The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed
All this seems to be is a company collecting corporate welfare while doing the bare minimum. Such companies should both be sanctioned and have their leadership investigated for potential fraud.
If you receive public dollars to function, the public should expect some modicum of sensibility and accountability.
The ideal solution is needing less driving overall. But excessively punishing people doesn't fix the problem. They're still gonna drive, most likely.
Generally driving drunk is a sign of addiction.... And that can come back anytime, and killing bystanders is clearly a worse outcome.
No it is not.
Especially in rural areas, you can get away with driving on a suspended license for a pretty long time before a cop catches you. I know someone who was probably (she wouldn't admit to it) doing it for at least a year.
Once while hot air balloon chasing, we saw a guy driving his 4 wheel drive in the ditches along a gravel road and found out later from someone he had a suspended license.
They said he figured the cops couldn't stop him if he stuck to the ditches and didn't operate on the official roadway.
Buying or selling tools designed to break the law is already illegal - trivial or not. If a driver gets a DUI and possess a NOOP interlock, they are getting an additional charge, and get to help investigation of the device supply chain.
NHTSA was directed to write some guidelines/rules around the implementation of passive impairment detection as OEM features. They have yet to do so, probably because it is flaky technology.
My guess is that the final rule implementation will be similar to the distracted driver detection that is already in many new vehicles.
I might be wrong on that assumption - I don’t drink, myself.
I'm not sure if this is preventable.
I work for an electrical contractor and I don't think being annoyed by shitty UI is nearly the same problem as electrical fires. Why govern the whole set of software with 1 set of rules?
Software isn't safety critical until it is, but we already have code to regulate software on electrical equipment, planes, etc. Why do you recommend software have a code? I'd much rather each individual thing that's safety critical have regulations around software in place than have to learn a 4000 page manual that changes every time you cross a jurisdiction, where enforcement varies, etc.
Software engineers can't even agree on best practices as is.
Imo, put the code around the safety critical thing (e.g. cars, planes, buildings). Restricting "critical" software will only get abused the way essential workers did during covid.
Also keep in mind the way buulding code gets enforced: you get an inspection upon completion or milestones. Software has a tendency to evolve and need maintenance or add features after; I don't want to trust this to a bureacrat. I don't like google or apple getting involved on "their platform" and I certainly don't want an incompetent government getting involved.
Before we have a software code, let's make and adopt some guidelines we can agree to. In construction, plenty of builders have their own sets of internal rules that are de facto codes. When one of those gets popular enough for life safety software, let's consider pushing for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
ADA is particularly strong in aviation.
https://www.adacore.com/industries/avionics
Rust would also be a contender, but it's "the new kid on the block."
these are slowly but surely pushing manufacturers/sellers/distributors to try to do the right things
it requires transparency about support period commitment, a bug tracker program, issuing updates (I guess in case there's a CVE), doing risk assessment during development, etc., and requirements kick in based on turnover (or headcount).
and it seems like the correct approach, these are already things good products come with
Things like house arrest and the breathalyzer interlock are ways to punish that still let people provide for themselves. So I agree I don't think the state should be babysitting adults which is why I don't like punishments that turn adults into babies.
Disabling all of them would have silly consequences, and wouldn't be compatible with other safety regulations.
The computer systems which perform the calibration on the device (usually done at a mechanic or auto electrician) are under attack. The vehicle will get locked out of this calibration is not performed monthly. There is no remote attack on the vehicle.
https://carcoachreports.substack.com/p/government-kill-switc...
People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehicles. They're 100% court mandated, as a punishment for, usually, drunk driving.
This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment. So what 150k people cant use their cars. 'They did something wrong and deserve it', is the usual motto in the USA.
Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
Unfortunately the US public has no interest in this issue. They have a dual morality where lawbreaking is wrong, but profiting off of criminals and the poor isn't. So mandatory prison labor, expensive monitoring, for-profit probation services, and for-profit jails are fine.
Literally if you don't pay or play, you go to jail. But it was a plea so you "volunteered" (to not go to jail).
I'm legitimately quite confused about this reply in general, why did you assume I wouldn't be talking about a state like Kentucky? Did you consider that most states/courts mandate approved vendors?
Its obviously cruel and unusual to execute those guilty of DUI. But what should the penalty be? Jail? How long? Monetary? How much? Confiscation of vehicle(s)? Some 3rd party company-owned device? What terms? What is reasonable and what is excessive? We also must keep in mind that our society constructed this to be a vehicle nation, with poor to non-existent public transit.
Should the punishment depend on how poor or rich you are? Pro-tip: it already does.
Maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I do find it pretty fair that people that can't responsible use a vehicle aren't allowed to use a vehicle. You don't see me flying airplanes for hire ...
> Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
You're welcome to demand that the software you use provide a warranty. For some reason government agencies which actually would have the ability to demand this seem to not care. It does seem extremely negligent to allow people who can't use cars responsibly to use cars with provided software without a warranty.
