I’ve been driving about twenty-five years. I’ve been drunk maybe four times. Not only have I never been drunk while behind the wheel of a car, only once have I ever had a drink within six hours of getting behind the wheel of a car, and on that occasion it was a single shot of scotch consumed over about an hour and with food.
Why should I pay extra, and risk having my access to my vehicle denied because of a malfunction?
The only cars that should have breathalyzers attached to their ignitions are those used by persons who have demonstrated their inability or unwillingness to drink responsibly.
I don’t drive drunk either, and my first inclination is to be against this too, because I suspect it’d be too expensive, too inaccurate, and too obtrusive. But there’s some imaginable point of cheapness, accuracy, and inobtrusiveness that makes the tradeoff worth it. Non drunk-drivers get something out of this after all: decreased likelihood of being killed by a drunk driver.
How do we reach your hypothetical point of cheapness, accuracy, and unobtrusiveness without years of requiring people who are of no danger to the public to pay a large and unjustified fee?
Better to only require this of people who have shown they can’t be trusted in the first place.
There are people who think this is a good idea? For some reason, that fact scares me more than the thought of sharing the road with the occasional drunk driver.
I’ve commented before that if people were serious about ending drunk driving deaths then the answer has nothing to do with the MADD approach of ever increasing penalties for drunk drivers. Instead of a breath device, you would install a device in the steering wheel that can determine BAC from the skin (this is not fantasy technology, skin based detectors exist and engineers have even prototyped ones for steering wheels.)
I’ve also always said it’d never happen, the majority of the population is fine with 50% of traffic fatalities being alcohol related, they aren’t fine with something that might inconvenience them.
Cars in general could be a lot safer if they refused to start for a variety of reasons, but generally people aren’t willing to accept the inconvenience of that tradeoff.
You wouldn’t need them to be like court ordered interlock devices. Those devices are relatively cheap to install, where they get really pricey is you have to pay a monthly fee every month you have one. This mostly covers the price of the monitoring service, these things aren’t standalone, and too many positive results and the monitoring center alerts the police to the situation.
If you just designed one that was interested in disabling a car and not reporting anything to the police, it’s not really treating people like criminals anymore than requiring a driver’s license or regulating where people can smoke is–it’s just a regulation imposed by society on people for the safety of the public at large.
I was thinking of it as a passive device that would simply alert you when it detects a certain level of alcohol, like how it alerts you your seat belt isn’t on, or a door is ajar or something. The accuracy of the device wouldn’t be something certified to stand up in court or anything, nor would it disable your car (unless you want that option).
Well that doesn’t sound too bad. It wouldn’t stop all the drunk drivers, of course, but it would stop some of them. If there was evidence that it would stop a significant number, then I don’t see much of a downside.
Habitual drunk drives might not be deterred, but there are probably lots of people who don’t drink much and don’t really have a sense of how much is a little too much. Also, I’d think it’d be reassuring to parents loaning the car to the teenagers in the family, etc.
I’m going to be seriously pissed when my hand sanitizer disables my car for an hour.:dubious: The problem with stuff like this is that it is rarely so reliable AND fool proof that it won’t cause misfires. Frankly, even one malfunction is too many, tattling to the cops be damned. A better function might allow one to set the monitor on when stopping for drinks, and thus using the technology pro-actively rather than in assumption of inebriation at all times. In fact, we could probably link that system up to a rfid tag in the car, and one in parking lots of places with liquor licenses, so that it automatically turns on in such places. I don’t like the idea at all, but if it is going to happen then we should ensure that the testing is conducted with some measure of sanity and not randomly.
I don’t know. I don’t care either. I’m not advocating a program to get there. (ETA: though some interesting ideas were posted in this thread since I wrote this.)
Back to hypothetical land, I don’t fully agree with this. It’s like having to take a vision test to drive: we don’t require that only of people who have gotten in vision-caused accidents; we require it of everybody. And we do so because it’s cheap, accurate, unobstrusive, and results in safer roads, which benefit everyone.
Most likely unless you immediately use hand sanitizer the moment before going driving it would have no impact (just like how high alcohol content mouth wash will cause a false positive on a breathalyzer but only immediately after using the mouth wash)–and you basically illustrate my point perfectly by the way. People are unwilling to be inconvenienced.
Society has essentially decided it is okay with 50% of all traffic fatalities being caused by alcohol, just like we’ve decided a certain portion of people dying to lung cancer from smoking or heart disease from eating unhealthy food is acceptable. Free societies result in all kinds of results antithetical to societal and individual good, and the drunk driving thing is just another of them.
I’m actually not in favor of any sort of anti-drunk devices being installed in all cars, I just think it’s worth noting you could probably reduce the number of traffic fatalities by 50% if you implemented a mandatory system, but people by and large are unwilling to be inconvenienced.
Just get rid of the combustion engine already and bring back horses and a few acres of land per family so we can grow our own food and get away from the NANNYSTATE. :mad: