driver programs, and providing education about all driving impairments or distractions, not trying to foist a second prohibition on North Americans.

Studies have shown that distracted drivers can be as bad or worse than drunk drivers; yet MADD isn't going after sleep-deprived new parents, texting teenagers, speeding cell-phoning soccer moms, makeup-applying bankers, whiny children, or any other of the myriad distractions that can also cause crashes.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

"Comparing this to the hysteria of air travel / TSA is ridiculous..."
IDK about that. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[jahudabudy]

Also, alcohol producers didn't go around putting chemicals in their product to make it extra addictive, then start marketing it at kids in an attempt to get life-long customers. All while suppressing the evidence they had that their product was harmful in any dose, and lethal in large doses. Tobacco is in large part getting the shaft b/c the industry (not the product) behaved over a course of decades as evil evil bastards. Public backlash is a bitch.

Re:DUI Hysteria

[bostongraf]

The graph you link to indicates Aclohol in one column, Traffic Collisions in another column, and a whole slew of other categories.

Traffic Collisions are at 43,000. (I would assume that drunk driving deaths would be included in this column, as opposed to death due to alcoholism being what is found in the Alcohol column) 9,000 is just shy of 21% of all traffic deaths. That is not insignificant.

However, DUI caused total just over half those caused by drug abuse (17,000), just under half those caused by STD's (20,000), just under 1/3 those caused by firearms (29,000) (side note: DUI's cause just less preventable deaths than homicide by firearm, and just more than 50% of firearms suicides), and is just over 10% of the deaths caused by alcoholism (85,000!).

According to your stats, there were 870,909 total preventable deaths in the US last year. That puts DUIs at 1% of the preventable deaths. If you exclude smoking and obesity, you have 324,000, of which DUIs' would be 2.8%.

There is not a single overall category that is less than DUI caused deaths. In fact there is not a single overall category that is not close to TWICE as many deaths when compared to DUIs. And overall, you are looking at 1%. Considering the homicide and suicide numbers are only with regards to firearms, and are not an overall total, I would have to say the DUI is pretty low on the list.

The only thing that I will give you is that that 9,000 deaths is right on par with how many deaths "studies" show are prevented by seat belt use each year. (Wikipedia Seat Belts)

Re:DUI Hysteria

[bostongraf]

Gah! I just noticed that a) the 9,000 DUI deaths is from a site with absolutely zero citations, b) that site obviously has a bias in inflating the numbers, and c) the graph that you directed us to is data from the year 2000.

Well, I guess if we contain the numbers to those we both agreed to use, my statements still stand.

But I have very little faith that ANY of the numbers used from either side have much accuracy at all...

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

More like about %20. 43945 motor vehicle deaths (2007@USA)

And remember that they count it as an "Alcohol related fatality" if any one involved had something to drink, including people in parked cars.

The real statistics are probably closer to 5000/year, or 10% of all vehicle fatalities. I'd also like to see some research into how skilled the DUI drivers who caused fatalities were. Considering how horrible some drivers are I wouldn't be shocked if the alcohol wasn't a red herring quite often.

CDC death stats

Re:DUI Hysteria

[Anonymous Coward]

33,982 14-25 year olds died in 2007 in USA
Here's some stats:
10,000 motor vehicle fatalities
2,000 (aprox) Alcohol related motor vehicle fatalities (About 20% of accidents).
3159 died of accidental poisoning.
4140 died by suicide.
5551 murdered
1084 heart disease
1653 cancer

How about we focus on keeping them from suicide and accidentally killing themselves with paint thinner?

Re:DUI Hysteria

[tragedy]

"slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening" is true, all other things being equal. The trouble is, all other things won't be equal. At slower speeds, people are going to cluster closer together. If they're close enough, and the car in front of them can stop quickly enough, they'll hit it before they can react to hit the brake.

I don't really disagree that slower speeds are going to result in more safety. It's just that it's a slippery slope between speed limits set above the maximum speed cars can go and 0. At 0, you have absolute safety, but no utility. At the maximum, things aren't all that safe, but most people either can't or won't go that fast. Basically, you have a peak level of danger vs. speed limit. Set the speed limit higher than that, and things get more dangerous, but the danger isn't growing as fast as it was approaching that peak. Set the speed limit lower and things get safer, but, once again, the lower they go, the less gains in safety relative to the drop.

Ultimately the problem is that if you can find a decent sweet spot for safety vs. utility (don't forget that the speed limit also determines the carrying capacity of the road, make it too low and your road is a continuous traffic jam), it's going to be far lower than people's comfort level. Ultimately, what happens in real life is that most people drive the speed that they're comfortable with, regardless of the speed limit.

Invasion of privacy??

[msgmonkey]

Call me stupid but how is this an invasion of privacy, it's not like information regarding your drunkenness is being passed over to the authorities.

Mark Hinkle, chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, fears the devices could evolve like seat belts — introduced as voluntary safety features that become lawfully enforced.

Oh yes those evil seat belts made mandatory because they save peoples lives, damn evil big government regulating car safety . Has it come to the point where there has to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything just for the sake of it?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Potor]

It's an invasion of privacy because IT"S MAKING A DECISION FOR YOU (excuse the shouting). It would be as if your car would not start if the seat belt was not done up.

Free agents prefer to make their own - even wrong - decisions.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[TubeSteak]

Oh yes those evil seat belts made mandatory because they save peoples lives, damn evil big government regulating car safety . Has it come to the point where there has to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything just for the sake of it?

People get bitter when laws start going down the slippery slope.
In 32 States, driving without a seat belt is a primary offense.
In how many of those States do you think people were told upfront that the law would eventually become a primary offense?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an invasion of privacy because IT"S MAKING A DECISION FOR YOU (excuse the shouting). It would be as if your car would not start if the seat belt was not done up.

Free agents prefer to make their own - even wrong - decisions.

yeah... but that would describe an invasion of your personal liberty not an invasion of your privacy.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[artor3]

So, it's an invasion of privacy when a machine has a safety interlock? It's an invasion of privacy that I can't run my microwave with the door open? It's an invasion of privacy that my circuit breaker cuts power if I drop a toaster in the bathtub?

No, that's absurd. Those are all safety features, and so would this be. Now, I think mandatory interlocks on all cars would be a waste of money, but acting like it's some intrusion in our lives by Big Brother is dishonest.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

Your kidding right? or are your people really getting dumber every year.

Why aren't you moaning about the break lights, surely letting the people behind you know you are slowing down is an even bigger invasion of privacy! Turn signals, why should other people know which way you are going...

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[mr100percent]

The decision to use seatbelts is taken out of your hands because much of the time, when people are injured in car accidents, my taxpayer money goes towards your ambulance, police, and hospital care. Particlarly if you have no insurance. If you have insurance in the US, it's quite often Medicaid or Medicare, so my taxpayer money is going towards it anyway.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

When those decisions impact the safety of others (drunk driving), then the government has an interest in regulating them. Yes, maybe they shouldn't mandate seat belts. If you are in a crash without a seatbelt, you're just hurting yourself. If you drive drunk, you're hurting others around you.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Potor]

It's not the same thing at all. A safety interlock is there to stop you from interfering with a process underway, or from being damaged by an accident (your toaster case).

In neither case did it prevent you from doing what you want.

A better example would be a microwave door handle that would detect your BMI and then decide whether or not you could open it.

In the case of the car, a decision would be made to stop you from initiating a process (a decision that could be deeply flawed, or even a malfunction).

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[sznupi]

So what's with all the love automatic transmissions?...

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Koby77]

Big government seems to have an anti-Midas touch; instead of turning to gold, everything it touches turns to crap, and that which it regulates costs way more than it should. I realize that life costs money, but I don't need it costing ME even more as punishment because a judge lets repeat DUI offenders off the hook.

How about this: If you don't have the gumption to put drunk drivers in jail, then go ahead and install a safety device on my car. The only catch is that YOU and YOUR ORGANIZATION have pay for it with your own non-taxpayer funded money. If M.A.D.D. wants it so bad, then I say let them.


... *mumbles something about a foolproof society*

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[russotto]

It's an invasion of privacy because IT"S MAKING A DECISION FOR YOU (excuse the shouting).

That's not an invasion of privacy. That's a violation of liberty. But no one really considers liberty to be an end or virtue in itself anymore, so that argument tends to fall flat.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[theY4Kman]

Freedom to travel is an inalienable right, and though there are many laws that apply to driving on public roads, they do not apply to private roads. Forcing someone to not be able to drive drunk on their own property is taking away their freedom.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with car manufacturer's adding this feature without nudges from the government. I'd still complain, but it wouldn't be illegal, I just wouldn't buy that car. The second the government steps in and makes it mandatory is when there's a problem.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhuh... yeah, sorry, but you SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO DECIDE TO DRIVE DRUNK IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Or do you think we should remove laws prohibiting murder because, you know, the government isn't allowing you to make the decision to stab your neighbour?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[superdave80]

It's not that the seat belts are evil, it's that I get fined even if I forget to buckle up. Not buckling up doesn't hurt anyone else, so why am I being punished???

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[BlueStrat]

my taxpayer money goes towards your ambulance, police, and hospital care

That logic could be used to regulate pretty much any & every facet of citizens' lives, as pretty much everything one does affects one's health in some way or another.

"I'm sorry citizen, but you may not legally assemble & protest. Public protest increases your risk of injury from possible violence from other protesters and/or police crowd-control actions, and/or possible long-term health risks from tear gas and thus increases the average healthcare costs to taxpayers."

"I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener"." - "Edgar Friendly" played by Dennis Leary in the movie "Demolition Man"

Strat

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Rhywden]

Tell that to the paramedics who have to scrape up your brain from the street. Or the relatives who care about you.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[twidarkling]

Does the level of offence really matter? If the law says "put on your fucking seatbelt or you're breaking the law" does it matter whether it comes with the rider "but you're only getting dinged for it if you're doing something else wrong too" or "and your ass is ours if we see it"? You're still breaking the law either way. I could accept you denouncing seat belt laws, but getting pissy about whether it's a primary or secondary offence is the most butt-fuck stupid thing I've read today, and I've been on both YouTube and Something Awful.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[zippthorne]

Oh yes those evil seat belts made mandatory because they save peoples lives, damn evil big government regulating car safety . Has it come to the point where there has to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything just for the sake of it?

If it saves one life, it's worth it? Is that the argument? Because once you start telling people what they can and can't do for their own good, you can make peoples lives pretty miserable. But I suppose you don't care if people are slaves as long as they are taken care of. It's a seductive philosophy, and I'm not going to say it's wrong, per se, but I would be very depressed to find it impossible to live any other way.

The libertarian argument for requiring people to wear seat-belts, btw, is not that it saves the life of the wearer, but that a driver with proper seat restraint can maintain control of his vehicle better in an accident, to prevent or reduce injury to the occupants of other vehicles. But under that argument, you're pretty strained for a reason to require passengers to wear them....

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[ironjaw33]

It would be as if your car would not start if the seat belt was not done up.

All new cars in the US are mandated to have a sensor that detects if the driver's seatbelt is buckled while the car is running. If the car is running and the seatbelt is unbuckled, an alarm sounds and lights flash in the dashboard. While this isn't quite as harsh as shutting off the engine if the seatbelt wasn't buckled, it's extremely annoying and incentivizes you to buckle your belt, even when in neutral with the parking brake on.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

, it's not like information regarding your drunkenness is being passed over to the authorities.

For how long will that be true. Police can read your speed from the car's computer now if you have a collision. Couple that with the big errors in making this measurement the way they plan to and you have a big problem. Glucose meters that use real blood samples are maybe plus/minus 15% at best so a reading of 80 could be 68 or 92 or anywhere in between

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Dcnjoe60]

Call me stupid but how is this an invasion of privacy, it's not like information regarding your drunkenness is being passed over to the authorities.

Mark Hinkle, chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, fears the devices could evolve like seat belts — introduced as voluntary safety features that become lawfully enforced.

Oh yes those evil seat belts made mandatory because they save peoples lives, damn evil big government regulating car safety . Has it come to the point where there has to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything just for the sake of it?

Seat belts are a passive restraint system. This device is not passive.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Polumna]

It is still definitely a safety interlock. You do not live in a vacuum and other people are made unsafe by the decision the device would prevent. The drunk driver is the magnetron, not the fat person, in your analogy. Driving drunk is not smoking weed in your basement; the rights of others are inherently affected.

Though I do generally agree with grandparent that the cost benefit analysis on this wouldn't work out.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[danbeck]

I has nothing to do with seat belts and everything to do with the US government telling me how to live, as if it knows best. It does not. I'm far smarter than the average money grubbing, lard-ass, palm pressing, know-it-all congressman. I don't need a group of people like that making sure I'm wiping my ass and eating my veggies. Do you?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Nocuous]

...not buckling up doesn't hurt anyone else, so why am I being punished???

Drivers who wear seatbelts are more likely to remain inside the car during an accident, and to remain in control of the car.

I'd rather you were desperately wrenching the wheel to reduce the effect of the crash than flying senseless through the air after exiting your vehicle through the windshield. You might save someone else's life. And you might not end up in a wheelchair paralyzed from the neck down, supported by public funds (my tax dollars).

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[tragedy]

The level of the offense really does matter. I can't imagine how anyone could think otherwise. You seem to be implying that it would be ok if it were a capital offense. After all, "you're still breaking the law either way".

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing in TFA or summary that says the car wouldn't start up.
If seatbelt, door and key sensors in American cars are anything to go by, it would probably mean yet another annoying bong. =(

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Charcharodon]

Invasion of privacy is not just people seeing your wiener while you pee or snooping around your house when you are not home.

It's applies to anything that acuses you of something or demands proof of something before you are allowed to preceed. You know the whole you are innocent until proven guilty thing and all.

This set up assumes you are guilty, ie the car won't start, until you prove otherwise.

Besides cars have gotten annoying enough already, you want to add another $1000 to the price of a car to save what 9000 people a year? At 7 million cars a year that would be 7 billion dollars a year. That's a round $750,000 per person "saved" per year.

I'm thinking that the grand bulk of the 9000 are actually giant idiots and are not worth $10 much less $750,000. So if we narrow it down even more to those that are "worth" it that drives up the price per person even higher,let's say 10% now we are talking about $7,500,000 dollars per "save"

That's the problem with softheaded types they don't think it through. A seat belt is an easy fix. It works on the very cheap. I'm thinking there are much better things to spend our money on. Like mandatory birth control for all mouthbreathers. Which would probably take care of the whole 9000 per year killed along with a whole rash of other social ills.

Besides what's to keep a drunk from having their kids touch the wheel to start the car? There is a great side affect, so instead of the kids being parentless they are now dead too.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[noidentity]

Agreed, it's not an invasion of privacy; it's in invasion of property. They are attempting to dictate how your equipment operates, under the flimsy excuse that it'll eliminate 9000 deaths a year, and that there is no other way of achieving that which is less-invasive.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Has it come to the point where there has to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything just for the sake of it?

It's been that way for quite a while, from all sides of the political spectrum.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

you want to add another $1000 to the price of a car to save what 9000 people a year? At 7 million cars a year that would be 7 billion dollars a year. That's a round $750,000 per person "saved" per year.

I would be surprised if for that added 1000 dollars per car you can prevent more then 5% of traffic deaths, let alone 100%

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[sincewhen]

You've gotta love the USA:

"I demand my right to needlessly die if I am involved in a car accident!"

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[nosferatu1001]

Except in A&E costs if you have an accident and you dont also have health insurance* when you ARE hurting others.

*another batshit idea from teh US - denying health service unless you can afford them.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Caue]

when it costs money to the state to clean up for the mess you made (ambulance, ER, etc.). Maybe you have money to pay for your expenses, but if you don't 911 will still be called and whatever is left of you will still get the care you need so you can remain as a burden to the state. Oh but I pay may taxes - maybe the taxes could go down if the state didn't have to put so many people working so that dumbasses like you could get launched of their cars and still sue the authorities for an ambulance that never came.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[superdave80]

Wow, really? If I am at a point in an accident that the only thing keeping me inside the car is my seatbelt, I can assure you that I have ZERO control over the car at that point...

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[superdave80]

Uh, neither the paramedics or my relatives are physically hurt at that point.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[superdave80]

I have no idea what A&E is. As far as I know, that is the Arts & Entertainment channel.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[superdave80]

Your entire rant is irrelevant to my statement. Who is PHYSICALLY HURT by me not wearing a seatbelt???

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Half-pint HAL]

In a crash, the human body can become a projectile weapon. The biggest threat is to other passengers in the same car, but a human being can pass through a windscreen if travelling with enough momentum. Not to mention convertibles.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[mark-t]

Not buckling up doesn't hurt anyone else

Actually, it does.... only to a very small extent, however.

By putting on a seatbelt, you are taking a single step, however minute, to being subconsciously more prepared for a collision, and as a result, you are more likely to drive defensively, and you should be better able to respond to situations which could otherwise have caused an accident, even if it wouldn't have been your fault. The end result is that not only are you increasing your own safety by putting on a seatbelt (something that's easy to show with empirical evidence), but by reducing the likelihood that you could be involved in an accident that may not be your own fault through basic defensive driving practices, you are also improving the safety of others.

Of course, again... the degree to which this actually affects the safety of other people is very minor... particularly for people for whom putting on a seat belt is simply something done out of habit rather than out of any recognition for why the requirement to wear it actually exists in the first place.

It also hurts other people in a more tangible way, albeit only financially, in that if you *do* end up in an accident where you are seriously injured, then medical procedures may have to be performed which cost money and can increase overall health care costs for everybody.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Caue]

people who can't be attended at a local hospital because you are being treated for being to damn stupid to wear a seatbelt. It's the same with rollercoasters and stuff: the theme parks require you to wear the belts and other safety measures simply because hurting you would cause them financial losses. financial losses = bankrupcy or financial difficulties = people unemployed. but that's beside the point: you think the only way of harming others is by causing them physical damage? if my taxes are being spent on scrapping rednecks of the road, I'd like the government to do something about it. So, regardless of what you may think, yes, the government must protect people from their own stupidity for the sake of others.

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Nocuous]

Wow, really? If I am at a point in an accident that the only thing keeping me inside the car is my seatbelt, I can assure you that I have ZERO control over the car at that point...

Sorry, that's nonsense. A seat belt keeps you from being ejected, and what are your hands doing? Hmm, clutching the wheel. You will seriously maintain that you're in no more control in your seat, clutching the wheel, than flying through the air (or getting rolled over by your own ride)? Really?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[Anonymous Coward]

If the car is forcibly trying to eject me through the window, I HAVE ALREADY CRASHED!!! You didn't even seem to read your own statement:

...or getting rolled over by your own ride

What control do I have over a car that is rolling over?

Re:Invasion of privacy??

