fraught with accuracy issues. It really does need to detect the alcohol on the exhaled breath of the driver as stated in the article rather than the atmosphere in the car. Especially if you are the sober designated driver taking a car full of heavily intoxicated drunks home with all the windows closed in Winter. Regarding touch testing, that presupposes no driving gloves. The article made no mention of drug driving, which I gather is increasingly common.

>The article made no mention of drug driving, which I gather is increasingly common.

So long as we are only targeting evil drugs like weed and not housewives on Prozac or Americans who can't afford insulin and are on the verge of a coma I think we can all get behind this.

I'm not a sniveling miserable coward so I'll just document my experience, psychedelics can be a serious issue but are very hard to detect, smoking cannabis can make driving entertaining but not much, it's easy to learn to work around it - I did both of those at college for a long time.

Drinking is a problem - my dad taught me when he was teaching me to drive ... we stopped at a pub and he ordered us a pint each, then looked at his watch and said, "We have to get home because your mother is getting lunch ready", so I downed my pint and learned the issues of being drunk while driving back home.

I learned how to drive drunk that day but it showed me that it has some serious effects although I was able to avoid going all the way into the ditch because dad grabbed the wheel. I passed my driving test a week later and the result was that ever since then I never drink alcohol if I'm going to be driving. I've only ever had two car accidents - one guy ran a red light and another turned across the road in front of me ... I was able to react fast enough that nobody was hurt.

What's the betting that it doesn't work with a certain skin tone ?

Wonder if methanol fumes will trip it up?

If I clean the windscreen a bit zealous with the demist setting pulling air in, I can get a whiff of it in the cabin.

I'm betting this will be ready for roll-out by the time it's obsoleted by fully autonomous vehicles. Of course, the subsidies for the development of this technology will still be forthcoming.

The driver isn't the one in the hotseat here. The hardware is. They have been failing to build a working system that can stand on it's merits for about 15 years, and even the courts won't uses them for mandated drunk/drink driving cases. People can defeat the more robust blow in the tube sensors after 15 min of trolling google. These are less accurate and less reliable.

This just another case of a company which spend R&D money on a "solution" no one wanted to buy trying to get the government to mandate it. People will disable them until they are wired so deep into the vehicle it disables them, then people will realize the false positive, false negative, and hardware failure rates mean their car won't start for no good reason when they need to get to work, or their ride share shuts down on freeway because it is a warm day and the rider used the complementary hand sanitizer.

This is an attempt to foist yet more junk into already expensive cars, that will make them less reliable and still fail to stop out of control alcoholics. I'd have had less opposition if this was a voluntary option that protective parents can buy, or people in recovery can opt into for extra support. I'd even see a narrower case for purely commercial vehicles, where the operator is on the clock and has been trained ho to handle a failure or a false positive. But that isn't a large enough market for management to make a fat bonus on, so they are going to try to foist this on everyone.

A least there is finally something for the convoys of angry truck people to strike up a valid protest over. Hope these guys like diesel exhaust, cause they are gonna roll some coal.

Perfect. More stuff that can fail in a mode that will render your car undrivable. As someone living in a part of the world where a dead car can mean dead (or severely frostbitten) occupants under worst-case scenarios, I don't like it.

OTOH, $dayjob involves automotive electronics, so bring on the mandatory add-ons, I guess.

(Not trying to argue that getting behind the wheel while inebriated is NBD, just not agreeing worth this approach).

Yep, false positives when the technology can never really be 100% but enough to keep drunks off the road and save lives. Maybe they should allow driver override. Perhaps a bit complicated process to confuse the genuinely drunk.

But doing so triggers a call to the local constabulary and the necessity of presenting oneself to be conventionally tested within a very short time. The touch bit helpful in ruling out impersonators.

Personally I'd spend the money in re-introducing traffic police instead.

Have the car issue a citation and suggest a manufacturer owned rehab facility.

Can i suggest a simpler system?

You have to keep both hands on the wheel, with a maximum of 5seconds for a gear change or a button push?

So people have to at least face forward instead of being busy with the phone, drinking coffee, doing make-up, reloading or reaching into the back seat to smack a child

And if you only have one hand? Or one hand available due holding a coffee cup or something else?

or you drive in the summer with open windows and the hand coolly out of said open window ?

If you're a one-handed driver, you cannot safely drive a vehicle equipped with a steering wheel as its only steering control. If you are one-handed, you may (depending on the assistive technology installed in your vehicle) be able to safely drive a motor vehicle.

Keep your hand on the tiller!

Typical knee jerk, nannying bullshit that dumbs everyone else down to your level. There is no law that says you have to have both hands on the wheel. I don't at all times, even when I'm not doing anything with the other hand. If you're not competent, by all means restrict your own behaviour.

"There is no law that says you have to have both hands on the wheel."

