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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."
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!