[nosferatu1001]

Accident and Emergency

Clean hands?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I used one of those hand wipes that contained alcohol?

Re:Clean hands?

[Opportunist]

Or how about people working in a bar? Because, well, if some soap and water gets it off, where's the problem for the drunk guest to go to the restroom first to "come clean"?

Re:Clean hands?

[twidarkling]

Er, from what I understand, this isn't just testing for residue on your fingers, this is actually testing blood level concentration. There's a lot of comments on here that seem to think only sloppy drunks who spill their drinks are the ones being caught by this, and if that were true, this would be the most useless system ever. Washing hands isn't going to do it, serving drinks isn't going to do it. Those wipes with alcohol, or alcohol-based hand sanitizer might do it if used shortly before the test, though.

Wrong way to think about it

[RightwingNutjob]

This is taking the entirely wrong approach here. The thing I never quite understood about ignition interlocks is why repeat DUI offenders are even allowed to drive a car at all. If after $N_MAX_OFFENSES you still can't control yourself, I don't trust you with a car, period. What this idea says is that because we've decided in giving an infinite number of second chances to the small fraction of the population that can't realistically be expected to act responsibly on their own, we're now going to impose an expensive mandatory new toy on everyone else, out of their pockets, and if the thing screws up and gives a false alarm, too bad.

If the court can order you to pay for an ignition interlock after a DUI, then it can sure as hell order you to sell your car, period.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[ACS Solver]

Absolutely. Drunk driving isn't close to the leading cause of preventable deaths, but I think that it's rather easily preventable. Just man up and institute real penalties for that. First offense, considerable fine, second time, permanent revocation of driving license.

I don't get the apparent sympathy towards drunk drivers. It's easy not to drive drunk. People who can't control themselves and do drive drunk are a danger, and need to be treated accordingly, as in not letting them drive. I'm aware that there are countries with lots of cars, the US first and foremost, and where cars are hugely important in some regions. To that I say, the people who really need cars still have a duty to use them responsibly. If they can't, they need to find an alternative.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I can easily think of scenarios where it's not so simple. It might seem to you that it's just "sell your car", but depending where the person lives, it might mean that he/she loses a job as there is no other transportation to get to work, thus loses place to live, etc.

So, what would we as society do about those carless people?
The infrastructure is not necessarily ready for this.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Stanislav_J]

Perfect solution -- I mean, it's not like they could borrow a car, or have one registered in someone else's name. Oh, wait...

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[karnal]

I have a more personal account of someone who had an interlock on their car and has flown right - mostly due to life changes and learning that drinking and driving affects more than just their life. The interlock devices can save lives - but them alone won't teach someone that drinking and driving is wrong.

And let's face it - most places in the USA you NEED a car to get to work at the very least. It's either that or you go the other route and just drive illegally (i.e. no insurance, no license, car not registered etc.) It happens. Better to have the person be on the legal side with an interlock than the alternative, I say.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already pretty much how it works in most states. First offense you are fined thousands of dollars and loose your license for a month or more. Plus lawyer fees, because if you have any intention of keeping your license at all you need a lawyer.

The problem isn't that the penalties aren't high enough. In fact I think in some cases they are too high. .08 is lower than you'd think, and Breathalyzers are far less reliable than you'd think. Most fatalities aren't the .08 people who had 1 beer too many. Its the people driving with extreme blood alcohol levels repeatedly.

Basically its the alcoholics. Or "drunk driving addicts." We need to stop flooding the court system with responsible adults who had a drink too many and instead focus on getting these drunk driving addicts off the roads. The problem with revoking a drivers license is many times they will drive anyways. In a way I think ignition interlocks are the perfect solution, because they physically won't let you drive drunk. Basically its a lot more of a guarantee that the offender won't be driving than just revoking a driver's license.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[icebike]

Its pretty simple not to drink and drive.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

The apparent sympathy is due in part to the fact that the legal limits are very low. A man who splits a bottle of wine with his wife at dinner may very well have a BAC above 0.08%, but very few people would consider the guy drunk at the time. In addition, there is no legal distinction made between someone with a BAC of 0.10% (who would have been a legal driver at the dawn of the DUI age thirty years ago, when the first limits were set around 0.15%) and someone with a BAC of 0.30% (who is a menace to society).

The problem is generally not the average guy; it's a relatively small pool of chronic drunks who drive.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Gordonjcp]

Well, if they lose their job they don't need to drive to work, do they? If they're on unemployment benefit they can't afford to drive anyway, so logically that stops them from drink-driving.

Do you expect me to be sympathetic? They chose to drive drunk, so they get to live with what happens when you drive drunk. If that means they lose their licence, their job, their car and their house, tough shit. They shouldn't have driven drunk, then.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[ACS Solver]

I may not have the best perspective here, as someone who doesn't drive, but why would you want even someone with a BAS of 0.08% at the wheel? The effects do vary greatly per person, but 0.08% is enough for many people to affect attention span and fine muscle coordination. That's already a person that is not at their best capacity due to alcohol.

At least in the local news I get, drunk drivers tend not to be chronic drunks, but rather people who had a few drinks at a party or such and believed themselves to be in "good enough" shape to drive.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Peeteriz]

Around here first DUI offense is ~$1000 + licence revoked for six months; repeat offense is 10-15 days in jail + confiscation of car + permanent revocation of driving licence.

When it was implemented a few years ago, it really did wonders in changing the attitude of people I know.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mr100percent]

Excellent point. In places like Sweden (I think), it's illegal to drive with the flu, because it's proven that they have reaction times more sluggish than even drunk drivers with a BAC of 0.08%

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

Because someone with a very low BAC isn't really a danger to others. And if you'll watch the news carefully, you'll note that most of those drinks-at-a-party folks are busted at roadblocks, not on the road, because their driving isn't impaired enough to attract police attention.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[thisnamestoolong]

I'm sure that a 0.08% BAC does decrease coordination and attention, but so do many, many other things. Like being a little bit tired. Or being pissed about that fight you had with your girlfriend. There does need to be a reasonable distinction between people that are barely over the limit and the guys that need to be carried to their car because they cannot walk straight.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[RightwingNutjob]

It's not like they can't borrow a car without an interlock.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[thisnamestoolong]

This. A 0.08% BAC will theoretically make you more likely to get into an accident, but no more than if you hadn't gotten quite enough sleep the night before. It is insane to punish a driver with a BAC of 0.10% in the same manner that you would punish the 0.30% guy.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Vanderhoth]

I have to assume you most likely don't need to drive because you live in a city with good transit, are always the person bumming a ride from someone who does drive or are a shut-in that never goes anywhere anyway. Where I live transit isn't an option and a cab would easily cost me $60 to get home. If I go out to dinner with my wife one of us has to drive. After two glasses of wine, a full meal and several hours; driving is not a problem for me.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

So, you want to trust that people who are unable to abstain from drinking "just a little too much" (even when obviously being sober at the start), will be reliably able to abstain from drinking definitely too much? (while already quite drunk, in the process)

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Ornlu]

No one contests that a "too drunk to stand" driver is a problem. The issue is that "Impaired" is a pretty damn vague term. Sure a BAC of 0.08% slows your reaction time. But so does less sleep, or looking at the hot girl jogging on the side walk, or age, or any of 400+ other things.

One person's reaction speed is not the same as another. This means that what is "impaired" for one driver might be a better-than-average day for another driver. This means that the law has had to pick an arbitrary amount of alcohol that is supposed to represent "impaired" abilities, but in reality there is a whole spectrum of fitness to drive.

I'm just saying if there was a concrete standard for "impaired" or "not impaired", the situation would actually be black and white; in reality, its a gray gray world.

According to the info my GF got in Al-Anon meetings, the vast majority of drunk driving casualties are by repeat offenders (or at least chronic drunks) with BACs of 0.20+, not the had-three-drinks type.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mvdwege]

0.08% is empathically not a 'very low' BAC. Your example of splitting a bottle shows just what is wrong with your example: that's three glasses! Unless you do that over an entire evening (4 hours mininum), you will end up with a BAC that provably has a detrimental influence on your capacity to operate a vehicle.

And would you really want people to not get caught at roadblocks but at the site of an accident?

Mart

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[thisnamestoolong]

I think that the punishments actually need to be more lenient for some and stricter for others. Let's imagine two scenarios here:

John Q. Public had one beer too many and got pulled over on the way home from the restaurant. He blew a 0.09% on the breathalyser. Realistically, he is no more a threat to other drivers that someone who is a little sleepy. He should get, at most, a hefty ticket ($200-$400) for his first offence.

Drunky McShitface, on the other hand, felt that it was OK to down 17 beers and then try to drive home. When he was pulled over, he blew a 0.35% then fell over and vomited on the cop. He should be arrested, thrown in jail for 3-12 months, and never be eligible to get his licence again.

The first scenario is a mistake that anyone could make. The second amounts to attempted murder, and is inexcusable.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

0.08%, "very low", seriously? It's now suddenly about "very few people would consider the guy drunk", you really believe that?! (the same people who, in 80+% of cases, consider themselves to in the top 50% of drivers?)

With all the evidence how poor grip on ourselves we have, especially while intoxicated. Ever heard about placebo? How quick we are to convince ourselves of something we really want? Did you know that split-brain patients appear almost normal? Did you ever notice how big of a myth the popular idea of "self" is? (while we only convince ourselves that our memories are good, and we are in fact basically closer to our peers than to ourselves at some different live stages) There's a very localized brain trauma which makes people blind, without them realizing it!

We did a test once, me and buddies, after some wine (was around 0.05% per head), with a bike on a closed terrain. While taking care to be introspective, watchful of own actions, et al. The realization was frakking scary.

After that we agreed 0.02% is not too bad.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

If you would like to eliminate everything that could make someone an imperfect driver at the level of a 0.08 BAC, you'll need to ban radios, cell phones, and all passengers other than those dedicated to serving as additional eyes for the driver. You're absolutely right that it's a detraction from someone's driving ability. The question is whether something detracts sufficiently that we should charge them with a felony for it.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

You couldn't ride a bike after two relatively small drinks?

I don't drive after more than two drinks, actually. But I don't think that the third would make me a sufficiently dangerous driver that I should be charged with a felony.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Gordonjcp]

The first scenario is a mistake that anyone could make.

The mistake is to drive after drinking *at all*. If you're going to drive, don't drink. If you're going to drink, don't drive. All this pish about "oh 0.08% BAC makes you less impaired than being a bit tired" is a lot of bloody nonsense. If you're so tired that your driving is impaired don't drive. It's not a hard concept to grasp - if your concentration or reaction time is impaired, leave the car alone.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[need4mospd]

How about mandatory PRISON time on the first offense. Paying money is just an inconvenience. Missing 1 month of work makes an impact.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

Again, "relatively small drinks" - do you just love to play it down? (and it wasn't about not being able, but about noticing - this time - what style of driving, what approach / attitude we tended to adopt)

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's face it - most places in the USA you NEED a car to get to work at the very least

you should have thought of that before driving while drunk

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

Seriously, so many people acting like they never experienced the effects of alcohol. Did you never notice how continuing to drink is easier once you're drunk? (it's not only reaction time BTW, it's also how alcohol changes you)

Somebody who is unable even to abstain from driving drunk (when two, which is apparently already enough, becomes three) seems to be quite impaired.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Rhywden]

That's what we're doing in Germany - my brother had to go without a driver's license for over a year due to a DUI incident.
During that year he also had to undergo repeated drug tests and visit a quite difficult psychology exam and thus prove that he wasn't likely to drive drunk again.

If he's caught again it'll be next to impossible for him to regain his driver's license.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[IICV]

The thing I never quite understood about ignition interlocks is why repeat DUI offenders are even allowed to drive a car at all.

Fundamentally, we let people become repeat DUI offenders because our public infrastructure is absolute shit.

Look: consider someone who drinks and drives, and gets arrested and hauled into court. What do we do with them? In general, there's about two options, which get mixed and matched:

1. The judge may force them to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, or a sister 12 step program.
2. The judge may suspend their driver's license.

What happens in case 1? Well, AA has about the same five-year success rate as going untreated, so it's essentially a useless option; I haven't heard any stats on its sister programs, which probably means that they're equally worthless (that's the thing about these stats - all those organizations have them, so if they don't bandy them about you know they're shitty).

Furthermore, there's some constitutional problems involved in a judge forcing someone to go to AA; it's a fundamentally religious organization with kind of ridiculous Christian overtones, which rather seems to violate people's first amendment rights. I know they try to get around it by saying "oh the higher power in step 2 doesn't have to be God!" but come on, that's a bullshit excuse and you know it. Why don't we have a proper, secular, working treatment for alcoholism? Because nobody feels like investing public money in it; they're all worthless alkies, after all.

If the judge tries option number 2, in this country he's essentially consigned the drunk driver to losing his job. Public transit is shit, alternate transit is generally unsupported (you try going anywhere on a bike most places in the USA - it's fucking scary), and walking is generally unfeasible, since a 20 minute drive would turn in to at least an hour long walk.

So, what's left to do? The judge basically has to let the guy keep his car and his license. Most states have a sort of restricted license deal, where you're still allowed to drive, but only to and from work - which works great, as long as the alcoholic doesn't oh I don't know get drunk again and decide to go for a drive.

Basically, we let people who drink and drive keep on drinking and driving because the alternative is to invest in infrastructure like public transit and rehabilitation programs, and that's just socialist - we can't have any of that society stuff here in the USA, oh no!

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[twidarkling]

This is already pretty much how it works in most states.

Except for the multiple accounts I have from US friends, and several studies of recidivism rates to back it up, that show a lot of DUIs do it 3 or 4 times, and the real repeat offenders hit double digits on offenses. So yes, it is that the penalties aren't high enough, because it's not being enforced at those levels.

However, if this system works, I think it'd go a long way to solving the problem, both reducing deaths and lower legal congestion.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

Well, that's what would get you a 0.05%. If you'd like to make it a felony to drive with any alcohol in your system at all, go ahead and see what your electoral success is.

BTW, on a totally different note, do you know any way to go from the front-page notification (Reply to...) to a fully-expanded comment thread without having to expand each one in turn?

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[twidarkling]

Usually that distinction comes from a judge who decides how much of a penalty to apply after the person was caught and charged. And since different BAC levels affect different people different amounts, I'd rather that a limit be lower to catch people more easily affected, and catch a couple people who are only "slightly" breaking the law, then raise it up and let more people who suck cheese at driving and are 3 sheets to the wind after a highball drive around and run me over.

My opinion as a dedicated pedestrian? All drivers fucking suck, just to different degrees. Pick an easily corrected shitty driving behaviour, fix it, and move on to another. This is a good step.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sjames]

You can play the game of perfection, but you'll then have to specify no driving right after a meal, nor too close to bed time, nor too soon after getting up. Certainly no driving after getting really upsetting news. After all, why would I want people driving if they're even the tiniest bit off of their peak performance?

The old standard of 0.12 was set based on advice from experts as to what level would have a significant (as in measurable) impact on driving performance.

Many people (diabetics for example) will read above 0.00 even if they never drink. The breathalyzer cannot distinguish ketones from alcohol.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

Yes, yes, but it's every friggin' time "just a small drink" (and you want to just trust the judgment of people who are at large unable to be honest even about such thing, even before themselves? Oh, it's suddenly about electoral success?!?!)

(@comments, seems to be one of many things which were making D2 quite great, in the end, but got axed ... what is this, a misplaced effort to train us (Pavlov-style) to clicking and reloading, so ads will get more impression?)

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[thisnamestoolong]

That's all well and good in a perfect world, but that is completely unrealistic. Try calling your boss and telling him/her that you will be unable to make it in because you are a little sleepy and can't drive. Furthermore, it strikes me as insane to completely ignore the question of degree. That would be akin to levying the same penalty to a guy with a gram of pot as you would to the guy that was caught with 40 kilos. It just doesn't make sense on any level.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[demonlapin]

I don't think that a 0.08% represents a menace to society, at least as a bright line. You obviously do. I don't think there's any reason to believe that one of us will convince the other, and when you get to that point in this kind of discussion, "see you at the polls" is pretty much what it comes down to.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[dr2chase]

My understanding of what it takes to get me to 0.08% (100 kilos, drink a couple of beers a day, for medicinal purposes, of course) tells me that I don't want people driving at that blood alcohol level. It takes four beers to get me to 0.08 (says Wikipedia); if I have two, I'm not driving, not till I have sat for a while to digest it. This is not "just like being sick" or "just like being tired" -- this is really impaired.

I am pretty well stunned to see, again and again and again, excuses for careless driving. I see enough bad driving from allegedly sober people (tailgating, in the dark, in the rain, with two lanes to the left someone could use to pass, and best of all, grabbing the steering wheel at the top, so that if that airbag goes off, there will definitely be broken bones), we don't need to liquor them up on top of that.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[dr2chase]

Try calling your boss and telling him/her that you will be unable to make it in because you are a little sleepy and can't drive.

It depends. New parent, people tend to cut you a lot of slack. Make a habit of it, maybe not. And depending on the job, he might not want you there anyway. Are there really no other choices for getting there? I can ride my bike (*), I can walk or bike to transit and take the bus (slower than biking, but it's an option), I can perhaps carpool, I can take a cab.

I think, also, that we need to be careful to define our terms. According to the Wikipedia BAC charts, and my experience with how I feel after drinking, I am in no mood to drive at 0.04% BAC (not exactly happy at 0.02, either). I've been that tired, but it takes serious lack of sleep, not just up a little late reading a good book.

(*) Not necessarily the safest for me, but I won't hurt anyone else, which makes it a more responsible choice, right?

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

Not as far as I am concerned. As I said, 0.02% from my place turned out to be not too bad.

But at least you basically admit how 0.08% is from feel good populism (and one really wonders what can be represented, in larger picture, by votes of drivers who are unable for something so damn simple as abstaining from alcohol)

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they get jail the next time. So?

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Strange Ranger]

Tell that to thousands upon thousands of bar owners who have no public transportation to and from their establishment. Tell that to the guy who just wants to MEET a friend for a couple beers. Having one or two beers and driving is totally acceptable to me. Most of the morons out there on their cell phones are far less capable than your average "I had 2 beers with dinner" driver.
 
If you really want to solve the problem your way (one drink = no driving) and do it realistically then you need to address the actual problem... It's a transportation problem, not a drinking problem. Just about everybody on earth drinking a beer tonight would like to be able to walk out of the bar and flag a ride home (or wherever). Are YOU going to pick them up?
 
