Congress' new mandate to carmakers: Figure out a way to stop drunk driving
npr.org
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I'm not attempting to straw man or anything, but curious if others feel the same way.
Some people seem to even purposely straddle the bicycle lane line as some kind of subconscious auto-guidance while using their smartphone while driving which should be a go-immediately-to-jail offense before they murder someone.
Oh, and call the cop immediately while at it.
And actually, my use case for per-use disabling is usually when I'm the driver: I turn on my car and then I pick up my phone to select some music - but I can't because the phone thinks I'm driving even though I'm parked.
But I'm sure most people have it permanently disabled.
I'm sure there are technical strategies to allow true emergency calls without texting, but I feel like there's a lot of ways for that to go haywire with tragic consequences and there's no need to starting playing with that fire just yet.
The general idea is that the vehicle will monitor the driver’s performance to determine if the driver is impaired or not. It seems fairly reasonable. We have lane assist “Autopilot” type systems that are relatively close as it is. Basically the computer would see the driver is not doing similar inputs as what it determines is necessary and would flag the driver as impaired no matter what is causing that impairment.
I would guess lane swerving and late braking from cell phone use would be easy to detect.
Looking forward to things like machine assisted breaking as default as the tech matures to help avoid crashes.
Additionally, “pervasive use” is not a measurement of damage.
Someone who causes an accident while distracted can just not say they were using their phone and theres no evidence otherwise.
is it? BAC itself is an objective measure, and can be measured quite precisely if one cares to calibrate their equipment. but the actual level of impairment varies a lot from one person to another. all we can really say is that, statistically, most people are not good to drive after some cutoff. it's even more difficult with other drugs. a dose of heroin that would put you in the ER might be the bare minimum to stave off withdrawal for an addict.
> Someone who causes an accident while distracted can just not say they were using their phone and theres no evidence otherwise.
depends how much you care to investigate. a text message sent a minute before the crash is fairly incriminating. even if they are just scrolling instagram, there's probably a timestamped log of that request somewhere.
- This was not the first time that Tory drive drunk, and
- Clearly some people can safely drive with a level of intoxication to that is unsafe for others.
(To be clear, I’m not suggesting that driving drunk is safe or sensible on public roads, just bolstering what the parent said: the BAC level for impairment differs between individuals.)
If by equipment you mean something that analyzes a blood draw, sure. It is my understanding that breathalyzers vary wildly from person to person because the rate at which the lungs pass alcohol from the bloodstream into the air is not consistent, and they necessarily contain a fudge factor that assumes it is.
Anecdotally, I do know what percentage of people who nearly hit me head on each day are looking down into their lap(if not holding the phone in front of their eyes), and it's nearly 100.
According to this other current HN story, this mandate aligns well with carmakers' plans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29182115
> If signs are spotted, the cars will warn the driver, and if the behavior persists, the car would turn on its hazard lights, slow down and pull to the side of the road.
What could possibly go wrong in the middle of the night on an under construction highway with barriers on both sides and no shoulder for miles?
If that sounds contrived, you've never experienced the joys of PennDOT.
American children are actually getting cirrhosis! It's the single greatest health crisis of our age, no exaggeration. Over half of Americans have symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome, what they used to call "fatty liver disease", a precursor to cirrhosis and numerous other ills.
Now that we know saturated fat is not only totally harmless, but important to health, maybe stop promoting low-fat diets, and dis-incentivize advertising "low-fat" and "non-fat" food, which is typically laced with sugar instead. And, maybe make promoting sugar without fiber to minors a felony?
I'm not talking about full self driving, but just the currently available assistance technologies that work 95% of the time (and if they improve to work 99.9999% of the time).
The last 18 months have shown that a lot of people disagree with that.
Only up to a point. We don't go round putting people in bubble wrap to keep them safe. We don't expect the government to station a policeman inside every house. But the lack of gun control in the USA is ludicrous as demonstrated by every mass shooting. Back to cars, why not limit every car out there to 40 miles per hour? fatality rates would plummet.