The problem is emergencies. I was riding in an auto which was slammed into by another motorist running a red light. The driver of the vehicle I was in had both hands on the wheel, saw it coming, and frantically cranked the steering wheel so our car turned sharply and we were hit at only a glancing angle.

You can't do that with just one hand on the steering wheel, and human reaction times being what they are, you won't get your other hand up onto the steering wheel in time to take meaningful evasive action.

(The driver who ran the red light was drunk, and relatively uninjured. His passenger was not wearing her seat belt, and died.)

I acquired an unwanted box of Solimo Ethyl Rubbing Alcohol that was meant for COVID disinfecting but it reeks from low purity. I use it for cleaning appliances and put a squirt in the water for my windshield wiper tank. I'll keep an eye out for cars stalling after I wash away the bugs.

Its like those stupid self bucking seat belts that were common in the USA for a while.

'Merkins and personal responsibility rarely occupy the same space.

They just want to make things idiot proof.

Unfortunately some countries excel at making better idiots

Funnily enough, they're the ones that keep idiot-proofing things.

From an outsiders perspective it does appear that the vast blue run cities and the overcharging universities are idiot breeding grounds.

If presented with a food item in its unmolested and unprocessed form they would end up either sobbing in the corner or trying to burn the place down.

Idiots try to make things foolproof. Nothing is foolproof, and an attempt by fools and idiots to make something useful foolproof OR idiot proof is most likely result in it becoming useless in short order.

Won't stop them from trying though.

Proof of registration / insurance detection. Proof of authorized operator. Driver attentiveness monitoring.

'one in three traffic fatalities on US roads involve alcohol '

which means that two out of three accidents were caused by sober drivers! We need a minimum intake requirement. Hic. Need a troll icon as well.

There is one....

Have they not heard of gloves?

Someone with a squirt bottle of meths going round a car park spraying the ventilation air intakes.

So, is the NTSB going to pay me money when I lose my job because I had to get up early to keep it and couldnt get in cause the car thought I was drinking?

I suspect that they are wasting their time with these systems. They would routinely get deactivated/disabled by drivers that were tempted to drink and drive.

The real answer is for the police and government to take the existing legal framework more seriously. Lifetime bans for drink drivers would make a lot of drivers sit up and take notice.

Having the current situation in most countries where a small amount of alcohol us permitted makes the assessment of if you are under or over the limit ambiguous, and let's face it if you have had a drink your judgement is likely to be a little impaired.

In some countries, notable South Korea, there is *no* safe limit. No alcohol if you are driving. I think that this would perhaps be more effective.

I do wonder how effective touch-based solutions would be when the driver is wearing gloves. Quite a few people routinely wear gloves, especially when it is very cold.

I also question the safety of having the car just stop when alcohol is detected. I can't image that it would be very safe to do such a thing on the highway in heavy traffic. They could make it so that a stop below a certain speed but that would reduce its effectiveness.

Over here they keep lowering the permissible level, because either the city of the lawyers get about 10k$ per infraction. Then the insurance company gouges too. If there was a "warning" tier with a non-draconian penalty it wouldn't be so bad, but that isn't what is happening.

Even in your example of South Korea, someone who leaves their kids wedding, having stopped drinking hours earlier, and testing themselves with an industry standard breathalyser could still be found braking the law even though they are not significantly impaired and not scoring on the scale of the tester they used.

That's a system designed to generate penalties and sell taxi rides, not save lives. At that point you should be banning old people, but big suprise that neither are popular.

Now if your last name is Pelosi you can do whatever you want :)

The American system is designed to gouge the little people. Civil asset forfeiture, eminent domain, policing for profit, private companies handling debts to the state, HOAs, the list goes on. Can't pay and you go to prison. Lost your job due to prison, oh dear, more prison. Don't forget you have to pay to stay in prison!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34705968

Land of the free supposedly....

I'll accept this technology in my car in exchange for it being an affirmative defense to drunk driving - so if my car lets me drive then I can't be convicted of drunk driving, unless it can be proven that I did something to defeat the system. If the cops/courts want to claim this isn't accurate enough for that, then why should everyone be forced to pay more for a car to include technology that doesn't work?

I think it would be great if I could get into my car and know I'm safe to drive if it lets me drive, and if it stops me then it has stopped me from doing something I don't want to be doing anyway so I'll make other arrangements to get home or screw around on my phone for an hour until my car will start.

Great ideas by the NTSB. Although maybe it would be easier and more efficient if the government would just lock us all in padded rooms immediately after birth, and keep us there for our entire lives. Kind of like the Matrix. Can't get much safer than that. Driving is dangerous, freedom of movement is grossly overrated, and the government's #1 job is to keep any of us from dying.

The same AIs that can't drive are now going to be able to prevent me from driving?

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."