Seriously good public transportation. Available everywhere, even to the karaoke bar in the sticks. That's the real solution. To a lot of things.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Dr. Scatterplot]

I think this would be more useful as a vehicle for social pressure. Imagine all cars have these. You've been to a party and had a few. You get in your car, thinking, "maybe I've had too many". Your car tells you, yup, you have. At that point, you can either drive anyway (to the chagrin of any passengers with you), or find another solution. Better, you're a passenger with someone who either fails the test, or doesn't have the test turned on. You have a definite and quantitative reminder of the risk you may be taking.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Dcnjoe60]

If the court can order you to pay for an ignition interlock after a DUI, then it can sure as hell order you to sell your car, period.

Unless you are in bankruptcy court, the court (really the state) cannot force you to sell your personal property. One of those funny constitutional things, you know.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Dcnjoe60]

Absolutely. Drunk driving isn't close to the leading cause of preventable deaths, but I think that it's rather easily preventable. Just man up and institute real penalties for that. First offense, considerable fine, second time, permanent revocation of driving license.

I don't get the apparent sympathy towards drunk drivers. It's easy not to drive drunk. People who can't control themselves and do drive drunk are a danger, and need to be treated accordingly, as in not letting them drive. I'm aware that there are countries with lots of cars, the US first and foremost, and where cars are hugely important in some regions. To that I say, the people who really need cars still have a duty to use them responsibly. If they can't, they need to find an alternative.

There is no sympathy towards drunk driving. However, it is the only law on the books that gives you criminal penalties because of the potential to do harm to others instead of actually doing harm. If you drive home drunk, and nobody is injured, and there is no property damage, what is the justification of the penalties you propose?

Drunk driving penalties should figure in on the damage/sentence when there is actual damage, not just because there is a potential that there might be harm done.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[himurabattousai]

This is only partially correct. I'm for getting rid of most of the leniency that comes with drunk-driving "punishments" handed down these days. There is no excuse for the unbelievable lack of forethought that comes with getting behind the wheel of a car that you can't adequately control.

However, so long as we rely on inaccurate breathalyzers (none of which are accurate, fwiw) for determining who is drunk and who is not, leniency is absolutely called for to counter the grossly wrong way in which DUI cases are handled. People talk a lot about punishing DUI offenders as is done in Europe, but Europe doesn't screw around with breathalyzers.

I know it's been thrown around here before, but this should be enough to make anyone who thinks that our current system of evidence gathering is good enough change his mind.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Already said but its worth repeating: Those people caught having a few too many drinks are most likely caught because of roadblocks and DUI quotas, not actual poor driving.

The bottom line is that drivers are not perfect. We accept people driving without perfect vision. People make mistakes. People talk on cell phones, talk with people in the car, yell at kids, listen to the radio etc. etc. Some people just plain suck at driving. It is my belief that .08 is low enough that it does not pose enough measurable risk to be doing the kind of punishments we give these people. .12%+, yes, that is bad. These people are a menace to society and need to have the book thrown at them. But I think .08 to .12 should be along the lines of a speeding ticket or maybe a little worse. A "don't do this again" type of illegal, not a $10,000 + lose your license and not be able to get to work kind of illegal.

We need to focus on BAD DRIVING. Not factors that contribute to bad driving. If someone can't stay in their lane and almost hits 10 people in a mile, that behavior should result in a revoked license or at least drivers training whether that person is drunk or just sucks at driving. Too many times it seems like its a oh, they are sober its ok. Continue your poor driving.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[drtsystems]

My opinion as a dedicated driver? All pedestrians suck, just to different degrees.

My car can kill you while barely slowing down. And if it does my life is over as I know it. So don't step out in the middle of the street when I am coming at you at 50mph and hope I have the reaction time to avoid you.

The bottom line is America gets around in cars. If your walking on a college campus or something then yea, pedestrians should be expected and drivers need to watch out for them. But on the other hand if you are walking to work along Hawthorne Blvd in LA, then you need to realize that drivers are not expecting to see pedestrians (even if there is a crosswalk) and that you are the exception so you need to watch the hell out, even if you technically are crossing at the legal time.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[russotto]

Seriously, so many people acting like they never experienced the effects of alcohol. Did you never notice how continuing to drink is easier once you're drunk?

Sure, when I'm sober, I can't _continue_ to drink, I have to START drinking. Aside from that, I've never noticed the phenomenon you refer to.

Somebody who is unable even to abstain from driving drunk (when two, which is apparently already enough, becomes three) seems to be quite impaired.

I believe you're confusing "unwilling" with "unable".

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

Bravo, with the first sentence you just said that any amount of alcohol makes one drunk (though I'm not sure if it's worth anything, since you apparently never did it, never noticed how easily the next bottle gets opened once it gets rolling - when also the difference between "unwilling" and "unable" ceases to matter ... or do you suggest those people purposefully drive intoxicated?)

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mvdwege]

Just because other impairments to driving exist does not excuse driving with a BAC that measurably impairs your ability to drive. Or would you want to stop the government prosecuting assault and battery because rape and murder still happen? Same non-sequitur. You're either stupid or trolling.

Stop making excuses, stop drinking so much before you drive.

Mart

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mvdwege]

The fact that you are counting on reaction time marks you as a bad driver, period. A good driver does not rely on reaction time, but uses insight to avoid bad situations. If you're on a piece of roadway that may have pedestrians suddenly crossing, especially if you can't see them coming, you have no business driving 50.

Mart

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mvdwege]

Two glasses of wine on a full stomach and several hours means your BAC is probably around 0.02%. Yes, that is safe to drive; not even on a roadblock are they going to make trouble for you. Bit of a strawman, isn't it?

Mart

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[drtsystems]

Using that logic one should creep along at 2mph everywhere. My point is that on most roadways pedestrians are NOT expected to be suddenly crossing (even at marked crosswalks). Yet "dedicated pedestrians" probably do not realize this as they do not drive, so they are only in tune to what they see as a pedestrian.

A perfect example is a left turn on a busy 5+ lane road. A pedestrian crossing technically has the right of way. But on a busy road with sparse pedestrian traffic, that is not on a drivers mind because a driver may only see a pedestrian in this sort of situation once out of every 500 left turns, so the driver waits for an opening and turns. There is no such thing as a driver who can see anything and there are plenty of dangers that a good driver has to worry about that happen far more often than a pedestrian popping out of nowhere (i.e. speeding driver running a red light)

Point being when a pedestrian is walking in a driver's world they need to watch out and respect that cars are not going to be thinking about them.

Now on the flip side when a driver is in an area with heavy pedestrian traffic, such as a residential neighborhood, they do need to slow the fuck down and pay extra attention to the side of the road for kids jumping out etc.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[jpmorgan]

And how is the law going to stop you from buying a car again?

The simple fact of the matter is, in today's world, most people need a car to get by. If you tell people they can't own a car, they're just going to own and drive illegaly. They've got bills to pay, and are unlikely to get caught.

Ignition interlocks may not satisfy your moral righteousness, but they accomplish the goal (i.e., keeping drunk people off of roads) far more effectively.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[krazytekn0]

It's called getting your license revoked and it happens quite a bit. But these people still can get in a car and turn a key.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[nosferatu1001]

Confiscation then? And a court order preventing you from purchasing another?

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[karnal]

Well, as someone who has had his share of screw ups, I'm always glad to see that someone has the totally objective viewpoint that you do.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1997, the judge didn't make me sell my car after several DUI's - but I sold it anyway. I didn't trust MYSELF!

Over the previous twenty years I had been a hazard to myself and everyone else on the road. Miraculously I had physically injured no one but myself. For the next thirteen years, I had no car and did not drive. It wasn't until I had three years of good sobriety that I got a license again.

Still, I don't like the idea of these sensors. As an electronic designer, I can foresee many problems implementing this in a successful manner. Any system whose purpose is to shut down another system in response to a sensor's report has the potential for failure.

Example: I don't drink, ever. No alcohol in my mouthwash, cough medicine, etc. My car won't start. Why? I'm not wearing gloves and I have no alcohol in my body. It's a failed sensor. I'm stuck in my driveway (or miles from home) with no recourse but to call a tow truck.

Of course the above example would not occur if the system was designed to allow normal operation in the event of a total sensor failure; but if the purpose of the system is to prevent drunk driving, well, then, I imagine a failed sensor could cause the design to suspect sabotage and shut the car down.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Dcnjoe60]

Confiscation then? And a court order preventing you from purchasing another?

Again, if you are willing to throw out the constitution and the rights it grants, the courts can do anything they want. However, most people would be opposed to creating such a system as they value the rights the constitution gives them.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate drunk driving, and am frustrated that in many cases penalties are too late. But taking away the right to drive can amount to condeming someone to a lifetime of unemployment, which is likely too harsh.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's easy not to drive drunk."

? It's very easy. If you drink, your control goes out the door, including ALL PRIOR INTENT. The very nature of drinking impinges on your decision making process. You may not start out intending to drive, you may have no intention to drive, but you drink, and then you find yourself in a situation, warranted or not, to drive. And you do so, because you have piss poor decision making--the exact same conditions leading to an accident led you into the car too. Just as intending to one drink may end up as having 2 or more, drunk driving does lead from this as well.

The mere fact you and the prior poster don't understand this is ridiculous. You don't understanding the effects of alcohol, or alcoholics for that matter. I don't drink, and I don't ever drink to get drunk, but if I wanted to enjoy alcohol on a regular basis (I only drink 1 drink ever a day and that occurs max 5 times year) (seriously, I'm really boring, I've been piss ass drunk twice to test my limits, and my personality doesn't change, my mentality clamps down and I get more restrictive, and only my physical nature changes (typical decline in motor skills), and that's unusual from what I've seen amongst the people I have seen get drunk), I'd see if I could buy a time-locked safe, where I throw my keys in, and they do not come out until morning absolutely, there is no password or tumbler, way too easily circumvent.

I agree with the repeat DUI offender thing, but your lack of understanding of what drinking is, from a social disease to an actual one, is astounding. There are many people that are functional drunks too--you encounter them every day and don't know it. Their BAC is through the roof, and you'd only know if you did indiscriminate sweeps. You walk by them every day. You drive by them every day. They pass by your malls and homes, every day. Then one day, not changigng their imbibing habits, but because their body can't process the same alcohol for whatever reason (deficiency, stress, etc.; similar to having a bad day where you can't lift the same weight you've lifted day upon day prior), they actually become functionally drunk, and bam, they are in an accident.

"People who can't control themselves"

That would be nearly anyone who drinks, sir. It's in the nature of the intoxicant. It's not a character flaw like you and MADD want to make it out, so you can beat down a segment of a population. It's part of the god damn drug process in a typical human body, and could also be seen as one of the reasons WHY people drink, to lose that control.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just sieze the car, as it was a tool used in the crime of DUI? (or do we give bank robbers back their guns, after they serve their prison time?)

If you have a history of DUI, and DUI meant whatever car you are driving is now being auctiond by the police, I'd think that would make it harder to get another car to DUI with.

The problem is that even states that have laws allowing such a thing find that it is unpopular - apparently Juries fall for the "but how can he get his life back in order if he can't get to work" argument, and car forfeiture for DUI is very uncommon.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[mvdwege]

Starting out with a false dilemma is not helping your cause much.

On most roadways where pedestrain traffic is not separated from vehicular traffic, a driver that is not expecting crossing pedestrians is a bad driver, period.

Mart

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[russotto]

Bravo, with the first sentence you just said that any amount of alcohol makes one drunk

Only if you make it a binary thing (sober v. drunk). What I said is that the first drink make you something other than sober. If I have one drink, I'm definitely not sober, but I'm not drunk in the colloquial sense either. And I've never noticed that it gets easier to have more alcohol as I get more intoxicated. Perhaps that happens to those more susceptible to alcoholism.

Re:Wrong way to think about it

[sznupi]

You made it a binary choice, involved "sober" ... and you know, even most alcoholics claim things you do.

Hand Sanitizer

[Anonymous Coward]

FfffffUuuuUuuuuu

engine coolant

[meatplow]

Can this system detect the difference because my car just overheated and I spilled cool and all over my hands.

Re:engine coolant

[donotlizard]

Exactly. And my blood has a naturally high alcohol content, which could be another problem.

Re:engine coolant

[icebike]

Can this system detect the difference because my car just overheated and I spilled cool and all over my hands.

I presume you meant Spilled Coolant. (I've seen people who oozed cool, but none that spilled it.).

Not being a chemist, I'm not sure if Ethylene glycol or Propylene glycol is detected as alcohol or not.

You may have meant windshield washer fluid, which often contains methanol. Methanol is seldom used for engine coolant
additives any more.

Re:engine coolant

[tragedy]

Not just ethylene glycol. It might or might not be detected by this system, but What about gasoline with ethanol blended into it? What if you're a drinker, and you've just taken your empties in for recycling and you got ethanol on your hands from leftover stuff in cans and bottles?

Aside from those false positives, what if it turns out that sensitive chemical sensors don't maintain their accuracy well sitting in direct sunlight in an environment too hot for human life? Ever leave your car out in the sun on a hot, sunny summer day? Anything in there exposed to direct sunlight can get up to 50 degrees celcius. In winter, it's generally below zero. How is this device supposed to remain calibrated? How much per year will it cost to have this extra car part inspected and calibrated?

If we knew more about how the sensors were supposed to work, we might have a better idea. From the linked article, I can't really tell if it's supposed to be detecting alcohol secreted in sweat, or using some particular wavelength of light to detect alcohol in the bloodstream somehow (like those oxygen monitors), or somehow monitoring blood vessels and pulse to try to detect alcohol by secondary vascular effects, etc., etc.

Aside from that, what about people who need to run their car while legally drunk or they'll die? Consider the drunk who doesn't have anyone else to drive her home and doesn't have money for a cab and there's no public transit. Also, it's the dead of winter. Will this interlock stop the engine from starting, or will it let the engine start but lock the transmission somehow? If it's the first one, then the drunk freezes to death huddled in her car. Now, consider someone partying in the woods. He and his friends are totally drunk, but not planning on going anywhere, then along comes a bear, or a forest fire, whatever. They run for the safety of the car, but can't go anywhere. In the bear scenario, the bear eats them after tearing the cars roof off. In the fire scenario, they make a run for it, but wind conditions mean that the fire is spreading faster than they can run. Sure it would be illegal for the people in these examples to drive (it may even be illegal for the one freezing to death to run the car just to get heat since "operating" a motor vehicle is a vague term). The examples are also statistical outliers. It's still an automatic death sentence in those cases, however, and some like that would happen.

Re:engine coolant

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Most places acknowledge these situations and allow in one way or another the violation of a law to avert a worse problem. DUI to escape a bear is perfectly reasonable, though unlikely. If I were to debate, I'd go with the heat cycling and environmental factors - those alcohol based hand sanitizers are fairly popular - wonder how they interact with the sensor.

So Like....

[RazorKitten]

What happens in the winter months, people not allowed to wear gloves to drive?

This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to get in my car and drive..I don't want fancy electronic shit that gets in my way. I don't want to be interrogated by my own stuff before I'm allowed to do what I want. It is about freedom...not free speech or privacy.. This is from someone who does not drink and never will.

Like school children using finger prints on gummy bears to fool biometric sensors ppl will just do the same or something similiar to fool the car sensor. There are enough people in the world that practical circumvention should expected to be common knowledge.

Regardless of what society tells you life is not guaranteed.. GET OVER IT.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[curio_city]

People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free.

Deal with the abuse of the drugs (DUI) not the banning of them, or alcohol.

Keeping people from abusing drugs violates the above definition of freedom. DUI is an example of the abuse of freedom.

Actually punish drunk drivers

[gatkinso]

Can we try that first?

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[artor3]

So we should wait until people are dead, and punish the culprits, rather than try to prevent the deaths in the first place?

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure we do. But they just do it again anyway. Often without a license or insurance as well, making them even more of a burden when they hit someone then.

This doesn't surprise me. Remember, we had to legislate the fact that you shouldn't text or talk on the phone with one hand while driving with the other. We have to save people from their own stupidity.

It should be obvious that if you drink anything with alcohol in it, you shouldn't drive. Period, the end. But since people cannot understand that concept, still, after all of these years, its up to the legislators to come up with something like this.

Because if they didn't, and someone got killed because they were allowed to talk on their phone, you'd sue the government for not legislating it. Ok, maybe not you, but others would.

These laws and stuff like this aren't stupid. They are there because it removes liability from the government for peoples sheer stupidity. And we will reach this level. Because the insurance companies are tired of paying for idiotic human mistakes, and the humans will drink and still try to drive.

They do punish drunks here in CA. I don't know how they can even afford a drink after the fines, but they manage to, somehow.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, people should be punished for what they have done, not what they MIGHT do.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Opportunist]

YES!

I'm sick of the "do we have to wait" excuse. Yes we do have to wait. Do you want to round up all muslims because they could be terrorists? Do you want to round up all the "odd people" because they could be perverts? Or how about rounding up all geeks, we could all be hackers as far as Average Joe out there is concerned.

Yes, we do have to wait for someone to break the law before we punish him. Then we should punish him and make sure that he cannot endanger the public again. "Pre-emptive" measures mean nothing less but limiting everyone's freedoms for the sake of maybe, possibly, avoiding something nasty.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he is suggesting that instead of installing this sort of system in a car after an offense, you just take away the car.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[orphiuchus]

We punish the shit out of drunk drivers. We punish them so hard in fact, that their lives are often ruined and they turn to further drinking to deal with the unemployment and ruined life.

Ok, most people's lives aren't THAT ruined, but when I was in the Marines a DUI was an instant demotion and a battle to keep an Honoroable discharge(even though they made you finish your contract, they would often stick you with a "Other than Honoroable", which pretty much makes getting a decent job impossible.).

I'm not saying don't punish drunk drivers, I think the punishment fits the crime, I'm just saying that if we can prevent them with a easy, cheap, non-intrusive(no stored data, no external notification) device, then that is a superior solution.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[superdave80]

You might murder someone in the near future, so I am going to have you tracked and monitored all the time to prevent the deaths in the first place. Because I would hate to wait until people are dead before I punish you.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[twidarkling]

Except that still, I don't see how this is a punishment for people who aren't driving drunk. Drunk driving is illegal, and doing it is illegal regardless of if you're caught. That means if this system stops you from driving, it's not a pre-emptive punishment, it's a timely one. If someone who isn't drunk is prevented from driving because the system malfunctioned, it's still not a punishment, because any car part can malfunction and stop you from driving (battery, distributor cap, fuel pump, etc), so it's just an inconvenience. A shitty one, but any car trouble sucks. If your goal is only preventing points of failure in a vehicle and calling it removing pre-emptive punishment, we'd be better served by moving to electric cars with fewer moving parts.

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[sjames]

Quite right. Artor3, you are under arrest for potential murder. What do you want us to do, wait until people are dead?

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Dcnjoe60]

So we should wait until people are dead, and punish the culprits, rather than try to prevent the deaths in the first place?

Short answer yes. Nobody would argue that anybody who purchases a gun should fined and imprisoned because they might walk up to a political rally and start shooting. Why then should somebody who has been drinking and driving, but has not caused any damage to property or others be punished just because they might do it?

Re:Actually punish drunk drivers

[Opportunist]

So technically nobody should complain about DRM. If it fails to work in your machine and locks you out even though you bought it fairly, or if the shitty driver somehow fucks up your system, it's just an inconvenience. After all, the game could crash due to a bug just as well as for the reason that the verification server cannot be reached for a few seconds, and that shitty copycripple driver that BSODs your system, well, any driver could be faulty, right?

But just like that testing part it's something that NEED NOT fail because it is not required for the operation.

And I somehow feel a bit odd for coming up with a computer analogy in a car topic...

Use a Moist Towelette, go to jail!

[Anonymous Coward]

So when I wash my hands with a handy wipe that uses alcohol, before getting behind the wheel, it decides I'm drunk!

It won't work.

[iamnotaclown]

Driving drunk is already against the law. If someone decides to drive drunk, bypassing a sensor is the least of their concerns.

Re:It won't work.

[nedlohs]

It adds a pretty blatant intent factor when they do that though.

Re:It won't work.

[orphiuchus]

You're missing the point. Due to the nature of drunk driving a lot of the people who commit it aren't aware that they're impaired. This could prevent someone who is black-out drunk from climbing into their car and driving into traffic.

Re:It won't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Driving drunk is already against the law. If someone decides to drive drunk, bypassing a sensor is the least of their concerns.

You're assuming people know they are drunk. Sure, have 10 pints and get behind the wheel and you know you're drunk. Have 3 over the course of an evening? Perhaps you are, perhaps not. Perhaps you convince yourself you probably aren't, and you feel fine.

The problem will be the calibration. You drive, the car says you're fine, but the cops say you're not.

Re:It won't work.

[dutchwhizzman]

As if that is going to stop them from hitting a school bus for the fourth time. A said previously, taking their driving license and their car might just prevent it, because they have to be sober to go out and buy a car and all that. If you let them have a car and drive it sober, they will want to drive it drunk as well. Don't try to reason with a drunk, reason with him/her when sober. The argument of "intent" doesn't work on someone that's hammered.

Re:It won't work.

[index0]

How about, before they start the heavy drinking, they think about how they are going to get home first.

Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[grimsnaggle]

Stuff happens, people die. One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk. To me, I'd rather the drunk lost his license rather than my car fitted with an interlock. I don't even drink, why should I have to pay for someone else's irresponsibility?

Measures like this are a waste of everyone's resources that distract from more serious problems - broken education, declining scientific investment, an uncompetitive economy, etc.

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you realize that if every car had an interlock, your friend would still be alive?

Do you really not recognize that?

I'm lucky enough to not know any immediate friends or family that have been victims of drunk driving. But I would never want to see them die or get hurt while doing nothing wrong on the roads.

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[Anonymous Coward]

"One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk...I don't even drink, why should I have to pay for someone else's irresponsibility?"

That cuts both ways. Why should my society have evil, one-sided laws because you're angry and so irresponsible that you choose your own petty, short-sighted vengeance over what's right for society as a whole?

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[Dcnjoe60]

Do you realize that if every car had an interlock, your friend would still be alive?

Do you really not recognize that?

I'm lucky enough to not know any immediate friends or family that have been victims of drunk driving. But I would never want to see them die or get hurt while doing nothing wrong on the roads.

There is no evidence to support your mean spirited position. First, an interlock may keep a car from starting, but what setting would you use on it? Any alcohol? Better not drink orange juice, because fruit juice can contain .5% alcohol through natural fermentation. What about .02? Then anybody who had 1 drink in the last hour couldn't drive. Go all the way up to .08? Then, that last beer I had and left immediately afterward, but didn't raise me from .075 to .08 will still allow me to drive drunk with an interlock, at least the kind the article is talking about. (Most DUI interlocks do not allow any alcohol).

The problem is with a mandatory interlock on every car, will only stop the really drunk people, who statistically aren't the most dangerous ones to others. Like the TSA, it will cost a lot of money but only give the perception of safety.

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[westlake]

One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk. To me, I'd rather the drunk lost his license rather than my car fitted with an interlock. I don't even drink, why should I have to pay for someone else's irresponsibility?

I'd rather have my friend alive than killed by a drunk driver.

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[LanMan04]

One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk. To me, I'd rather the drunk lost his license rather than my car fitted with an interlock.

I am not supporting these finger-tip-drunk-indicator things, but think about this:

That drunk would have lost his license AFTER killing your friend. This tech would have (supposedly) prevented your friend's death by making the car unstartable.

Re:Everybody pays for the stupidity of the few

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about my last sentence above. But really, if you think about it interlocks would save some lives. I agree there are edge cases where it won't do the right thing, but it could save lives.

I don't even think this is really the best way to stop drunk driving though, because not everyone will be happy. In my opinion humans should stop driving cars and the cars should drive themselves. If you want to drive your own car you go do it on special roads.

False positive rate for Diabetics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Certain medical conditions, like diabetes, increase your chances of a false positive for breathalyzers. I wonder if this newer tech is subject to the same problems?

Folks need to be responsible

[PolygamousRanchKid]

If your society needs to rely on electronic gadgets in cars to prevent drunk drivers, you're fucked. "Mind if I pass you, Lindsay Lohan, you are swerving on the highway? Oh, look, Charlie Sheen has passed out on the side of the road again."

In the country where I live, kids can drink alcoholic beverages when they are 16. But they are taught not to drink and drive. You will see a table with a bunch of teenage guys quaffing beers. And one guy will be drinking Coca-Cola. Guess who is driving.

To hammer the point home again, teaching people not to drink and drive is better than any control mechanism.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[scorp1us]

In Denver, a bar I went to had a novelty breathalyzer that would tell you your BAC for $1. I blew 0.10, but wasn't driving but I considered myself way past the point of safe driving. Why have I only ever seen this device once? Why not place it everywhere, for free, and let people check themselves before getting behind the wheel? It would be waaaay more cost effective and everyone could use it. And the cab companies could sponsor it. The ones who don't give a damn aren't going to care and drive drunk anyway.

Also note, that the legal limits are on the extremely cautious side of impairment. I urge everyone to read The DUI Exception to the Constitution. While I support safe roads, the extremes (rights violations) we go to to prevent drunk driving do not enthuse me. Now, some states are putting judges at checkpoints to make on-site court-orders possible.

There are two scapegoats that always work in America: think of the children and think of drunk driving. These seem to be more noble causes than the rights that get violated by them.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[orphiuchus]

If your society needs to rely on electronic gadgets in cars to prevent drunk drivers, you're fucked. "Mind if I pass you, Lindsay Lohan, you are swerving on the highway? Oh, look, Charlie Sheen has passed out on the side of the road again."

In the country where I live, kids can drink alcoholic beverages when they are 16. But they are taught not to drink and drive. You will see a table with a bunch of teenage guys quaffing beers. And one guy will be drinking Coca-Cola. Guess who is driving.

To hammer the point home again, teaching people not to drink and drive is better than any control mechanism.

I got this talk from some Spaniards when I spent 9 months there while in the Marines. The told me that they are so much more mature drinkers and you will never see a drunk Spanish person passed out in the street like you would with Americans.

Well bullshit. I saw it all the time. More than I did with Marines and Sailors even, so thats quite a fucking lot.

And if this safety feature works; Great! In 20 years it could be impossible to get a DUI simply because your car wouldn't start. Provided this thing works, I hope its standard in new cars within 5 years.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly it. Society needs to treat people who drink and drive as idiots. When there is a social stigma attached then it becomes normal for there to be either a designated driver or for everyone to get a taxi home and pick the car up in the morning.

In some countries it seems to be considered "normal" to get behind the wheel after several drinks. I can't really understand that sort of attitude.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[izomiac]

Like with most things, there's no simple technological solution to a social problem.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[demonlapin]

The presence of the device might, in the hands of a sufficiently gifted lawyer, create a responsibility on the part of the bar to monitor your BAC, and to refuse to serve you once you passed the legal limit - in many places, it is technically illegal to serve someone who is visibly intoxicated. The bar is then going to be held responsible if you go out and injure someone. And for the patron, it might create a false sense of security - the BAC can keep going up if you have a fresh drink still in your stomach.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[smellotron]

We also ask them to die for their country before they're allowed to imbibe. And for many people, abstinence-only sex education makes sense. And we never say "quaff" (except for potions).

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Like with most things, there's no simple technological solution to a social problem.

I this wasn't a thread that I started, and I had some mod points, I would have +insightfuled your comment. You summed it up better that I could. I hope you won't mind if I reuse that phrase. It's absolutely brilliant.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

I witnessed a deadly car accident caused by a drunk driver.
His friend had tried to prevent him from taking the wheel.
Then because he failed, he said "then I'll come with you in the car, surely I can prevent you from driving insanely"
Guess what, both died in front of me when they crashed in front of my house.

An automatic device would have blocked the car, and they would not have died.
This is in France. We have a security control every 2 years, and if that device was tampered, we would have to get a new one installed before being allowed on the street again.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Gentleman's Law amongst my friends that the designated driver pays nothing all evening. If we go to a pub, they drink for free. If we go for a curry after, they eat for free. This way, the driver never feels like they've missed out, and there's never pressure to be the driver as it's not a chore. A free night out is always welcome once in a while.

Re:Folks need to be responsible

[DCheesi]

Liability; if the BAC tester is mis-calibrated, it could lead someone to think they're ok to drive when they're not. If that results in an accident, the bar could be sued over it.

no fingerprints, no start at all

[fluor2]

easy solution for this workaround

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think that will get implemented in the specs? I bet not. It is just like the current system where someone else (a child even) can start the car for the intoxicated driver. Even if it does it would be a pain to use and violate privacy even more than it does now for non-intoxicated drivers.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[sjames]

That will be REAL popular with drivers up north. Especially with people who don't drink anyway but DO have poor circulation in their hands.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[mysidia]

where someone else (a child even) can start the car for the intoxicated driver.

Not unless the child's fingerprints match the biometric signature of an 'authorized driver programmed into the car'.

And no way the child is going to get programmed as an authorized driver, since you have to take your car to the local insurance company's office, and they have to see the proposed driver's drivers license, before they will register their National ID and bio data as an accepted driver (while noting the changes in the owner's insurance policy).

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I want to live in your ideal society.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a child would have supreme difficulty even blowing into breathalyzers correctly (most adults fail the first ~10 times) and the kid would need to be a willing passenger the entire time. Most kids are actually smart enough to decline driving with an obviously drunken parent.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[Grishnakh]

Who the hell is going to buy a car that you can't loan to someone on short notice? This idea is utterly ridiculous.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[mysidia]

Who the hell is going to buy a car that you can't loan to someone on short notice? This idea is utterly ridiculous.

Most people already cannot just do that. Personal auto insurance policies commonly prohibit loaning your car to someone on short notice; you have to notify the insurance company in advance, which is only possible during certain hours, and if you fail to do so, there is no liability (or other) coverage for the vehicle. And it is illegal for a car to be operated when not covered by insurance

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[jafiwam]

People ignore the policies. Anything they may do will be an effect in payouts or courtrooms later.

I dont think you actually are old enough to drive yet, as every policy I have ever read in detail is the exact opposite anyway. Course, you could be in one of those commie countries though.... they do all sorts of weird stuff.

Re:no fingerprints, no start at all

[Lord Ender]

That's wrong. You can loan your car to anyone who themselves has insurance. You don't have to notify anyone. Every insurance policy is this way.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Aranykai]

Endangering one's self is freedom. Endangering other's life abuses other's freedom.

Evolution? surely not

[petes_PoV]

Don't these libertarian people deny evolution? Weren't we (and seat belts) always like we are now?

Re:Evolution? surely not

[orphiuchus]

Nope, you've got the wrong political movement entirely. Libertarians are very often atheists.

Re:Evolution? surely not

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing Libertarians and Southern Baptists.

I'm a sustaining LP member and a secular humanist.

I haven't hung out with Hinkle too much, but a large chunk of those I've met at convention fall into the atheist chunk of the population.

stupidity of the few

[petes_PoV]

Yup, happens in elections all the time - except there it's everyone suffering from the stupidity of the many. Just 'cos the numbers vary doesn't make it any better.

Gloves.

[Junior J. Junior III]

Agree. This is stupid, because gloves exist and people often wear them while driving.

Also, this eliminates drunk driving how? I find it useful to point out that another word for "elimination" is "shitting". Are they shitting us? They've got to be.

In conclusion, I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines. Thankyouveddymuch.

Re:Gloves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your logic is flawed.

If my car were fitted with an interlock, that measures breath alcohol, then why don't I just hold my breath when starting the car?

I imagine this device would work in a similar way, touch your finger against a sensor to start the car. Anything more that that would be far too annoying for anyone.

The interlock devices that I've seen require periodically for the driver to stop the car retest 5 mins , 20 mins depending on the length of the journey.

The skin sensor devices could work the same, but only if switched to this mode by order of a court.

Really want to tick people off...

[justNoperator]

Recommend that the technology be added to the hand grips of fire arms to prevent alcohol related shootings!

Re:Really want to tick people off...

[orphiuchus]

It would be very hard and expensive to actually put this in guns. If someone came up with one that doesn't need a battery and wouldn't prevent simple modifications, like replacing an uncomfortable grip, I bet the NRA would get on board with it.

That said, I don't think it would be possible.

I mistrust MADD

[mbone]

I flat-out mistrust MADD, which is always on the side of more police power. They are to the traffic police what child pornography is to Internet regulation.

Re:I mistrust MADD

[mr100percent]

That's a mischaracterization. They are only on the side of more police power in terms of drunk driving. It's a very limited subset of traffic law. They don't really care about warrants to search your trunk etc. let alone the rest of the police actions.

Re:I mistrust MADD

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo!

Re:I mistrust MADD

[mbone]

Well, let' s get paranoid here. If their agitation gives the police the power to stop you, the police no longer have effective restraints on whether and how much they can search you, so mission accomplished !

I remember when Virginia MADD was agitating to make drinking anything in your car illegal (i.e., no more cans of coke or a Starbucks latte on your way to work), just because someone might put booze in a coke can. Anyone who can promote such tyranny is not to be trusted, in either motives or execution.

Re:I mistrust MADD

[Chewbacon]

Since I heard members of MADD stake out bars and follow patrons leaving only to call the cops and make sure they're arrested for DUI, I have grown to dislike them too. Shit like that is counter-therapeutic and won't bring them any closure for their tragedy. Instead of them having the imagenof a support group of activists trying to impact the world in a positive way, they come off as bitter women looking for revenge. Why not stake out a bar and offer to buy someone a cab home? It's a poor decision to drink and drive, sure, but with alcohol comes poor decisions.

Re:I mistrust MADD

[smellotron]

They don't really care about warrants to search your trunk etc.

But, but, there might be alcohol in your trunk! Alcohol on its way to a teenager party!

Re:I mistrust MADD

[mr100percent]

I don't think Virginia MADD represents NY MADD adequately. The ones I know wouldn't do something so crazy.

Re:I mistrust MADD

[juan2074]

I wouldn't trust MADD either.

'We believe this might turn the car into the cure for the elimination of drunk driving,' says Laura Dean-Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The good news is that when drunk driving is eliminated, MADD will have nothing to do. (That's not really true, because MADD is trying to prevent alcohol consumption in instances that have nothing to do with driving, but it would force them to be honest about it.)

Option Only

[android.dreamer]

As long as I have the ability to toggle it off and on, then I would gladly get this for my car. But if I don't have a choice, then I do not like it. What are the chances that the device could give me a false positive?

Hand Wipes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what would happen if somebody uses a hand wipe or soap that is alcohol based. It's great that the sensor can detect beneath the skin but will it overload if somebody's hands are covered in alcohol for a perfectly good reason?

Override available?

[Golden_Rider]

So, will there be some kind of "override" for dangerous situations? Like, I do not PLAN on driving that day, so I have a beer or two and am just over the limit where the car won't start anymore, but then suddenly space aliens with anal probes arrive and I *really* need to drive away fast - but the car won't let me.

Or any other, more real life situation - say, you THINK you're still under the limit, on the way to your car you get assaulted by some criminal, you just make it to your car and want to get away, and your car tells you "sorry, driving right now would not be good for you."

Or just scratch the alcohol in all these examples and let the damn thing have a malfunction. "Sorry, you can't drive your wife to the hospital right now."

Re:Override available?

[orphiuchus]

Assuming it works as I'm assuming it does in all of those cases you could just cover your hands with your shirt and drive away. It would just make it so if you were to drive drunk it would require you intentionally avoid touching the wheel with your alcoholic hands, and if you were caught would pretty much seal the deal on jail time.

Re:Override available?

[Ranzear]

Or maybe you've had a single dose of Nyquil, or even something as simple as rinsed your mouth with Listerine, and the residue on your fingers (stabilized by the other ingredients of these products) is enough to trip the device. Describing them as 'Unfailingly Accurate' sounds like a recipe for false positives in bad situations. In an amusing reversal of the standard trope, this is like DRM cutting your access to something you legally purchased and legally make use of because you have a Torrent client installed. I'm sure there will be 'Circumvention' clauses associated with the devices as well.

Re:Override available?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that's a case for MezdrunkLoader 1.16, though early versions I hear will simply take a vlk. ;)

Re:Override available?

[jbatista]

so I have a beer or two and am just over the limit where the car won't start anymore, but then suddenly space aliens with anal probes arrive

And one tells the other, "Lookit Bubba, 'dis one's drunk already. Let's get him."

As for your other two examples, your car can fail at any time. I don't know about the reliability of the proposed devices, but I'm not sure people blame auto makers when the car needs to be started and it won't for some reason (dead battery, whatever).

Heart monitor

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can do this, why can't they make a continuous heart rate monitor that doesn't require a chest strap or to touch two electrodes on a watch?

Hand sanitizer

[Anonymous Coward]

Would ethanol-based hand sanitizer set the sensors off? What about other substances you might have on your hand that might trigger a false positive?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[The Master Control P]

And this is where the theory of "you can do anything you want that doesn't harm others," given without qualifiers, falls apart.

Everything in the world interacts with everything else - somehow - so you can always identify some way in which what you're doing takes something from or harms someone else. Which leaves us only with "no one can do anything" unless we start imposing a cutoff and say "you're allowed to harm others and impose on their freedom a tiny bit." And at that point, we're right back to arguing over what's an acceptable amount of intrusion in various matters.