Except they are allowed to use a vehicle. This issue isn't that they aren't allowed to use their vehicles. The danger is the disruption in what they are allowed to do and software/hardware failing. This is dangerous not only for them, but others as well.
And to be clear, this is specifically about people who are allowed to drive with a breathalyzer. So, "aren't allowed to use a vehicle" makes no sense. They are allowed to drive with certain conditions. Just like you and me.
The choices these defendants are being offered is "We can charge you for 3-10 years in prison, or you can pay a pile of money to the state and our private companies for 1 year of a breathalyzer in your car"
The plea deal is at best blackmail, and enriches the state and 'business partners' (private companies) via more suffering.
And given how this plea deal system works, I would wager that quite a few who pled out didn't do anything wrong, but are still subject to the blackmail and subsequent removal of rights with tenuous due process at best.
The whole root of this issue is that the USA demolished most of public transit to go all in on the personal vehicle. This was done nationwide to increase profits for vehicle companies and gas/oil companies. If we did have good/great public transit, drunk driving would be a significantly less of a thing. But that would cut into US domestic car production and oil/gas production.
Interlock devices are typically mandated for 6-12 months if it's your first DUI. In California, you will be mandated to use it for three years after your fourth (!) DUI. DUI laws in many parts of the US are ridiculously permissive and your criticism is pretty off-base.
Oh sure there are plenty of people who are guilty and have a problem, they get caught too, but the courts want money so they aren't just going after the problem, they are charging any and every person possible. Some people get charged DUIs for annoying a cop or being tired, and even if their blood work comes up clean, do they drop the case? No. They just argue they were high on some other drug that they didn't test for.
I hate to say this, but how about... not drinking and driving? Drunk driving is a massive problem in the US and accounts for a good proportion of all driving fatalities. And your attitude sounds precisely like the problem: unless the penalties are painful, people will keep trying their luck in hopes of blowing "exactly the limit".
> your criticism is pretty off-base
In my experience, and the experience of my friends, that criticism was spot-fucking-on. Once you get into the system, you'll be lucky to ever truly get out. Every step is designed to keep you paying into the system in perpetuity unless you walk a very, very thin tightrope. Anyone that thinks we rehab our criminals is pretty off-base.
If the people of the country were more constitution minded, they would want a punishment that fits the crime, and no additional punishment on top of it. So I share this gripe, even though I consider DUI a very serious crime (including those who do it and don't get caught).
Consider guns. A felon cannot be in possession of guns legally, and the doctrine of constructive possession means that a prohibited person can be charged with unlawful possession of a firearm if a lawful owner in a household leaves a gun accessible to the prohibited person.
Perhaps it should be a serious crime for a convicted drunk driver to be in or around a car where the ignition device could be in the prohibited person's possession.
My technological ideas were along those lines. Basically allowing them to continue to own their automobile, but not to drive, and perhaps not to buy one, because forcing them to sell their cars is hard to implement (though maybe worth it). And also preventing them from operating cars owned by other people that are stored in their residence or workplace.
So if the punishment for driving drunk is 3 years in prison, you may be able to avoid it by accepting a plea deal that infringes on your third amendment rights.
This can even occur in a civil case.
An interlock prevents you from driving drunk. Suspending a license pretty frequently does nothing.
N=1, but I know of one case where the defendant was offered a lock on their car or an ankle alcohol monitor. Of course they were going to choose the car lock.
Courts (read: prosecutors) routinely use legal blackmail to coerce defendants into agreeing to plea deals. The threat is "we will prosecute you, and add extra charges, and push for maximums, that is unless you agree to these terms".
And those terms, as others have rightly pointed out, can include punishments the court normally isn't permitted to ask for on sentencing.
Also, with our judicial punishment based system, and that those with more money can afford better lawyers. And those with less money get public defenders, who are well known for not doing their job, or the absolute minimum to keep from being investigated by the Bar.
The only way out of here is to ever avoid interacting with police or courts. Once you're in that system, any sympathy is thrown out the window, and you become a money-pinata for the state and private 3rd party companies predating on your socio-economic class.
You mean like this?
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/minnesota-judge-sarah...
Or like that??
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-man-who-shot-killed...
I've had my license suspended. It was just speeding. It's my only traffic ticket, let's not focus on that too much.
Do you know what was stopping me from getting in my car and driving it to work? Absolutely nothing.
You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
On 2019-04-19 my wife's car was struck, while she was driving, by a driver who was driving under suspension. The driver had a bench warrant out for their arrest for failure to appear in court on a previous driving under suspension violation.
I searched my local court database and found this driver had driving under suspension or driving in violation of restriction charges on: 1999-07-12, 2000-01-27, 2000-02-03, 2000-02-14, 2000-05-03, 2001-07-23, 2011-07-13, 2013-07-10, 2013-10-24, 2016-03-10, 2016-05-23, 2016-08-15, 2016-09-09, 2018-04-09, 2018-05-03, and 2019-04-19 (when my wife was struck).
