Technology that can stop drunk drivers could be in every new car
Drunk Driving at the Collider: Impaired Driving at Work for the U.S. Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Institute of Highway Safety Administrator Ann Carlson
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Tuesday that such technology could help end a problem that kills thousands of people in the U.S. each year.
NHTSA acting administrator Ann Carlson said there’s no excuse to drive if you’ve been drinking or using drugs.
“Today’s announcement sets the groundwork for impaired driving rulemaking that will seek the most mature and effective technology,” Polly Trottenberg, the deputy secretary of the US Department of Transportation, said at the event Tuesday. Translation: It will take a long time for technology to detect drunkenness. It is not likely that your next car will come with an anti-Drunk Driving feature.
To force automakers to include the feature, the agency would need multiple rounds of public input before any regulations could be created. Research shows that it is possible to detect impairment using a variety of technologies, including alcohol detection by breath, touch or gaze, as well as by steering or blood alcohol concentration.
The president of the national Mothers Against Drunk Driving said that everyone in the process of designing impaired driving prevention technologies at car companies needs to understand that it’s about saving human beings from horror and from deaths and injuries.
Even if reasonable answers can be found for those questions, the technology would also have to survive the court of public opinion. “The public will reject this if the false positives are too high,” says James C. Fell, a principal research scientist who studies impaired driving at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization. You don’t want to stop people from driving.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed the NHTSA to create regulations requiring drunk and impaired driving prevention technology in vehicles. But the process of creating new vehicle regulations can take months and even years, as regulators collect input from industry, researchers, and the public.
The NHTSA says that any technology that becomes standard would have to be “passive,” meaning it would have to work without any specific action from a driver such as blowing into a breathalyzer tube.
