You’re saying that if I don’t put this device on my car, 10,000 Americans will die every year? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. I don’t currently have one on my car, and somehow I manage to kill less than 10,000 Americans every year.
By rhetorically reducing the solution to the installation of a single device on my car, you are trivializing the total cost to the nation as a whole. There are 75 million cars sold in the US every year. If the device adds $100 to the cost of each vehicle, then we’re talking about a solution that costs us $7.5B per year. This does not even consider the intrusiveness and inconvenience of it, as well as the dangerous “guilty-until-proven-innocent” mindset fostered by this solution.
How do other countries manage to obtain a much lower rate of drunk driving without resorting to solutions like this? Surely they are doing so more economically and less intrusively.
BTW, we had this discussion three years ago, at which point I opined the following:
the vast majority of us drivers who do not drive drunk resent being treated as potential criminals with no self-control or sense of responsibility.
Years ago there was a feminist group that had taken all of the male names from a college student directory and published them in a list titled “POTENTIAL RAPISTS.” Those listed were rightly indignant, and in the same vein I resent the idea that you regard me - with my decades-long, accident-free, alcohol-free driving record - as little more than a potential drunk driver who is not ever to be trusted to his own judgment.