Now one can certainly argue in favor of setting that cutoff higher or lower. Personally, I favor a large degree of freedom for small entities (whose actions have comparatively little potential for large-scale harm) and increasing restrictions on large entities (Thank you for nearly imploding the entire world's economy, Wall St!). If you want to get high or drunk, go for it. Drive high or drunk, lose your license for a week. Do it the Nth time and lose your license for 2^N weeks; Eventually you'll either figure it out or go to jail.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Seumas]

The first thing people need to do is stop treating MADD (which is an outrageous scam) as some respected and righteous organization. Treat them like the pope -- let them talk and completely ignore them because they have no place in civil discourse.

The second thing people need to do is stop thinking of ways to avoid letting drunks start up their car while drunk and STOP LETTING DRUNKS HAVE A LICENSE. It's that fucking simple. First drunk driving conviction, lose your license forever. A second conviction means you are both driving drunk and without a license. It's a year in prison, for you (because you are proven risk to society, at that point).

For everyone else? Fuck this shit. I don't drink and drive and I'm offended at the idea of being treated like a criminal the moment I get into my own property and turn the key.

over 9000

[acalltoreason]

Seriously, we need to stop holding peoples hands. Think about the number 9000..it is roughly .003% of the US population. Instead of spending all that money on a statistically useless product why not help the 49.1 million US residents living with hunger issues (http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html), or the 1 million people (min) in the US with cancer http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurveilance/documents/document/acspc-026210.pdf. The point is that this does absolutely NOTHING to help anyone. So the in-car breathalyzer takes a few seconds...big deal. Its not worth waisting money on something so useless that .003% of the US would be affected by it. People die, that is the natural order of things, some earlier than others, you need to deal with it and move on. And before some ignoramus starts to whine about insensitivity because they lost someone to a drunk driving accident, everyone has problems and everyone has lost someone, you are in no way different from any other human on this planet, existentially speaking of course.

Re:over 9000

[orphiuchus]

I don't buy the hunger issues claim. Having been to actual 3rd world countries and seen actual starvation, then coming back to the states and seeing that obesity is one of the major problems our underclass faces... I just don't buy it.

Yea, you may not get to eat the best tasting food every meal, and you may not get as much as you want, but nobody in the US who isn't a victim of neglect is starving.

Re:over 9000

[acalltoreason]

I don't buy the hunger issues claim. Having been to actual 3rd world countries and seen actual starvation, then coming back to the states and seeing that obesity is one of the major problems our underclass faces... I just don't buy it.

Yea, you may not get to eat the best tasting food every meal, and you may not get as much as you want, but nobody in the US who isn't a victim of neglect is starving.

That is possibly one of the most ignorant statements you can post. So let me get this straight, because there are obese people in the US, no one is struggling with hunger? I live about 5 minutes from a neighborhood of mansions, does this mean then that homelessness is not a problem? Further, we are not dicussing 3rd world countries, we are discussing the usefulness (or lack thereof) of a BAC analyzer. You are employing a common tactic used by the news media, Fox News in particular. You try and redirect the argument because you have no valid point to add. "...but nobody in the US who isn't a victim of neglect is starving" - the only thing I can say to that is Bullsh*t, did you even follow the link i provided? Or did you just get diarrhea of the keyboard? You, sir, are ignorant. I say that not as an insult but rather as a definition. To make definitive statements when discussing human behavior (yes eating is part of a humans behavior, try using Google) is one of the most ignorant mistakes you can make.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[jdpars]

I wish you many angry replies, good troll.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[19thNervousBreakdown]

I want to put you inside my body.

If this works it would be fantastic

[orphiuchus]

I'm a pretty libertarian guy and so long as the car doesn't alert the authorities, or store records of when it refused to start, I'm all for it.

This could make the crime of drunk driving almost impossible to commit, at least without going out of your way to fool the system(which would make jail time easier to justify).

Its not often you see a really really good solution to a major societal problem, but this is close.

It makes at least as much sense for a standard safety feature as airbags.

Re:If this works it would be fantastic

[Tanuki64]

This could make the crime of drunk driving almost impossible to commit,

This fact alone makes it very unlikely that such a system will ever become mandatory. The state would dearly miss the money it makes with drunk drivers.

Re:If this works it would be fantastic

[Zerth]

This could be awesome for another reason: if you can't start the car, then the cops can't give you a DUI for sleeping it off in the back seat.

To the assholes working on this:

[russotto]

You're trying to solve the wrong problem. I don't object to these things on my car because they're inconvenient, or expensive, or likely to leave me stranded. Or rather, I don't object to them primarily for those reasons. I object to these things because I _do not want_ them on my car. I do not want an inanimate object which I own attempting to enforce the law on me (and that goes whether I agree with the law or not).

Furthermore, the existence of devices like these is an attractive nuisance; once they exist, many legislators simply can't help themselves against mandating them. When the devices are seriously inconvenient and impractical, this serves the same effect as a fence around a swimming pool; it keeps all but the most determined lawmaking efforts out. SO STOP TRYING TO MAKE THEM BETTER. BY DOING SO YOU ARE FORGING CHAINS TO BE USED ON US ALL.

Re:To the assholes working on this:

[Tanuki64]

I object to these things because I _do not want_ them on my car.

I could not care less what you want. This is a safety mechanism not for the one behind the wheel, but for the one in front of the hood. If you don't want safety belts, I'd say this should be your own decision.

Re:To the assholes working on this:

[russotto]

I could not care less what you want. This is a safety mechanism not for the one behind the wheel, but for the one in front of the hood.

Keep your fascist devices off my car, and stay out from in front of my hood.

Punish the guilty instead.

[couchslug]

Preventive measures that encumber everyone are merely a PC effort to avoid punishing the guilty.

DUI should carry a one-year mandatory jail sentence. Don't want to get busted? Don't fucking drink and drive.

As I used to tell my military motorcycle safety classes:

"I might drink 'til it runs out my ears, but I don't drive until I'm sober and alert. Party at the house, take everyone's keys, and we won't be going to a memorial service for a dead drunk or the people they kill."

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[orphiuchus]

God I hated those monthly safety-stand downs. They never prevented a fucking thing, everyone already knows not to drink and drive. The mandatory Motorcycle safety classes on LeJeune with the multi-month wait weren't much better.

Anyway, if you have a simple and non-intrusive way to prevent a crime, especially one with the potential to cause so much harm, why not use it? This isn't avoiding punishing the guilty, this prevents people from ever becoming guilty in the first place.

I'm not a big rehabilitation guy, I think you should be removed from society if you can't function there, not fixed up at taxpayer expense and thrown back out there to commit more crimes.
But due to the nature of drinking and driving a lot of people don't realize they are about to commit it, and provided this system didn't store information or contact authorities for failed tests, it could really save a lot of lives.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Tanuki64]

DUI should carry a one-year mandatory jail sentence. Don't want to get busted? Don't fucking drink and drive.

I agree with you. But please, the punishment after the killed innocents are brought back to life.

Geez, when I read people like you I wonder whether you are aware why dunk driving is forbidden. Just to make money for the state? To fill jails? For fun? If this is the case in your country your proposal is perfectly fine. In mine a number of ppl. is killed every year because of drunks behind a wheel. I would prefer a solution, which prevents those deaths.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

taking everyone's keys at a party, and not giving them back until when? Now you are magically able to judge, the next morning, that everyone's BAC is below the limit?

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Dcnjoe60]

DUI should carry a one-year mandatory jail sentence. Don't want to get busted? Don't fucking drink and drive.

I agree with you. But please, the punishment after the killed innocents are brought back to life.

Geez, when I read people like you I wonder whether you are aware why dunk driving is forbidden. Just to make money for the state? To fill jails? For fun? If this is the case in your country your proposal is perfectly fine. In mine a number of ppl. is killed every year because of drunks behind a wheel. I would prefer a solution, which prevents those deaths.

Statistically more people are in accidents where another motorist lost control from the snow and ice than by drunk drivers, but we don't make it illegal for people to drive in snow and ice.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Horrible Idea, mandatory sentencing will only cause more trouble when a drunk is pulled over. Especially with the legal limit so low.

I could see mandatory sentencing if another party is injured. Also I would like to see a tiered DUI sentencing. .08 - .15 is a ticket. .16 - .20 is the current penalty for .08. Then above .20 should be your mandatory 1 year sentence.

This give a much more flexible way for sentencing and judging a persons true intoxication.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

And that will do fuck all to reduce DUI rates. The people that kill will drive anyway, and ratcheting up the punishment won't really make them stop. Give them another way to get to and from the bar and you'll see changes.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things spring to mind. Firstly, I think mandatory one year ban with re-test for first offence is enough. It's a good deterrent as they are on public transport / car pool for everyday activities they'd have used the car for, and it doesn't clog up jails. However, second offence is 5 years in prison just for DUI. Obviously these change if there's an actual accident etc.
 
Secondly, when you're at a house party and there's a bowl full of keys, everyone's supposed to bring their wife as well as their automobile. Not my thing personally, but hey, it takes all sorts.

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[sincewhen]

OK, but what about people who have a few drinks, and take a taxi home. The next day, after a full night's rest, they go and pick up their car. They are well rested and "sober and alert". But when breathalysed, they are over the limit.
Sure they are technically breaking the law, and should be punished. But a mandatory year in jail when they thought they were doing the right thing?

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[DCheesi]

Not sure if you're confused, or just trolling. In any case, his assertion is that the best way to prevent DUI is by raising the penalties so much that they become a more effective deterrent. People would be less likely to push the legal limit if they knew that a tiny bit over the limit == automatic jail time.

Of course this might not deter the hardcore alcoholics. But at least they'd be off the street for a year, and maybe while they're inside they'd sober up long enough to think about what they've been doing (probably a longshot, but hey...).

Re:Punish the guilty instead.

[Tanuki64]

Neither confused, nor trolling. Punishment simply does not work. Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides 'Hey, nice day today, I think it might be fun to get drunk and drive a bit around'. Some people just seem to be incapable to handle alcohol and cars. Higher punishments won't make much difference.

Furthermore, higher punishments might be good to punish tax evasion, or theft. The victims can, at least in theory, compensated for their loss. But how do you compensate someone who was killed by a drunk driver?

Prevention certainly is not always better than punishment if the necessary measures are out of proportion compared the possible damage. But we talking here about totally needless losses of lifes and a relatively small price to pay.

and down the slope we continue

[Anonymous Coward]

"People get bitter when laws start going down the slippery slope."
--
Exactly TubeSteak.

Hi I'm from the government and I'm here to help!.
*sigh* - Stay the hell out of my car and off my property.

I predict such a system will not prevent anyone who is drunk and wants to drive the car from doing so for more then a couple minutes.

Potential problems

[Adrian Lopez]

Problems with this sistem:

1. What if the legal limit for BAC changes after the device has been installed into my car? Can I update the limit by going to a mechanic? Can said mechanic change it, for a few extra dollars under the table, even when the legal limit itself has not?

2. What about false positives when I need to get somewhere right now, because it's an emergency?

3. What if the thing fails while I'm driving? Isn't shutting off the car potentially more dangerous than driving slightly over the limit?

Re:Potential problems

[Tanuki64]

1. So what? Not use something because it can be illegally tempered with? Wonder what else we wouldn't be able to use anymore.

2. You are an American? Be happy and sue manufacturer of this device.

3. Your car has a steering lock? What happens when it locks while driving? Does not happen? Why not use the same technics those devices? If you are drunk, you cannot start the car. If the car is already running it simply won't shut down.

So what haopens with false readings?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens if their fingers get contaminated with a substance that may register as alcohol.

Change your window washing fluid and get it on your fingers. your trip you planned for today has been cancelled due to making sure you can see properly after you hit some big bugs.

Working on a car? Well wait until you can get any substance that might look like alcohol to the sensors off before driving the car.

and you better believe they will implement measures to make sure it will only work in the presence of human skin contact, so gloves are out of the question, unless you can tap the sensors with a non-contaminated bit of skin.

Also given how people drive, the whole steering wheel would have to have sensors.

and with MADD involved, you better believe that they will make it mandatory to go through a system like onstar or whatever proprietary assistance program they put on new cars today, will alert police that you are a drunk, and the police will use this to arrest you on the spot because the car is "evidence enough" and will neglect to do any real test on you until it's too late to counter the car's results, and they manage to book you for being an evil drunk and you lose your license.

MADD would rather no one drive.

Re:So what haopens with false readings?

[nedlohs]

No MADD would rather no one drink, ever.

What about an emergency?

[kbg]

So you are in your cabin in the woods with your friend and you both have had a few beers, your friend manages to cut himself badly, there is no phone so you decide to drive him to the nearest hospital, but oh no your car won't allow you to drive, too bad your friend dies.

Re:What about an emergency?

[Tanuki64]

Yeah, happens once every hundred years. People getting killed by drunk assholes happens slightly more often.

Re:What about an emergency?

[nedlohs]

What if you can't find the keys. Oh no the car won't allow you to drive, too bad your friend dies. Better get rid of the keys too I guess.

One dead drunk in the woods seems a fair trade off for a few less dead children on their way home from soccer anyway.

Re:What about an emergency?

[kbg]

No there are various emergency's that could happen, for example being burgled, chased by a murderer, chased by a violent spouse, and all kind of accidents that could happen.

Re:What about an emergency?

[kbg]

What? You are totally missing the point. Nobody is forcing you to misplace your keys. What if it wasn't a friend but a child instead? I don't like drunk drivers any more than you do, but taking away everyones freedom is not the right thing to do.

Re:What about an emergency?

[nedlohs]

No one is forcing you to drink a couple of beers either.

Re:What about an emergency?

[russotto]

So you are in your cabin in the woods with your friend and you both have had a few beers, your friend manages to cut himself badly, there is no phone so you decide to drive him to the nearest hospital, but oh no your car won't allow you to drive, too bad your friend dies.

Sounds like a law school setup, though the way I remember it, "you" were stinking drunk near the cabin in the woods and had neither car nor phone (this taking place before the days of ubiqtuous cell phones) when "you" came upon a car accident. The driver was incapacitated. "You" then drove the victim (in his damaged but functional car) to the hospital where upon arriving the accident victim was treated and "you" were arrested for drunk driving. At your trial the doctors testified that the victim would not have survived much longer without treatment; driving drunk definitely saved his life. However, the verdict was guilty; drunk driving is a strict liability offense and necessity is not a defense; sorry bud, you should have let the guy die.

Supposedly based on a real case. Believe it, or not.

This is amount government contracts.

[Seumas]

Don't let them bullshit you for one second that the value of lives is at all relevant to them, here. The motivating factor is the value of the government contracts that will be handed out should this idea succeed. The same kind of contracts that benefit certain industries if we fall for the idea that we should stick everyone under house arrest and fit them with an electronic bracelet for even the slightest crime (and, of course, people will think that's a tremendous idea if the alternative is jail time).

The result is an enormous revenue stream. Every single person in this country convicted of some sort of a violation (in this case, we'll just stick to alcohol related) fitted with an expensive device for an additional expensive installation fee. Then their car, fitted with an expensive device and another expensive installation fee. Then expensive monthly subscriptions (paid out of the individual's pocket) for monitoring and maintenance. If you don't have the money or you find it an abhorrent solution, then you can always opt not to participate and not pay all of that money. Of course, then we're going to lock you up in prison for a year. So it's not like we're not giving you freedom of choice!

If they REALLY gave a fuck about preventing lives, the solution wouldn't involve ridiculously complex and expensive monitoring and fittings and equipment farmed out to private industry. The solution would be that if you are convicted of driving drunk, your license would be revoked for the rest of your life and if you still put society in danger by driving without a license, then we stick you in prison.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[peragrin]

That's just it. something like 60% of all DUI and DWI offenses are for people who already have been arrested for that same thing. 50% of the population doesn't learn from their mistakes.

heck in just my home town in the last 3 months 4 people have been arrested at crashes scenes for DWI, while have no licenses because they lost them do to prior offenses.

How many times must some family die because you let some idiot drive drunk 5 times?

Get rid of drunk driving laws...

[jammer170]

After reading all the comments, I still wonder why people don't actually fix the problem, rather than worry about potential causes. People die because people drive poorly. It doesn't matter if it is caused by alcohol, or cold medicine, or texting while driving, or anything else.

I saw we get rid of all drunk driving laws. And all texting laws. And every other random, 'special case' driving law on the books. What we need is for people who drive poorly to be seriously punished. If a person is swerving all over the road, I don't give a damn why, he needs to be pulled of the road and have his license pulled until he learns to drive. The same for those who follow too close, obstruct traffic, and the like. We wouldn't have to worry about problematic measurement methods, equipment failures, and so on. It also has the benefit that those who truly can text or take a phone call while driving (or the 300 pound guy who can probably drink four beers over the 'average' number of three and still be safe to drive) are not punished for the deficiencies of others.

Aren't we suppose to be the land of the free? What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Those fundamental rights have been taken away, all because some group of people thinks they know what is best for everyone.

Re:Get rid of drunk driving laws...

[Tanuki64]

Aren't we suppose to be the land of the free?

Interesting. A Russian /.er.

Re:Get rid of drunk driving laws...

[nathan.fulton]

What we need is for people who drive poorly to be seriously punished.
Yes.

If a person is swerving all over the road, I don't give a damn why, he needs to be pulled of the road and have his license pulled until he learns to drive. The same for those who follow too close, obstruct traffic, and the like.

Yes. Because these aren't wildly arbitrary standards that would most definitely be selectively and (hopefully, although probably not) arbitrarily enforced.

...or the 300 pound guy who can probably drink four beers over the 'average' number of three and still be safe to drive

Since legislation is written in term of BAC and not in terms of "how many beers you had tonight," this is a non-issue. Also, even someone who weights 300 pounds would be close to/over .08 after 7 beers.

What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Those fundamental rights have been taken away

I understand why people who don't really care about the bill of rights evoke it in every single discussion -- it's a cheap rhetorical device that appeals to American populism, so that rational discourse becomes unequivocally associated with intellectual/authoritarian/nazi/commie attacks on fundamental rights.* But if you really are concerned with the right to due process, it's not a good call to insinuate that industry regulation is a dire threat to due process. You're just contributing to misinformation and confusion.

*ie, person X: "And the nth amendment..."; person Y: "That's no what the nth amendment says, it has never said that, and none of the founding fathers ever had that intention. Also, the courts would find that laughable"; person X: See! Person Y is purposefully limiting what the nth amendment says and revising history! They be nazis!"

Re:Get rid of drunk driving laws...

[jammer170]

If a person is swerving all over the road, I don't give a damn why, he needs to be pulled of the road and have his license pulled until he learns to drive. The same for those who follow too close, obstruct traffic, and the like.

Yes. Because these aren't wildly arbitrary standards that would most definitely be selectively and (hopefully, although probably not) arbitrarily enforced.

