High-tech highway high jinks
Mother Hen in a Sheet Metal Skin
Well, color me flabbergasted
Usually, it’s the government that increasingly acts as our nanny every minute of the day – especially on the roads. It never ends: Seat-belt laws, helmet laws, killer air-bag laws, crash-test standards, increasingly (absurdly) strict DUI restrictions, stoplight cameras, and on and on.
But what’s this? According to a recent Associated Press article, the freshly crowned number 2 automaker in the world, Toyota, is voluntarily gearing up to soon equip its cars with high-tech automatic blood-alcohol detection devices. These won’t be as simple as on-board breathalyzers
They’ll be things like special steering-wheel mounted sweat sensors, on-board computers that detect erratic driving, or special cameras that scrutinize a driver’s pupils for dilation, poor focus or erratic movement. Upon detection of anything the car’s “brain” classifies as impaired, the cars will coast to a stop.
Yeah, that’s real safe – especially on the highway. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want potentially drunk drivers to even be able to START their cars, much less have them weaving all over the place trying to get over to the shoulder from the middle lane at 70 miles an hour when their car conks out!
But hey, that’s just me.
Starting with the 2010 model year, Toyota hopes to have such systems up and running in its entire model line. Apparently, this design direction is in response to increasing concerns about drunken driving in Japan. Toyota isn’t the only company with such plans in the works, either. Nissan Motor Company has been experimenting with built-in breathalyzers (sounds sanitary – how would this work in rental cars), and some U.S. manufacturers have toyed with things like alcohol-detecting ignition cutoffs
To a lot of you, this must sound like a pretty good development. Life-saving, right?
Maybe. But what I’m wondering is this: Once this technology becomes common, how many legitimately charged drunk drivers will get off in court by claiming that because their cars “let” them drive (because of a malfunctioning system or whatever), they didn’t know they were drunk. Conversely, will police even be allowed to stop someone driving one of these cars for suspicion of drunken driving? How could they establish probable cause for DUI if the car itself supposedly cannot by operated by a drunk?
But hold the phone. There’s another new technology out there that portends to really make a difference in rates of drunken driving (not)