The driver has since had additional driving under suspension charges on: 2019-08-15, 2022-04-29, 2022-08-18, and 2025-10-21.
The driver had served jail time for some of these violations, too.
I tend to think a significant fraction of people who don't respect the law prior to conviction don't begin to respect the law after conviction.
(My wife wasn't injured, fortunately. The other driver was also driving without the state minimum required liability insurance, so we ended up eating the cost of the crash, too. This also seems to be indicative of a general disrespect for the law.)
That isn't what I said, you're misrepresenting me. That isn't very nice.
I said someone who _already broke the law_ in a very provable way, most likely doesn't give a fuck about driving without a license.
> You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
I didn't say everyone. There you go again, making shit up and putting words in my "mouth" as it were. This isn't a good-faith conversation. Take care.
...but even though it's impractical to avoid these machines entirely, in many parts of the world it's possible (and enjoyable) to simply choose a bike instead.
The above is sadly serious. It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people. Taking away someone's car is cruel and usual punishment that cannot be accepted.
As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?
> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.
That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.
Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.
The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.
I live in the UK (hardly a bastion of public transport) in a town of under 10k, and have a car. The main requirement for a car is to take my youngest to Drama club in the next town where it finishes at 9pm, well after buses have stopped. There is a drama club in the town, but as we only just moved we didn't want to move him. Likewise we're driving him to his old school until the end of July as he'll move school then.
I used to live in a village of 300 people, and sure you need a car there.
Sure it was nice to drive the 4 miles to the garden centre at the weekend rather than take the hourly bus, but it's not a requirement.
For a town of 10,000 people, let alone 50,000, to say you can't live car free is nonsense.
Of course America is different. Their towns are far less dense, they don't even have "sidewalks", they are consciously built so you have to drive everywhere, but that's unique to the time American towns were built.
So again, what towns in Europe with a population of 50,000 have no public transport.
I live in a well populated East Coast state, so it's not like I'm even really far out in the sticks too, there are many places which are even worse off in these regards.
And the other 55% may have access but often it doesn't meet people's needs (it may not go when/where they need to go)
Only 11% of Americans use public transit at all on a weekly basis.
3.5% of Americans use public transit to commute.
This is exactly what the parent meant by designing the country in a 'car-brained' fashion. It's not true in many/most other countries.
Europe may not drive as much as America, but it's still about half. Cars are popular worldwide for a reason, and it is not American corporations magically convincing everyone how useful they are.
It's also entirely moot, as we're not redesigning the country in the short term to cut down on DUIs.
This seemed implausible, so I ran the numbers for my situation at the time that involved car costs and a commute distance that were both below median for my city, plus well above-median household income.
Sure enough! It worked out just the way they claimed, if only barely. For the median worker in my city though, it was very true.
When I hear people suggest that, I wonder if they live somewhere fairly flat, with mild mostly dry weather and high population density. Maybe this is why there is so much disagreement on the topic.
That's not to say that anyone should drive after drinking, but the basic reality is that impairment is often individual, and cannot be directly measured by blood alcohol content. Many people are impaired with a lower BAC than 0.08, and in many states you can now be charged and convicted of DUI even if your BAC is not beyond the legal threshold on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence.
There's no good answer here, because we need cut and dried evidence in our legal system to prevent abuses, but there's not really good ways to do that. Separately, the leading cause of accidents is no longer drunk driving in most parts of the West, it's inattentive driving due to cellphone/electronics usage while operating a vehicle. Younger generations don't drink as much as older generations, to the point that zero-percent alcohol spirits and NA beer are now becoming broad markets and it's dramatically affecting bar/pub culture, but younger generations nearly as a rule are addicted to their smartphones.
0.08 level was set in law in the UK in 1967, in France and West Germany in 1970
Most countries have since lowered it to 0.05.
That's the BAC of a healthy male an hour after drinking 2 light beers. That is an absurd limit to set in stone, however there is plenty of evidence to show that /some/ people are impaired at 0.05 BAC.
Ultimately it really amounts to a battle between people who want to operate off fuzzy logic and reasonableness and a people who want to use totalitarian enforcement. There is definitely a significant government-funded (and activist pushed) take where /any/ amount of alcohol /any/ time prior to driving is dangerous, which is obviously stupid and incorrect.
People should not drink and drive, they should not drive while impaired in any capacity, whether its from their prescription medication, a drink, a joint, or simply a lack of sleep. There is also absolutely nothing wrong for a normal healthy person to have a single glass of wine over a steak dinner and to drive home, which will not in any way physiologically impair you.
Alcohol abuse has been around about as long as we've been human. We've just constructed a society where Alcohol abuse is far more likely to pick up collateral damage.
Most people don't do that, but the option is there for anyone looking to make their life and the lives of people around them significantly worse.
Or because they are drunk and want to go somewhere.
That's all there is to it.