Yes, arbitrary enforcement of laws is a problem, but it is a problem that exists already in regards to arresting drunk drivers. Friends of police get a pass, while others get arrested for merely having keys in their hands. I agree that problem needs to be addressed (frankly, by simply recording everything a police officer does while on duty), but to claim that as a reason not to arrest people who are breaking the law is ridiculous. Arrest them, ticket them, etc and let the court system handle the rest. That is what it is there for (although it too has its problems, but one thing at a time).

...or the 300 pound guy who can probably drink four beers over the 'average' number of three and still be safe to drive

Since legislation is written in term of BAC and not in terms of "how many beers you had tonight," this is a non-issue. Also, even someone who weights 300 pounds would be close to/over .08 after 7 beers.

Every checked out a breathalyser machine? They do not take sex, heritage, weight, liver function, and any of a dozen contributing factors into consideration when determining BAC. Yet that is all the American court system needs to convict a person, so it is very much an issue. Additionally, regarding your claim that a 300 pound person would be at a .08 after 7 beers, I am going to have to say that a citation is needed. Over how many hours? What if food is eaten? What if he chases each beer with a bottle of water? What if he has an extremely well-functioning liver? All scientific articles making any across-the-boards claims in regards to BAC levels have been thoroughly discredited during peer review. On top of that, the number of .08 itself is bullshit. There is no research to support that number has any correlation to impaired driving ability.

What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Those fundamental rights have been taken away

I understand why people who don't really care about the bill of rights evoke it in every single discussion -- it's a cheap rhetorical device that appeals to American populism, so that rational discourse becomes unequivocally associated with intellectual/authoritarian/nazi/commie attacks on fundamental rights.* But if you really are concerned with the right to due process, it's not a good call to insinuate that industry regulation is a dire threat to due process. You're just contributing to misinformation and confusion. *ie, person X: "And the nth amendment..."; person Y: "That's no what the nth amendment says, it has never said that, and none of the founding fathers ever had that intention. Also, the courts would find that laughable"; person X: See! Person Y is purposefully limiting what the nth amendment says and revising history! They be nazis!"

That's an extremely pathetic attempt at a strawman argument. The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, are the foundation for everything in regards to American law. It has relevance everywhere. If 'rational discourse' demands a change in the rights outlined in those documents, you have to get amendments passed as outlined in the Constitution. This is basic American civics. Also, nothing being discussed here is 'industry regulation', we are discussing laws governing the rights and responsibilities of the American citizens. Finally, you almost Godwin'ed your whole 'refutation'. None of what you claim applies to me or what I said. You just made a bunch of false insinuations in the hope that people won't notice. I hate to break it to you, but Slashdotters are pretty good at spotting logical fallacies. Care to try again, maybe addressing what I actually said rather than your fantasy?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[mysidia]

The federal government tried to do that in the past, and it was found unconstitutional/unenforceable against the states, so a constitutional amendment would be required to allow the government to do so.

Hand Sanitizer = false positive?

[Ellis D. Tripp]

What about those people who are constantly using those alcohol-based hand sanitizer products? Will their car assume that they are drunk and refuse to start?

Re:Hand Sanitizer = false positive?

[Tanuki64]

I really doubt this is based on alcohol on your hands. I don't know you, but when I drink my beer, I rarely get some on my fingers.

Re:Hand Sanitizer = false positive?

[Ellis D. Tripp]

The sensors I am aware of detect minute amounts of alcohol which diffuse out of the bloodstream and through your epidermis. The actual sensor technology can be a self-generating fuel cell (like a flammable gas detector), or an optical absorption type affair, but both would be equally disrupted by surface contamination with alcohol.

Re:Hand Sanitizer = false positive?

[julesh]

I really doubt this is based on alcohol on your hands.

So how do you think it works? The only plausible way I can think of would be detecting the alcohol content of your sweat. I suppose you could also attempt to detect one of the substances alcohol metabolises to, but there are serious disadvantages with that (it would probably not provide a positive reading until an hour or so after you started drinking, and would likely still provide positives four or five hours after you were no longer over the limit; plus the most obvious one to detect, acetic acid, can easily end up being present for plenty of other reasons).

Re:Hand Sanitizer = false positive?

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. Or what if they go to a bar to pick up a friend. They set their hand down on a table that had alcohol spilt on it. What now?

Shut up and dance

[t0p]

This law wouldn't affect the rich much... the wealthy boozer can pay someone else to drive him about. But what about all of the poor boozers? You want to make the poor walk to the pub?

S' not fair. It never is. What did you expect? Shut up and dance!

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[superdave80]

...so a constitutional amendment would be required to allow the government to do so.

You mean something like this?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Besides, the courts don't seem to have any problem with the federal government controlling every single other substance known to man (cocaine, marijuana, prescription drugs, etc.).

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see you're still making retarded and off-topic comments. Even taken on a literal level your comment fails the laugh test, and as sarcasm it merely makes you look like a damn fool. Even those in support of substance bans wouldn't say "cocaine's banned, no one's taking it, we won!" so you can't be mocking that mind set legitimately. You're setting up a strawman to an argument that wasn't even mentioned.

Congratulations, you, in an infinitely large medium with endless potential for idiocy and eternal memory and limitless capacity, have made a comment that's completely worthless and a waste of space. *slow applause*

Let's go back to horses

[bzipitidoo]

Horses don't wreck because their drivers are drunk or making out.

This will all be moot when we get cars that can drive themselves.

Re:Let's go back to horses

[wmbetts]

Doesn't matter there are recorded cases where people have been arrested for DUI while on a horse. It's not about public safety it's about money.

Re:Let's go back to horses

[Sarten-X]

I take it you've never had a horse charge at you because the rider was an idiot.

Re:Let's go back to horses

[breakfastpirate]

I see this horse thing come up a lot in drunk driving discussions. Is it not possible to direct a horse in an unsafe manner due to being drunk? I'm pretty sure I could still cause a lot of damage if I have my horse dart into busy traffic. I'm no expert on horses, but I think there are plenty of situations where a sober human could be a lot better judge of danger than a sober horse. Would a horse think twice about galloping through a blind intersection with a red signal?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[tgeller]

Deal with the abuse of the drugs (DUI) not the banning of them, or alcohol.

That's exactly what this invention does. I'm for it.

Driving while drunk is against the law: If you're drunk and you turn the key, you have broken the law. This invention determines whether you are currently breaking the law, not whether you're likely to do so, or have done so in the past.

The "privacy" argument would only make sense if you believe that the actions you take with your car are your own, private business. Considering that they travel on public roads, I disagree with that belief, and frankly find it hard to understand how anyone could argue otherwise.

Derrr

[Dachannien]

Er... uh, pardon me, Ossifer... uh, can I finger your borrow a minute? *hic*

In 8-10 years, just in time to be irrelevant

[Digicrat]

"But not everyone is enamored of the device which could be available to automakers in eight to 10 years."

So in other words, the technology to forbid drunk driving will arrive at the same time that it becomes irrelevant, at least if Google has its way with autonomous vehicles.

I suppose this technology could play a role in disabling any 'manual override' on autonomous cars though, such that the worst that could happen would be the drunk telling the car to take him to some unseemly place...

This isn't new

[Chewbacon]

This technology has been around for a while. A few years ago I came across a guy (ironically in a bar) who had to wear a sensor on his ankle for probation. Every morning he'd hook it up to a phoneline so it could snitch on him if he'd been drinking.

The DUI Complex

[Frosty Piss]

The confluence of manufacturers of ignition interlock equipment and alcohol monitoring ankle bracelets, plus the political interests of lawmakers to appear tough on crime, along with the self interests of trial lawyers who make stock and trade of DUI arrests, as well as the fines paid to local governments, the reinstatement fees paid to the state and the fees paid to the alcohol treatment programs that are used as an alternative to incarceration, means that the âoedrunk drivingâ cash cow is rivaling the Military Industrial Complex as a hysteria-based revenue stream.

How about other approaches?

[bussdriver]

Other partial or complete solutions in 15 min:

Better mass transit.

Driver's license required to start the car; forget keys. mine already has an encrypted magnetic strip, its possible already to setup something to handle the swiping etc. Suspended license would disable ability to start any cars.

Complex starting process on par with driving... like an IQ test to start your car. people too stupid shouldn't be able to drive anyhow.

FREE mass transit if you FAIL a test!

FREE taxi if you FAIL a test (wonder what the total costs would be compared to the damage caused?)

Fingerprint to start a car-- I don't like the idea but would fit will into this method-- it doesn't have any real privacy issues in itself. your car's black box records a lot more than people realize already; we could use some laws limiting those along with OnStar (don't the inactive onstars still track you if you are a "person of interest"?)

DWI people take hypnosis classes and just make themselves fake drunk when they want to drink; but don't actually drink. (not that this would work since probably the 50% that don't learn are alcoholics-- it isn't one of the worst drugs for no reason.)

use more Roundabouts!! the bad accidents are at the intersections with some idiot running the light or stop sign at high speeds

beef up cars -- they only have to handle about 30 mph; its slower in the USA than EU last I heard.

Slow down car speeds. lower limits, throttle max speeds. Its not the drunk that kills its the car...moving quickly. (to borrow from the gun debate)

Automatic speed limiting based upon the speed limit signs. many ways to implement this without tracking. I'm I the only person SICK of tracking complaints from people who carry CELL PHONES?? WTF! don't these nimrods realize every minute of their life is logged on multiple cell towers probably along with signal strength and other data and is kept for YEARS (possibly forever) and it has been used in court for a long time already-- I bet they can pin point you pretty well now-- back when I 1st heard court case using it they could nail you down to a tower's range.

Automatic breaking at stop signs.

Automatic assessment of driving skills by the car as you get going. It probably will figure you out within a few blocks. This can increase how aggressive its other automatic features work.

More (gov) research into automatically driving cars. Eventually nobody needs to drive except the gearheads; who after a DWI lose the privilege.

Invent an undrunk drug... which will likely end up abused in another way....

Stop putting drunks in jail? put them in other programs. A lot of people drink to IMPAIR their judgment a little (or lot) so why is it a surprise when they make stupid decisions?

Fine the bar for each DWI traced back to them. Ha, like the free market would help much to solve the problem...other than lobby to repeal that idea.

Develop a drug that makes you allergic to alcohol. put them on it. (we do this for mental cases- it works ok....just ok.)

Bigger punishments for driving without a license. In MOST the USA you can't get bye without a car; and most are too clueless to realize there is lame mass transit-- they'll drive without a license because they won't walk a few blocks and lose an hour of time a day (which they'll spend watching TV or drinking.) SO:
Provide free info and free passes for alternative transit to DWI people without licenses. Yes, it sounds backwards but perhaps we are backwards...

If they are single, impound the car.

Censor mainstream media / movies portrayal of alcohol use; attempt to change the culture with a big campaign over a long period of time. Smoking is all but banned in the media. Not a ban, but only responsible use or villains... etc. some sheeple will go for it.

Teach responsible drinking in HIGH SCHOOL. Lower drinking age to 16... at least 18. its not like the ban is doing anything other than helping encourage bad habits and breaking of the law

Re:How about other approaches?

[Grishnakh]

Driver's license required to start the car; forget keys. mine already has an encrypted magnetic strip, its possible already to setup something to handle the swiping etc. Suspended license would disable ability to start any cars.

Won't work. The thing on your license is just a magnetic strip; it doesn't have any way of communicating with the DMV. So that magnetic strip won't be updated when your license is suspended, unless the police come personally with a machine to do it (I guess that could be a solution).

<i>use more Roundabouts!! the bad accidents are at the intersections with some idiot running the light or stop sign at high speeds</i>

Traffic circles are horrible, and cause tons of confusion.

<i>beef up cars -- they only have to handle about 30 mph; its slower in the USA than EU last I heard.</i>

What are you talking about? Improving their handling, or crashworthiness? They're already pretty crashworthy without making them extremely heavy. If you make them more crashworthy, they're going to way as much as a Hummer, but later you complain about SUVs. Crashworthiness and car weight (which directly affects fuel economy) are opposed to each other for the most part, though you can do better with exotic materials and techniques, such as carbon fiber. However, no one can afford a $500,000 car made of carbon fiber just for better crashworthiness.

<i>Slow down car speeds. lower limits, throttle max speeds. Its not the drunk that kills its the car...moving quickly. (to borrow from the gun debate)</i>

Dumb idea. Most DUI accidents are not at excessively high speeds (like > 75mph). The car still has to have enough power to be safe and responsive at freeway speeds, which is 75mph in many states now. Most DUI accidents are at much lower speeds, on surface streets.

<i>More (gov) research into automatically driving cars. Eventually nobody needs to drive except the gearheads; who after a DWI lose the privilege.</i>

Bad idea. Too much complexity for computers to handle city traffic; software errors will kill people, causing massive lawsuits. Sure, we have automatically-driving test cars now, but those are on highways, which are far, far simpler to navigate than crowded, chaotic city streets.

A better idea is SkyTran: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran
Here, the cars have their own raised track, so there's not much complexity, and the cars are fully automated, so human error is eliminated. Plus, they're faster than regular cars and don't have to stop at intersections.

<i>Teach responsible drinking in HIGH SCHOOL. Lower drinking age to 16... at least 18.</i>

Can't be done. On one hand, the religious people will be screaming about lowering the driving age or being accepting of alcohol, and on the other hand, the liberals will be screaming about indoctrinating people from other cultures into our culture. Teaching any kind of moral value in school, like responsible drinking, will irk both the religious people (because you're not teaching the values exactly the way they want them taught), and the liberals (because someone from some other repressive culture might be offended).

I'm going to stop for now.

----
This new Slashdot version SUCKS!

Re:How about other approaches?

[bussdriver]

I listed a bunch of ideas all of which likely would have some positive impact and many better than the few tired lines that ALWAYS come up and stifle discussion. "New" ideas need to get some daylight.

Are people SO STUPID that we can only handle a few ideas and claim those few answers solve 100% of the problems setting up easy rebuttals in a pointless cycle that ruins all progress? Clearly the parent thinks people are too stupid because driving in a circle (roundabout) is too confusing!

My response to anti roundabout people-- yeah, your right, Americans are not as smart as Europeans (or French) and I'd rather total my car so I can get a new one instead of just banging my fenders back into shape.

----
points of issue with parent responses (since everybody else is stuck only defending conventional talking points:)

Car safety design; only caused by force of government, find that the BIG SUVs and heavy vehicles do not have the 5 star ratings. They only look safer and their gains from size are minimal, its almost entirely smart design that makes them TEST safe. MASS doesn't help you if the other guy is also an SUV or is driving faster (F=ma) or has a side impact (much lower G force threshold for instant death.) Carbon Fiber is not needed.... unless you want a big SUV... there should be a weight cap and we should be TAXED by weight since weight is one of the biggest factors that wear down the roads (as does speed). F=ma...

Cars in the USA only are about as safe as the government regulations and they fought that at every point and it did raise car costs already while lowering insurance rates etc. We've had the debate long ago and we finally benefited from "my side" winning. We can go further until we overshoot but we haven't done that. The mandates are lower speed than the EU but we drive faster over here; since we drive faster we should at least meet EU standards or start driving slower than they do. My car may have a high rating but its only for 30mph because that is all they were regulated to do.

Since about 40% of fatal accidents are caused by DUI, I have a hard time thinking your stats are being applied correctly. I couldn't care less about low speed damaged cars; that is an insurance problem-- what really fuels the debate on is the DEATH RATE and the serious injuries!
The majority of accidents are the "low" speed ones; likely every kind of accident has its majority share in the low speed category, except probably car on car fatalities. BTW, I define high speed based on what the car can't protect you really well; which in the USA is probably >30mph. Like I said, they are not safe at highway speeds. I can kill you in your truck with my compact car with me living and within the speed limit! I know a cop and he's seen it (aside from what I've said in this post which can explain how that is possible.)

---
Computers will get better with time and they have been. slashdot? of all places to claim CS has limits to improving our lives.... Computers could drive our cars TODAY; I won't get into implementation issues but one could design a system that would out do humans TODAY; it would be expensive and would have to ban other forms of traffic. I didn't specify the conditions for computer controlled cars; it only gets more flexible and cheaper as the technology advances.

---
SkyTran-- you should post this elsewhere so more people will see it!

That being said, I still think its silly; I've actually met with 2 inventors of such systems.

1) fanatic individualism causes a lot of stupid ideas. having to SHARE something makes it much more affordable. trains or mini trains (bus size) The formerly richest nation could afford to pave everything and get everybody an affordable car but this is not the case for everybody or probably even sustainable for this nation in the future. Sharing transport saves. We can't even do upkeep on our aging road system and bridges today.

2) mono rails are expensive. cable car is the cheapest method; think about it; goo

Re:How about other approaches?

[Grishnakh]

I listed a bunch of ideas all of which likely would have some positive impact and many better than the few tired lines that ALWAYS come up and stifle discussion. "New" ideas need to get some daylight.
Only if they're actually good ideas. If they're unrealistic and easily dismissed with about 3 seconds of thought, then they're not good ideas.

<i>Clearly the parent thinks people are too stupid because driving in a circle (roundabout) is too confusing! My response to anti roundabout people-- yeah, your right, Americans are not as smart as Europeans (or French) and I'd rather total my car so I can get a new one instead of just banging my fenders back into shape.</i>

Are you an American? If you were, you'd know that drivers here are indeed quite stupid, and yes, stupider than Europeans. Now, it's most likely that, on average, American citizens aren't any stupider than European citizens, but drivers are, because of one simple fact: in America, almost everyone is a driver. In Europe, lots of people don't drive, because it's too expensive and/or they don't need to because public transit is better (and they tend to live in denser cities anyway, making public transit more viable). In Germany, apparently, significant driver training is required, which is quite expensive, and the driving test is supposed to be quite challenging. Here in America, there is zero training required, you just have to pass a very simple written test, and the driving test for me consisted of three right turns (out of the parking lot, onto a street, right turn onto another street, and another right turn back into the parking lot!), and then parking in a standard straight-in space. With standards this low, any moron can get a driver's license.

<i>Car safety design; only caused by force of government, find that the BIG SUVs and heavy vehicles do not have the 5 star ratings. They only look safer and their gains from size are minimal, its almost entirely smart design that makes them TEST safe. MASS doesn't help you if the other guy is also an SUV or is driving faster (F=ma) or has a side impact (much lower G force threshold for instant death.)</i>

Yes, good design is important, but if you're driving a 2000-pound small car that's well designed, and some moron in a 6000-pound SUV plows into you, you're screwed. He's going to suffer much less damage than you.

Maybe we should have speed limits set by kinetic energy, instead of speed. That way, someone driving a 2500 pound car can drive 80 on the freeway, while someone driving a 6000 pound SUV can only drive 33 mph on the same road, and is required to stay in the far right lane. On a regular 35mph road, the stupid SUV would be restricted to a mere 15mph.