For example: require an AI system at a drive through which makes a decision if you should be allowed to buy that quarter pounder with nacho cheese sause and half a gallon of Coca Cola based on your silhouette. Or have a scale in the seat of the car connecting to the drive through till…
Don't need to make a case for driving drunk, just need to make the case that preventative measures cause more trouble than they're worth. We had one guy try to make a shoe bomb, and now every commercial passenger has to take shoes off to fly on a plane. It's reasonable to ask where the line is, isn't it?
> Second, as a society we should be minimizing preventable deaths where reasonably feasible.
"Reasonably" and "feasible" are subjective terms.
Thank you. You took the words out of my mouth.
Yes reasonable is a subjective term, which is exactly why I used it. Feasible is less subjective. Society always has to make trade offs over time in cost, freedom, etc. Which is to say taking an extreme position will lead to an extreme society. That’s not what we currently live in, nor would it be what most people want.
A crash test result and airbags make no difference in how I operate the vehicle. The only issue it causes is a higher price of the vehicle, but most people are fine with that tradeoff.
Seatbelts are a better example for your argument, but it's simple and mature tech that's easy and fast to operate. I have never once been unable to operate my car because something went wrong with the seatbelt.
If breathalyzers are as foolproof as seatbelts, do not reduce the privacy of people who have done nothing wrong, and don't add too much to the cost of the vehicle (both for delivery and maintenance) then I'd welcome them.
There is a ton of low hanging fruit in cars.
That's not an acceptable outcome for a car, though.
Your car already has tons of software that just as easily can have bugs that prevent you from playing with your toy.
My car has just worked for a long time for every use case I've needed it for.
I'd wager that nearly 100% of them involve humans driving.
Note that neither claim actually shows cause.
Regulation of humans happens via these forces:
Norms - people expressing approval / disapproval, imposing consequences and remedies similar to law, but not in a court, and not with assurances of due process, equal protection.
Law - Regulates behavior using courts, process and judgement, and can impose remedies, costs, and loss of freedom, consequenses.
Neither norms or law actually prevent people from doing things. They are both about accounting for things people have done. Notably the more resources one has, greater means and popularity generally mean lower costs and more moderate consequences.
Physics - The rules of the world do prevent actions! If it's too heavy you can't lift it, etc... The better one understand the world, the more agency one has. Access to technology also contributes to this agency.
Money - If you can't afford it, you are regulated. The more money one has, the more agency one has, generally.
What is being done here is to regulate with real teeth, preventing actions, without actually making laws and going through courts. Policy becomes law in other words, and many people oppose that because it represents a direct attack on their agency, freedom and it's very difficult to hold the people responsible accountable.
All Congress needs to do is weave in a little immunity and suddenly very large numbers of people experience regulation they may find expensive or undesirable and have very little they can do about it.
Meanwhile, I think there are other causes that haven't hit that inversion yet. 88,000 people die from diabetes each year. If we've got money that we're willing to splash on preventing deaths, why not take the easy win and have the government pay for everyone's insulin? There's no risk to privacy, no dubious "will this prevent me getting to work when I'm sober" questions, and no questions about efficacy.
If the goal is to prevent death, this seems like one of the most dubious methods of getting there. There are 17 million new cars sold in the US per year. If we're conservative on pricing and say it costs $10/car to add this, that's $170,000,000/year, or roughly $17,000 per prevented death. $17,000 a lot. That's health insurance premiums for like 3 families for a year. That's nearly a 5 year supply of the most expensive insulin on the market. That's enough to send someone to rehab.
Re diabetes, personally I’d rather see shifts in food supply and diet / offerings in the US. It’s pretty clear that fast food, soda, endless snacks, and the rest that mega food cos “innovate” is driving diabetes and a whole host of other conditions. Not an easy problem to solve under the guise of freedom to eat what you want, but we’ve been able to successfully minimize tobacco usage so why not junk food?
Government providing anything medical comes with a whole pile of political culture war.
I really hate driving now. 5km/h over the limit is an insta-fine in some areas, where the entire road is monitored. When I still drove I used to watch the speedo more than the road sometimes which can't be the intention. And now the car needs to validate my state of awareness? So I have to focus on looking awake and perky as well.
I really can't wait for self driving cars. Luckily right now where I live I don't need or own one. I hope I never will need to own a car again :)
Ps I never drink and drive but this method will probably cause false positives and cause distractions. It's just time to take this full circle IMO. Computers aren't perfect at driving but neither are people.