<i>Carbon Fiber is not needed.</i>

Yes, exotic (expensive) materials are needed to get much better crash performance. There's not much more improvement to be had with the standard steel chasses we have now. Look at the Ferrari Enzo that some moron crashed in California a couple years ago while driving 150mph. He walked away. No $30k car can achieve that level of safety. Enzos cost over $1 million each, and are loaded with carbon fiber.

<i>Computers will get better with time and they have been. slashdot? of all places to claim CS has limits to improving our lives.... Computers could drive our cars TODAY; I won't get into implementation issues but one could design a system that would out do humans TODAY</i>

Microsoft Windows has already shown what happens when humans build software systems that are too complex: it simply isn't reliable. Even Linux systems aren't that reliable as soon as you throw in some 3D video drivers. The software needed to drive cars automatically on city streets would be staggeringly complex, and there's no way to make it bug-free. The first time a fatal crash happens that's the fault of the software, that'd be the end of the company after a giant lawsuit.

That's why we need SkyTran instead:

Re:How about other approaches?

[bussdriver]

Hey off the top of my head I listed a lot of good ideas. I won't say they are all perfect but I don't think that any of them are so bad as to be totally dismissed in seconds-- some people might but then which ones would differ by the person.

I'm American, yes I think we have a lot of stupid people more than many other nations; because of many reasons I'll not get into. its not genetic, its due to them not having to think and their minds getting fat like their bodies are.

My driving test was easy and i did nothing to prepare and passed it 1st time. It is pathetic and I shouldn't have been able to do that. All that we've both said on it does bolster your position on Americans being too stupid to drive in circles (roundabouts) ;however, I do not think people are THAT stupid, they merely need to get used to the process and learn how which is an easier lesson than the act of driving is itself and I think its no more difficult than a 4 way stop. If you were correct, than I can't see how we don't have multiple car pile ups at every 5-6 way intersection... In my state we are putting in roundabouts and people are confused but slowly are adapting with plenty of bitching (but saying it'll cost more taxes to "fix" them usually shuts the people up a bit.)

Roundabouts are no-brainer solutions to high insurance costs, high numbers of fatal accidents being at intersections, and high infrastructure costs for lights. Estimates here were $600 per year per intersection for my city. We have been installing LED bulbs because of the $100s estimated costs for replacing bulbs (labor costs, insurance for labor, multiple trucks, etc.) No drunk can quickly drive over our roundabouts - in some cases they'll smash into something in the middle.

Roundabouts are not something that can be instantly dismissed as being a stupid idea; and we have more intersections and more space in the suburbs around the city than in the city.

----

We are capable of stable secure software that could drive cars. Clearly you are not familiar with the level of regulation that keeps military and especially medical software running as well as it does. You couldn't pull it off if you applied linux level quality; forget microsoft. I won't get into implementation but like I said it can be done today without huge advancements if the infrastructure was put in place-- Your Skycars running on tracks would be an example of 1 design where computers could handle it safely (because it would be a simple problem.)

I had these arguments with other skytran like inventors in the past⦠maybe I talked with the skytran guy? I don't remember. You do realize that running a 2nd road network to every house is not possible anymore right? During the depression and all the good times afterwards allowed us to build the network we have today and the prosperity, foresight, and government investment will not exist in the USA tomorrow or likely even in the next 100 years. We foolishly designed our urban sprawl and city zoning around the most wasteful times in this nation's history. That is going to harm us; especially any new designs like your Skytran.

I've been in cities with great mass transit. It is not HORRIBLE like in the USA where it seems like we are not allowed to have a competent system. As costs go up perhaps less americans can be spoiled with a personal transit system (cars plus road network.) If I lived in say, Montreal, CA - I'd not even want a car (but then I'd also avoid suburbs since they only speak French out there.)

I'm in MN and we have 1 light rail system; cost a ton as well because of property costs-- our stupid ancestors sold our land with the trolley cars and trains and now we are unable to afford buying it all back again. (GM had a part in screwing us BTW.) We have 1 commuter train (using existing rails) and another light rail coming up soon at huge expense. Let me tell you from experience, businesses are hurt during construction-- duh... but afterwards the area changes and businesses are

Re:How about other approaches?

[Grishnakh]

Apologies in advance for the non-working italics. I've seen one person do it correctly since the stupid Slashdot redesign, but I can't figure out what he did to make it work. Anyway, I'll just enclose my quotes in the HTML tags anyway even if stupid Slashdot doesn't render them right.

<i>Hey off the top of my head I listed a lot of good ideas. I won't say they are all perfect but I don't think that any of them are so bad as to be totally dismissed in seconds</i>

Some of them were. Slowing down car speeds, for one, when most deaths occur at speeds much less than highway speeds. Making cars go no more than 55 might reduce highway speeds obviously, but since so many people die at intersections, at speeds less than that on surface streets, it won't help much. Typical speeds are very different between highways and surface streets (or they should be!), so that's why that idea is so easily dismissed. Highway deaths just don't account for much of the total; most people die on other roads, at lower speeds. Highways, with their lack of distractions and everyone driving nearly the same speed and in the same direction, are the safest places to drive by far.

The thing about censoring the media is downright silly, and against the 1st Amendment. If you censor the media, then you also have to censor the internet (because there's really nothing much different than Foxnews and some guy on Youtube, they're both "broadcasting" for all to see), and then the country is no different from Iran. No one wants to go there.

Automatic braking at stop signs? How would that be done? And how would you prevent abuse? What if some prankster sticks up a stop sign on an busy freeway, and all the cars' optical stop-sign detectors see it and cause a massive pileup? Having automatic control systems overruling drivers is an invitation to disaster.

<i>We are capable of stable secure software that could drive cars. Clearly you are not familiar with the level of regulation that keeps military and especially medical software running as well as it does. You couldn't pull it off if you applied linux level quality; forget microsoft. I won't get into implementation but like I said it can be done today without huge advancements if the infrastructure was put in place-- Your Skycars running on tracks would be an example of 1 design where computers could handle it safely (because it would be a simple problem.)</i>

It's not just the OS that's the problem, it's all the algorithms. The amount of computer vision that'd be required in an automatic car would be staggering, and there's always possibilities for error there, which can be fatal. SkyTran and other tracked vehicles, by contrast, don't require computer vision at all: the cars are confined to tracks, so the only thing they have to do is detect cars in front of them, which can easily be done in multiple, simultaneous ways for safety. Even in a blinding snowstorm, these cars would be able to run with no problems, whereas computer-driven road cars would not because they'd be just as limited by lack of vision as a human. Fundamentally, the amount of computational power needed for SkyTran cars is several orders of magnitude less than an automatic road car, and this means they're fundamentally far safer, as much less can go wrong.

<i>AS I SAID - trains only cost because of LAND RIGHTS if you kill ROADS (public land) then the train is cheap.</i>

True, trains would be much, much cheaper if you could suddenly close all the roads to cars and dig them up and start laying train tracks. However, this is impractical. No public transit system is going to be able to take over like that, without a smooth transition. People aren't going to walk to work for 2 years while they wait for a new train system to be built; they'll just move out and go to another city. And realistically, cars aren't going away any time soon, and roads will be around much longer, because a lot of things can't be done with ANY kind of public transit: de

Solving the problem might be worse for society

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people have talked about dropping the .05% to .02% here in Australia and I found a very interesting trend. It turns out that dropping the drunk driving limit is killing more people in other ways while dropping the accident rates on the road in sometimes insignificant ways. It turns out that about 1,500 people die each year on Australian roads and about 30% of them are in accident where someone involved (even as a passenger) had a BAC above 0. About 3,000 people die each year due to alcohol related heath issues and a marjory of these people are middle age or younger. If we use stats for binge drinking of places that have .02%, we should expect that number to about double to 6,000 people a year. Also these figures don't figure in the people that will take a decade to die. When London's 0% BAC came into effect, it didn't make its roads any safer yet the binge drinking rates have increased very dramatically. This trend is visible all over the world. It seems the old idea of having a pint or two at the pub with friends and then driving home has turned into drive home and down a 6 pack followed a year later with a decreased alcohol tolerance so drinking many times the safe limit is very common. The number of people being treated for depression and other mental illnesses that are made worse by social isolation also increases.

Re:Solving the problem might be worse for society

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing has happened in Sweden.

Human stupidity can overcome technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Human stupidity can still overcome technology. There are plenty of people(voters, legislators, judges) that believe that it is wrong to require people with one or more DUI convictions to install ignition interlock device\car breathalyzers.

  couchslug said, "DUI should carry a one-year mandatory jail sentence" I used to live in New Mexico where you would occasionally hear about people getting into wrecks having over a dozen (the largest I recall was 21) DUI convictions. Having lived for many years in New Mexico, DUI is a fact of life and I've put some thought into this. I think an effective mechanism could be to use stuff like whipping, caning, and branding for repeat DUI offenders an addition to fines and forced labor.

I'm not sure what it's like in other places, but suspending a driver's license in New Mexico is often equivalent to giving them a warning as most people with many DUI convictions already have suspended licenses.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Edward_Colgate]

Do you think making poison directly and easily available to manic depressives and schizophrenics etc. is a good idea?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

That's terribly inefficient. Clearly the problems occur while driving, and your solution requires banning a lot of substances. Instead, let's just ban the automobile. It has the same effect, but only requires banning one item, thereby being much more efficient. No more cars == no more drunk driving.

But come to think of it, you'd still need to ban planes and other forms of transportation just to be safe. So instead, we should go to the source of the problem: ban people! No more people == no more drunk driving. Problem solved once and for all. Once and for all!

Math is Your Friend

[Bob9113]

>> Anti-drunken driving crusaders believe that almost 9,000 road traffic deaths could be prevented every year if alcohol detection devices were used in all vehicles to prevent alcohol-impaired drivers from driving their vehicles.

How to Measure Anything is an awesome book.

43,443 deaths from traffic accidents in 2005 (the worst year in the past 20). To prevent 9,000, one in five traffic fatalities would have to be due to alcohol impairment and be prevented by the system.

That may be true, I don't have the stats handy for a more precise measurement.

We must also consider cost. There are three hundred million people in the united states. If one in three have access to a car, and on average those one in three start their car once every three days (call it 100 starts per year on average), that equals (300m / 3) * 100, or ten billion starts per year.

The value of a human life (according to wrongful death suits) is about $25m. Very rough guess, of course.

What is the cost of you car failing to start? Something more than a dollar and less than -- maybe $100 -- on average. Wild-assed guess range there, so I made it broad.

250m vehicles on the road, 10 years median age, 25m new cars per year.

Device cost $25 - $100. Guessing, should be in there, including sensor, interlock, maintenance, and engineering it into the system -- once production ramps up.

9,000 deaths (perhaps an overestimate, probably not an underestimate, IMO)
10b starts per year
Start value range $1-$100
$25m value per life
25m vehicles per year.
Device cost $25 - $100 per unit.

$25m per life times 10k lives (rounding up) = $250b per year.

25m devices times $25 - $100 = $625m - $2.5b per year.

So the device cost portion is essentially inconsequential.

10b starts * {$1 - $100} per start = $10b - $1t start value per year.

{$10b - $1t} / $25b = 0.4 to 4.

Even if you assume $100 value per start, the device only has to make the right decision 3 out of 4 times to be worth it.

When I started this calculation, I was expecting to show numbers clearly opposed to this obvious infringement of personal liberty. I don't like the answer, but it is what it is. These numbers could be off. Given the spin I wanted to put on it, I intentionally edged the numbers in favor of the devices to mitigate the risk of being considered a charlatan.

Based on this rough calculation, it looks like the pure economic case for the devices might hold water.

Re:Math is Your Friend

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of people who's lives aren't worth 25M$.

OT: Please help me to get everyone putting the dollar sign at the end of a dollar amount. When was the last time you heard "That will be dollars 5."?

Re:Math is Your Friend

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great, but I don't drink and drive, and I resent and object to this collective punishment.
 
Captcha: immoral

Re:Math is Your Friend

[Anonymous Coward]

It sure seems odd that this was developed before a good "prickless" blood sugar test was developed. More people die each year from diabetes (than the 9000 DUIs), the costs to the national health care systems are higher than for treating DUI issues (over 25 million diabetics) http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/) and each day most diabetics have to do minimum 4 blood sugar tests.

Re:Math is Your Friend

[cnaumann]

Lets do the math a different way:

10,000 deaths a year * $25,000,000 per death = $250 Billion dollar per year problem.

10 Billion starts per year (I think you are way low here):

$250B / 10B = $25 liability per start

By your math, you liabilty is $25 every time you start your car. That sounds a little high to me.

Re:Math is Your Friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you assume $100 value per start, the device only has to make the right decision 3 out of 4 times to be worth it.

You are assuming the device prevents all 9000 deaths. It will not. Also, it can guess wrong two different ways. It can prevent the sober from driving and fail to stop the drunk (or otherwise incapacitated - DUI figures are inflated to include non-alcohol, typically) from driving. Also, most DUI deaths are drunks killing themselves and/or their, often drunk, passengers. It does happen that innocents are killed in other vehicles but that is a lessor amount. Lastly, the wrongful death amounts will only apply to those wrongfully killed. The DUI/suicide-by-car types are not wronfully killed. Many took their own lives and their families will not be entitled to additional compensation.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

So when they take LSD and and bring themselves to near death do they have to pay their hospital bills?

MADD is about right

[parlancex]

If the solution involved the mandatory installation of this hardware into the actual fingertips of ever man woman and child MADD would still be fighting for it. It's disappointing that this is the biggest voice against drunk driving.

Disaster Waiting To Happen

[Jane Q. Public]

I have serious doubts whether such a system would be anywhere near as accurate as a breathalyzer, which themselves have problems, both with their accuracy and the basic premise on which they are founded.

What would happen is that in order to avoid liability issues, the manufacturers would set them to detect the lowest possible level that may indicate infraction, thereby grounding drivers who are simply not intoxicated.

My vote is not just no, but "HELL NO!" This is a very bad idea.

Further, those who were forced to get them would simply buy a bootleg chip (and accompanying mod if necessary) for their vehicle that defeats the system, rendering it useless anyway. That's what I would do, so I'm guessing others would too.

it's a modern temperance movement

[Wansu]

MADD's goal is prohibition. Along the way they make alliances with politicians and companies eager to manufacture devices like this. If they succeed in getting this crap mandated on all cars, clever drunks will circumvent it and less technologically savvy teetotalers will find themselves unable to drive once these sensors fail. Just look at all the O2 sensor failures. This one will fail too and likely be expensive to replace. Maybe this is what it will take to turn the public against MADD. Go for it MADD. Hike up the cost and failure rate of cars.

Only until the first person dies...

[dlevitan]

It'll only last until the first person dies from one of these sensors. Someone will have a heart attack in a rural area where ambulance service is at least 30 minutes away. Their spouse/friend will carry them to the car, and try to start the car. The sensor will malfunction, and refuse to start. By the time the ambulance gets there, the person with the heart attack will be dead. Instant lawsuit against the car manufacturer and the government. And I'd support it 100%. It's one thing to mandate sensors for people who lost the right. It's another thing to mandate it for everyone.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Grishnakh]

And this is where the theory of "you can do anything you want that doesn't harm others," given without qualifiers, falls apart.

I don't see how it falls apart. If someone drives impaired (by a drug or something else), and hurts or kills someone, then obviously that action should be illegal. That means that drunk or drugged driving should be illegal, as it already is. You can get powerful prescription drugs perfectly legally, but if you drive under their influence and hurt someone, you go to prison for DUI, just as if you did the same with cocaine or pot.

However, if someone ingests a drug, by themselves, in their apartment, then what's the problem? They're only hurting themselves. As long as they don't operate heavy equipment, there is no problem.

Now, you could make some lame argument about "everyone is connected" or somesuch, and how it's going to hurt their families if they die of an OD, but that's a crap argument. Because by that same line of thinking, you should ban being gay, because that's going to hurt their families when they don't have children, or you should ban being atheist or any religious conversion, because that'll hurt their parents when their child abandons their religion. Or you could ban skiing, because someone might hit a tree and die, and then that'll hurt their employer financially. Or you could ban marriage and families, because they take away time that could be used by employees to do more work for the employer.

If individual liberty is at all important, then there's absolutely no reason to ban drugs.

As for Wall Street, there's two problems: 1) Wall Street isn't an individual, it's corporations. In a sane society, corporations would not be treated as people, and not have all the liberties that individuals do. and 2) their actions do affect people and the whole economy greatly, so there is justification for regulation there (again, coupled with the fact that they aren't people).

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Grishnakh]

This post clearly shows why Slashdot needs a "-1, Ignorant" moderation.

The ban on alcohol was not unconstitutional at all, it was part of the Constitution! It's called the 18th Amendment. Look it up. It was only overturned when the government decided it was a giant mistake, and rescinded by the 21st Amendment.

The government can do anything they want if they pass a Constitutional amendment for it.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[DudeTheMath]

I made this point in response to someone else, but: Alcohol impairs response time (and judgment, to some extent, but response time most of all). We had been nearly parked in during a Christmas party: My (entirely sober) wife was unwilling to attempt extraction, but understanding alcohol impairment, was happy to let me pull our car out of its parking place. I did so, then turned the driver's seat over to her. With the article's alcohol detection system in place, I would not have been able to drive at all, not even in a private drive (where we'd been parked); it couldn't know "public roads" (your term) from the private drive, where I endangered no one.

calm down

[Anonymous Coward]

These devices try to reduce the incidence of innocent deaths. They are supposed to stop people from harming others. Humans are notoriously unable to envisage the consequences of their actions on themselves and on others, particularly when they're been on the turps. Such regulations should be welcomed where the driver's actions play out in such a public space as the road.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[DerekLyons]

I certainly hope so. People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free.

The parents of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims might have a different perspective on that.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[EdIII]

Driving while drunk is against the law: If you're drunk and you turn the key, you have broken the law. This invention determines whether you are currently breaking the law, not whether you're likely to do so, or have done so in the past.

That has always been stupid. A car is private property, not public. I have been drunk and worse before and all I wanted to do was to have a safe place to stay warm and take a nap for a few hours. Sitting in the drivers seat with the heat or A/C on while taking a nap is not the same as having the car in drive and actually driving.

All that has ever done is force somebody to take a cab and/or get a hotel room for the night. Cabs are ridiculously expensive. Last time I took a cab it was a 8 minute ride to the airport and was $15. That's just plain stupid. I guess cabs work if your rich or just playing the credit game. Hotel rooms are also expensive as hell. For the money you spend in a hotel room for the month you can afford a mortgage on huge multi-bedroom property, even a few years ago.

Both cabs and hotel rooms are only useful when absolutely necessary and forcing people to absorb those costs only gives them incentives to become criminals.

The "privacy" argument would only make sense if you believe that the actions you take with your car are your own, private business

They absolutely ARE your own private business. Government has ZERO rights to know where you are going with your car, what you are putting in it, who is travelling with you, how often you pick your nose, etc.

Considering that they travel on public roads, I disagree with that belief, and frankly find it hard to understand how anyone could argue otherwise.

It has nothing to do with public roads. As a society we have determined that operating objects in excess of 2,000 pounds at speeds that can cause severe damage to both public and private property and death to citizens is something that requires regulation.

It's not the roads, it's the cars.

I agree with that and it does not conflict with my sometimes fanatical beliefs in Freedom, Privacy, and Anonymity. The only thing I hate about it is that proving I have been granted the right by the state to drive requires verification on demand which is severely abused by the rest of the government. When I am not directly operating a car, government has no rights to demand my identity regardless of how often my identity may be used to verify I have the right to drive.

That being said I do think we need to evaluate the costs of this technology and recognize that we are going to be forcing the costs on to the people. So this had better be a reasonable cost, and not something like $5k per car. Otherwise they can go screw themselves.

Additionally, if this is going to be implemented, DON'T do it on the steering wheel or ignition. Do it on the gear shifting mechanism. Even on automatics, if you can't get the car out of park because it won't shift, you can't drive drunk can you? That would still allow a drunk person to sleep it off in their car too, which is still private property and you should be able to do whatever the hell you want inside it. When you are not driving of course.

Then.... of course keep in mind the penchant that the People have to bypass technology that tells them what they can and can't do. If DRM and copyright protection mechanisms on gaming consoles are any indication, we will have an awful lot of these devices bypassed.

Just like DRM, the only 100% effective solution is a client/server model, which can't be completely applied in this situation. The attempts at doing so would destroy our rights to privacy and speaking for myself I would just say fuck it and become a criminal with my car before letting the government know exactly what I am doing with it every step of the way.

Hang on

[Cant use a slash wtf]

How is this an invasion of privacy? Not letting your car run doesn't sound at all like an invasion of privacy. Maybe if the car started yelling out that I am drunk and my home address. But seriously, in what way does your car not letting you drive because you are drunk, thus not allowing you to possibly kill or injure other people invade your privacy?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[The Yuckinator]

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Or,

"The right to drive your car drunk ends at my bumper" (or legs)

Driving Prevention technology can be VERY bad

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine kept getting stranded by her car. She called the car maker to find out why it refused to start. The answer was that when the temp gets to a certain point (above zero but below freezing), the car's theft protection would be unable to ascertain if she was trying to start the car with the owner's key or if she was trying to steal the car somehow. So as a result, it left her stranded 3 times in a week in dangerously cold weather.

And you think I'm going to buy a car that has this same potential in it, when I do not have the problem of driving drunk? Think again.

Why don't we invest in giving people an alternative to driving drunk, instead of treating every driver like a criminal? I'm talking about developing a public transportation system that drinkers can afford so they don't have to be irresponsible with their driving. Or better yet, focus your technology on the car being able to drive itself so you don't have to worry about the moron who had 10 too many shots.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[adolf]

Under current drunk driving laws in some states, operating any motor vehicle while inebriated -- no matter the locale -- is an offense. Even if it is private land, and even if the vehicle in question is not registered for road use.

I've heard one two many news stories about folks being arrested for mowing their own lawn with their riding mower, while drinking a beer.

Do I think these things are OK? Sure: It sounds like you have one good example of OK. I've produced another (so what if a guy sips a bear as he cuts his grass on an August afternoon?) of OK behavior.

But just because it's right, doesn't mean it's legal.

So, as much as I'm opposed to automated law enforcement, I must say that if it is to rear its ugly head, then it must be indiscriminate.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

It was still stupid for you to do that. What if there had been another partygoer walking behind your car at the time and you didn't notice because you were drunk? Killing someone on private property because you were driving drunk is still illegal.

Hope it can be disabled

[uninformedLuddite]

Living in a country where some 'farms' are larger than entire countries it would be sort of annoying if I couldn't get pissed and drive my own car on my own property.

fingertip blood alcohol testing driving not privac

[Transaction7]

I believe, contrary to many people including many Constitutional originalists, that broad rights of privacy are essential to liberty and thus among the unenumerated, God-given, unenumerated fundamental rights of individuals mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, as well as being more explicitly covered in the Fourth Amendment, to the U. S. Constitution. However, I have some hard questions when people start talking about rights of privacy in connection with driving while intoxicated on alcohol, drugs, substances, or any combination thereof. I have been actively involved in lobbying and campaigning for certain laws protecting real rights of privacy, including medical and psychological privacy, and in litigation over rights of privacy and invasions thereof. How is a measurement of alcohol level taken in, and by a device you know is installed in, your own car an invasion of your privacy? For that matter, since when is driving a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, much less doing so when your being impaired by alcohol or other drugs is very likely to endanger the lives and safety of other people as well as their property, a private act, or an act in or concerning which you would have any reasonable expectation or right of privacy? It also totally escapes me how some people insist vehemently that announced cameras that catch people running red lights or otherwise dangerously violating traffic laws while operating a motor vehicle on a public street or highway, where violations endanger lives and property, implicates much less violates any identifiable, much less arguable, right of privacy.

Hypochondriacs?

[mishehu]

I'm just waiting to hear about how it won't let somebody who just put on some alcohol-based hand sanitizer to drive. Sort of like how I heard eating a couple of those listerine breath strips can register a false positive on a breathalyzer...

Defeated by Gummi Bears??

[TarPitt]

In the last few years some very creative ways to defeat fingerprint biometric systems have been devised:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fingerprint_sensors/

I'm sure we will find some creative ways around this as well, in fact I bet some enterprising folks will market these in the same way that fake urine is sold to defeat drug tests

johnny cab

[fadethepolice]

why don't we just remove the driver from the equation and allow cars to drive themselves. If a car is alway obeying the traffic laws and cannot be in violation of them then there is no reason to pull over and search the vehicle.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

The fact the Tea Party is against it also makes it sound like a good idea.

This can't be good for ....

[ieatcookies]

Purell !

I want one.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I regularly drink at bars. I usually don't go hog wild and all out as often as I want because I have to drive home. If I had a reliable indicator of when I'm good versus when I'm not, I'd be more likely to drink a little more. The way they describe the device, it would be *very* discreet, and no one would have to know.

Whether it should be *mandatory* or not, that's a different story, and unfortunately with no simple answer.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If you're drunk and you turn the key, you have broken the law. This invention determines whether you are currently breaking the law, not whether you're likely to do so, or have done so in the past.

It's not my car's job to be a nanny. It goes where I tell it, and if I feel like making it spin round and round, so be it. It's up to me to choose safe places for that stuff. What I want to know is this: doesn't anybody remember what it's like to stand on principle?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[julesh]

I have no idea where the privacy argument comes from, as nobody's suggesting the car should report failed attempts to start it, or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that such devices are inconveniences. How's it going to distinguish between alcohol accumulating in my sweat because I have a high blood alcohol content and alcohol on my hands because I just used a product like this one?

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[krazytekn0]

Drunk driving laws aren't limited to public roads, the statutes usually read "anywhere in the state" in the spot where most traffic statutes will say "on a public highway"

Connect lock to car's temp sensor

[Kyusaku Natsume]

If the internal or external temperature gets below 15C* then the lock allows you to bypass it and start the car, but it will make the directional lights blink with an specific code every minute until the internal temp goes up and it can make the test on the driver. If this device becomes standard equipment it could be very cheap; I think that it could have one mode in which it is activated/deactivated voluntarily by the car's owner, and another in which it is activated by a court order.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Chrisq]

That's exactly what this invention does. I'm for it.

Driving while drunk is against the law: If you're drunk and you turn the key, you have broken the law. This invention determines whether you are currently breaking the law, not whether you're likely to do so, or have done so in the past.

It is probably not as straightforward as that. I don't know if it is the same in the USA but in the UK an action is not a crime if it is done to avoid a greater crime. For example if someone saw a car bomb and were over the legal alcohol limit, driving it to a safe are would not be illegal if they could show that it was (or could reasonably be seen as) the only way of avoiding mass murder.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[AmiMoJo]

People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free.

I disagree. People should not be free to be drunk in public places. The cost of policing them, the cost of treating them for injuries sustained and the probability of them committing crimes are high enough to justify that IMHO, just like we don't allow people to drive when drunk because the chance of them killing someone else is too high.

While it would be nice if we were all free to do what we wanted to as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else the reality is that we all have to live in close proximity and there are some forms of behaviour that are simply not fair or considerate.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Chrisq]

The fact the Tea Party is against it also makes it sound like a good idea.

Must be the Long Island Iced Tea Party then.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal with the abuse of the drugs (DUI) not the banning of them, or alcohol.
That's exactly what this invention does. I'm for it.

No, it attempts to mitigate the results of the abuse, which occurred in the bar when you drank the stuff.

Driving while drunk is against the law:

No it's not. It's only illegal to drive drunk on the public roads. I'm perfectly within my rights to get drunk and drive my truck on my 200 acres of land, and I'm perfectly within my rights to guzzle whiskey while I do it.

If you're drunk and you turn the key, you have broken the law

Within most city limits, you broke the law when you sat in the driver's seat, even if you don't have the keys in the ignition. Even if the keys are in the trunk. Every year there are multiple citations given to people who decided it was better to sleep in their car instead of driving home from the bar, and were found by police and given DUI.

This invention determines whether you are currently breaking the law

No, it determines whether or not you've placed something containing alcohol against the sensor. Use some hand sanitizer, you'll have to wait for a couple minutes until it evaporates completely or it'll show you off the charts.

The "privacy" argument would only make sense

It has nothing to do with privacy. The argument is called the Presumption of Innocence and our entire system of Justice is founded on it. In fact I believe we had ourselves a little Revolution because of rules like the ones you advocate.

What cost to whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you figure its worth it to a non-drinker like me, an annual bill for $100 dollars ?

Oh, and howtomeasureanything is all flash, like I'm falling for that trap

Warantless Search

[EmagGeek]

This amounts to a warrantless search and is an egregious violation of the 4th and 5th amendments.

If the government requires these in all vehicles, then they also have to write into the litigation that the results of the "test" are inadmissible in court and cannot be used in any way by the State to establish Reasonable Articulable Suspicion or Probable Cause.

Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions that the government even tries to obey the law anymore, and I'm fully aware that this technology will eventually be in all cars, but still...

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[theaveng]

Dahmer forcing people to eat cyanide against their will has jack-all to do with what I said (the right to kill oneself voluntarily).

Medics had better stop using alcohol hand gel?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be a problem if ambulances had this for example.

  Apply hand gel.
  Load casualty into back.
  Clean hands again, more gel.
  Jump into front to rush down to emergency department.
  Problem!

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so, especially if that person with alcohol or drugs is sharing the same road with my family members or friends or other law abiding citizens.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

You reversed over Kenny, you bastard!

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[cain]

I think you may be missing the point of the grandparent post. This is the sound you just heard.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the way the laws are written, having a beer while working on your car counts as a DUI, as does cutting grass with a riding mower, and having the keys on you while sitting (or sleeping) in the car. The logic behind this is apparently: You were GOING TO DRIVE even if you haven't made an attempt to do so yet. At least thats how it works here.... I don't think you should be able to be charged with a dui because you decided to have a beer while working on your car in your yard. Until this is changed, I see no need for this "feature".

Citation:
DUI for sleeping in Broken Down Car

I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that.

[kgfowler]

"(burp) O-Open the P-Prius bay doors Hal..." --kf

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[index0]

Sarcastic or not, I don't drink alcohol for pleasure so this idea is fine with me. Once alcohol is banned, then most people will know what weed smokers feel like.

"Assisted driving"

[DrYak]

Hell, it is already being implemented in the self-parking cars and the intelligent cruise control. There will be some resistance to self-driving cars

The trick is to leave some symbolic form of control to the human, while having the computer take care of all the security details.
(In self parking cars, the drivers is still in charge of hitting the gas pedal, even it the car is mostly doing all the work)

Imagine a system, where the driver is using the steering wheel to indicate where he/she wants to go (destination), while the computer is handling all the details (staying in the lane, avoiding collision with other vehicles, etc.)
A sufficiently advanced system could let all the cars go trough a crossing at the same time, and take the necessary steps to avoid collision (slowing down, slightly turning, and signaling to the other vehicles), so that crossings don't even need traffic lights for the drivers to wait on before crossing.

What you have technically is a "AI / computerized" version of a horse or a donkey. There's still technically a rider on the animal, but the donkey has enough braincells to find its way home and avoid dying, even if the guy sleeping on it is completely dead drunk.

The humans behind the steering wheel still feels enough "in charge" to be able to accept the technology, and the technology only takes care of whats vital to avoid accidents.

Meanwhile, I would happily type in a destination into the GPS and have the damn thing completely auto-pilot itself to destination, while I take a nap.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[bjdevil66]

"People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free."

Selfish absolute freedom from an individual perspective: Yes.

True and absolute freedom, however, does not exist in life because no man is an island. Any "action debt" racked up by the free individual has to be accounted for in our universe.

I mean, who's going to pay (with their time or money) to get rid of the dead body? Everything always comes even...

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[DerekLyons]

Since Dahmer did not do so, you obviously have no clue what I was talking about, and are too fucking lazy to even look it up.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Golddess]

While a quick check of Wikipedia does not reveal anything about cyanide, I'm still not sure what point you were trying to raise with theaveng. How is me being free to do stuff to my own body in any way related to me being free to murder individuals?

Overly Elaborate

[ewhac]

I imagine such an elaborate kluge could reduce the number of drunk driving fatalities.

You know what else could reduce drunk fatalities? Manual transmissions.

If your car has a stick, you have a built-in hand-eye coordination and competency test. If you fail, the car doesn't move (at least, not very well).

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[DerekLyons]

Dahmer was a cannibal.

Ok, let me debunk a couple things.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a first-time DUI offender. I was convicted back in November, and I'm doing my best to answer for it. Nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. I was pulled over less than a mile from where I live. I was not belligerent, got to spend some quality time in the local drunk tank before they released me. Had to walk some miles to where they left my car (and to be honest, I'm glad they didn't impound it...though it would've been nice for them to have locked it.)

I spent six months freaking out daily how my case was going. Accepted the plea deal, and even though I'm doing everything I'm supposed to legally with the courts or fulfilling the stipulations of the Department of Motor Vehicles, I still get surprises. Today I got to fill out even more forms giving my employer additional information even though they included a report with their questions that has all the answers. Fun times.

If you wonder how well Ignition Interlock Devices (IIDs) work, go find out if your locality has a court-ordered DUI traffic school. Hang around there and ask some of the people about IIDs (someone probably has one.) Ask them how they feel about having to go get it calibrated all the time. Ask them how they feel about how long they have to wait for it to boot up before they can start their car. Ask them about how they feel having the sensor go off mid-drive and they have to blow in it to keep driving (lest they started the car sober, got loaded and then went driving) Ask them how they feel hearing stories of people that get their kids to blow for them...

Those of us going through getting our lives back all know how it is...DUI law is a moneymaker. We didn't go out wanting to hurt anyone, but now we have to answer for our poor judgment. And those of us doing it are giving it our best shot, even while we're being told "75% of you will be back here."

I quit drinking entirely because of this. The benefits weren't worth the risk of difficulty.

But I will avoid my anger to all the sanctimonious posts this is generating and offer instead "Walk a mile in my shoes." (And yes, I have to walk a lot now)

Number One thing that will reduce Drunk Driving

[John Meacham]

_Make the trains and buses run past midnight_.
At least in many parts of Los Angeles this is an issue.

Even if they come every half hour or 45 minutes instead of every 10, it will be drastically better than having no option at all. I love taking public transport, but it is just too easy to become stranded when using them late at night. And there are a lot of areas of LA where cabs literally won't go at night, not even particularly dangerous ones, just places off the beaten path. Not that a cab is a good solution in general, what is a $1.25 train ride before midnight will easily turn into a ~$120 cab ride after midnight here.

Compared to the cost of installing breathalyzers in every car which is what MADD advocates, spending the money on better public transport, in particular, public transport that is available after last call seems like a much bigger win. (of course, it actually has the effect of only reducing drunk driving and not drinking in general, which MADD always had trouble deciding between as their main goal. The temperance faction seems to be actively fighting the lets stop drunk driving faction when it comes to policy decisions it seems)

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[coolmadsi]

If instead of preventing the drunk driver from starting the car at all, what if the car would start but be limited to 5MPH? That would allow for simple maneuvers similar to what you described, and if someone did try to then drive somewhere, it would be at a significantly less dangerous speed than if there was no limiting factor.

Re:Let's just ban Alcohol like we did with Marijua

[Golddess]

Ah, did not notice that part. Sorry for ruining the joke.

Flagrant Abuse Fear to Gain Power

[theamarand]

Yes, just what I need, another sensor to fail and make my car not start. However, this is just one more device/sensor to override and hack into submission. Drunk drivers have been overriding keys, buttons, switches and sensors ever since they were employed. What makes anyone think this will be different? I hear people talking about wearing gloves...I imagine the car won't start without some sort of baseline conductivity check - otherwise every drunk would wear gloves to bypass. If it checks every second, does that mean that it would check only once prior to starting the engine, and not check until the engine was turned off; or continuously check as you drove, and turn the car off if you suddenly show positive for alcohol? False positives are scary. Also, would it "report" you? Nice, a tattletale car.

This is how laws get passed: fear. Over 9,000 road traffic deaths could be saved, great. But how about the inconvenience to the other 254,000,000 (Wiki) registered drivers. I'm sorry, but that's like 0.004%. Law enforcement already has great programs for stopping drunk drivers and, hey, if someone gets a DUI, take away their license for a longer period of time, increase the fine, throw them in jail - I don't care. What I do care about, strongly, are my civil liberties. If I'm not a criminal, don't treat me like one.

This goes back to the whole enforced seatbelt thing. Why does it matter if I choose to wear a seatbelt or not? If I die, it's my own life. Why shouldn't it be my choice? I've heard of several friends getting into wrecks over the years where they were saved by not wearing their seatbelt. Officer on the scene said something like "if you had been wearing your seatbelt, you would have been crushed where you sat. Here, have a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt." Nice, right?

Now, having said that, I think this is a great idea to put into the cars of people who have proven themselves to be dangerous by getting behind the wheel of a car drunk. Retrofit it into every vehicle in their household, and if they're caught driving a vehicle without the device, revoke their driving privileges. But, again, I'm only talking about the idea of putting this into vehicles that are driven by people who have a history (once is enough for me) of DUI. When you drive drunk, you could easily kill a single innocent person, so I'm willing to limit someone who obviously can't control their impulses and make the adult decision to either drink, or drive, but not both.