Also those are super easy to defeat. People who have them usually just get someone else to blow in it or just blow into a bottle and then squeeze the bottle into the tube.
people have defeated driver awareness systems with flat-printed pictures of their face.
I don't know if defeat-hardness is a particularly good metric for these kind of systems. Very few systems on a modern automobile haven't been defeated in some way/shape/form.
I think it's more valuable to consider the convenience or life-altering-aspect of the consideration -- few people mind nor even notice their photo being taken, forcing folks to breath into a breathalyzer changes their activities and behavior ; their routine is now disrupted, that's a hard sell.
( I hate additional surveillance options, espescially given the idea of the 'always connected automobile'; it's a system that is prime for abuse by authorities. My consideration of these features in no way implies that i'm happy about either implementation. )
In the case of the car, it's dependence and having options. A simple car is a car I can count on even when times are difficult. And I've got a lot of agency on how I manage all of that.
With the TV, it's simple privacy and utility.
This madness must be stopped.
On the other hand, the only times I've ever swerved was to avoid something in the road. And if you've ever driven in icy conditions—it's not ideal but it happens—any kind of automatic correction is dangerous. There are also plenty of circumstances where it's okay to cross solid white lines.
So the devil is in the implementation details. How sensitive is it? How does it determine the difference between a driver who's avoiding an emergency versus about to cause one? What does it do when it thinks something is wrong?
Could there be a good version that informs unsafe drivers that they're not okay? Sure. There could also be a lot of bad versions.
We've moved into a definite era of attempting control through technology, and what defines the "era" is the level of aggression and overt strong arming of responsibility onto companies.
The very highly undesirable part is this will all likely end up working a lot like banking rules do. The companies set policy and enforce it technically, nicely circumventing many limits associated with government and law.
Lessig: CODE
Here it comes! CODE and tech as law.
I do not see this ending well at all, and it's not going to be pleasant.
Edit: Also, "drunk driving" is the "save the children" type blanket cover argument for many other reasons behind this initiative.
Either both mandates make sense or neither does. I think you can probably tell which camp I'm in.
It's stuff like this that's been happening with cars over the years that makes me deliberately continue to drive older cars exclusively. I wouldn't buy a brand new car if I were a billionaire.
The root problem of drunk driving is that driving is the only option for many people and that's a city planning problem.
More density, more walkability, more transit, less drunk driving. Also greener, healthier living.
Technical monitoring is one solution. Making you calculate if driving is potentially worth, at a minimum 3-months of no driving, quickly makes you decide it's not worth the risk is another. That said, you'd think potentially running someone over would be enough risk for to avoid driving under the influence, but it's obviously not.
There's a considerable portion of the US where your options are drive drunk, pay $$$ for an Uber, or sleep next to your car (people have gotten DUIs for sleeping in the car). There are also areas where Uber doesn't exist at 2am, so your options are drive drunk or sleep next to your car.
Japan also has this neat concept of tiny hotels, where they stack beds almost like the drawers at a morgue. They're super cheap though, which gives Japan's drinkers yet another option if they don't want to drive. In the US, I've never been able to rent anything but a full room + bathroom, and you'd still have to solve the issue of how you get to the motel.
Japan has to convince their drinkers to sleep in a tiny hotel or take the train instead of driving. The US is trying to convince a drunk person they'd rather sleep on the ground than try to drive home. I am not surprised that Japan has better compliance rates than the US; it's a much smaller ask.
The way they handle the issue is "daikou taxi", which is a service from the taxi providers. If you've been drinking, you call them, they send a taxi with 2 drivers. You get in the taxi, and the other driver drives your car home.
Introducing a service like this would help reduce DUIs, I think. Having stricter laws about also helps avoid people making the decision to drive somewhere, where they know they're going to drink, in the first place. Instead they may opt to take a cab, find a designated driver etc, drink closer to home etc..
That's it. We won't do it because America.
Mobile app using computer vision to roughly determine BAC based on facial and optic features. No one has a breathalyzer but everyone has a phone, so people will be able to get a more objective measure of their inebriation without drunkenly doing math of how many drinks they had. If a cop can estimate it with a flashlight, a phone can too.