39
votes
NHTSA tells US Congress: advanced impaired driving detection tech isn't ready
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- Title
- Federal Regulators Tell Congress: Advanced In-Car Tech to Detect Impaired Driving Isn't Ready Yet
- Published
- Mar 17 2026
- Word count
- 654 words
I am so, so against this, in the same way I oppose things like passively scanning your iCloud account to make sure there's no CSAM, etc. I don't think the benefits to public safety outweigh the cost to private privacy and freedom. And yet I'd never heard of this provision before!
Good for the NHTSA for at the very least not implementing a half-baked solution.
It's not capable of saving 12,000 lives, that's what the article is about.
"Currently, detection technology around the legal limit continues to have an error rate that would be unacceptably high ... while NHTSA has not made a final determination about the necessary level of accuracy, even a 99.9 percent detection accuracy level could result in millions to tens of millions of instances each year where the technology would incorrectly prevent or limit drivers from operating their vehicles, or fail to prevent or limit impaired drivers from doing so," the report reads. "At this time, NHTSA is not aware of any technology that claims to achieve anywhere close to [the needed] level of accuracy."
In my opinion, we need to strengthen public transit to reduce drunk driving instances. It's not a perfect solution, nothing is, as countries with better public transportation still have drunk drivers kill people, but it would help a reduce the number of drunk drivers on the road and benefit those not able to buy or operate a car.
I am old enough to remember the pre-Uber/Lyft days and have worked the service industry for most that time. The advent of ride-share apps significantly decreased the rates of drunk driving [anecdotal] just by the sheer fact that the driver would actually show up. (As an aside, it ironically made it a bit harder as a bartender to bounce someone and call them a ride... you used to be able to call a cab, now you have to pay for the ride yourself.)
I imagine a bus/train/subway system that ran efficiently, effectively, and frequently (and at night...) would have to help. I wonder what the drunk driving rates in, say, New York City are vs. smaller cities without meaningful public transit.
I understand your carrot and stick line of reasoning. I think I would say that, and this is a big if, if there was public transit easily accessible everywhere, then we could massively increase the punishments for drunk driving and especially drunk accidents.
I don't necessarily agree with using the stick as the primary way to make the world safer. In my neck of the woods, it would almost certainly be unfairly enforced: rich people would skate by with a fine and minimal jail time, but poor and unprivileged people would see the max sentence every time. While I do agree that every death from drunk driving is preventable, and I would love to live in that world, policing/ sentencing near me would probably not create that.
I also understand that that is a huge "IF" public transit is not an easy thing, and is often underfunded and poorly planned/managed. As someone in an area without, I loved riding the subway in NYC and the Underground in London. But I am also not one of the people who may be scared off or made uncomfortable on public transit.
We know from Singapore's experiences that the most important factor to getting people to follow laws is consistent enforcement. It matters more than what the punishment is. If people know that they'll get caught, and face any kind of punishment, they will stop doing the activity.
I think this also views drunk driving as a "privilege". It's not - drunk driving is purely bad. There is no benefit to drunk driving for either the person or anyone else. Even if it were the case that rich people would go around drunk driving and poor people would be forced to stop drunk driving - I mean, too bad for the rich people? That's their loss.
Do we know that or do we know that it worked for Singapore? Different cultures value different things.
No. Not even a little bit. Look, in a vacuum this stuff always sounds good at first glance. But it never justifies surveillance of the entire population to try to prevent a crime only ever committed by a tiny minority.
Moreover, 12,000 people sounds like a lot, but it's not even a third of all traffic-related fatalities every year, which themselves cause fewer deaths than liver cirrhosis. So we can't even argue that we'd be addressing a top cause of death.
Third sentence of the linked article:
I just wanted to toss this out in regards to:
There's a pretty big difference between someone dying from their own poor decision making, versus someone getting killed due to another person's bad decisions.
That's totally true and a valuable addition, though I think my overall point stands.
I think the idea is that the sensor readings would only be used locally to somehow disable the car… which is itself a problem, but it’s not technically surveillance.
By contrast, a ride share or even just using Google Maps for directions tracks your car’s location and speed. They use it for determining traffic. (They do promise that it’s anonymized.)
Ya, until the police get a geolocation warrant and come after you for riding your bike by the scene of a crime.
Looks like the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on whether geofence warrants are legal soon. But meanwhile, Google changed how they handle location data, so maybe that won't work anymore?
You know what would save way more lives and save a lot of resources and money?
Make it way more expensive to own huge trucks and SUVs that are too tall to even see small pedestrians or low cars. There are so many avoidable deaths per year from this.
This isn’t just “whataboutism”, I’m just saying that if we’re serious about improving road safety there are a lot of things to do first without increasing surveillance.
YES! Put on a big car tax and then use that to create subsidies for small cars. Exempt commercial users with REAL businesses and then when someone buys a suburban they pay 10k extra and someone else gets a rebate on their civic.
And/or require an additional license for vehicles over a certain weight or size. Then if we're going to keep giving people back theirs license after a DUI (which I think is obscene) we could at least force dangerous drivers out of their black dodge rams by revoking their big car endorsement.
Also rolling with this idea... force people who get a DUI to buy a bus pass when you take their license away.
Sober people will still make stupid mistakes. They will get distracted, the weather or visibility will be bad, they'll drive when angry. At which point, you'll have to do the infrastructure upgrades anyways, and you'll have lost even more autonomy
I love @R3qn65's wording that this stuff always sounds good in a vacuum. Lives have a value, but liberty and privacy also have value, especially nowadays. Just because someone disagrees about the exchange rate, doesn't mean they don't care about one or the other.
That said, you asked for an alternative, and nobody else has mentioned it yet…
Self driving cars. Instead of investing time and research and technology into scrutinizing drivers, put that same effort into solving driving. We don't even have to solve the whole thing, just make the combination of human + machine safer than a human alone. And we're really close! The government should help fund it and make it mandatory in every new vehicle.
And lives are not the only metric, but it would save more lives. That 12,000 number is only 30% of driving fatalities—if we build the right things as a civilization, we'll be closer to saving 40,000 lives instead.
Not to burst your bubble, but almost all transportation public policy is ultimately about deciding whether people not dying is worth the increased burden to the public. That's not even getting into the absolute mess that American transportation public policy even is.
On a base level, even something as minor as a stop sign being placed somewhere is an attempt to reduce traffic fatalities, but increases the time, and thus the burden, on the driving public for that street. Going outwards, where the major thoroughfare roads are ultimately is a political issue factoring into noise, and health outcomes, before even going further towards climate change, and access issues.
Regarding this, we already have solutions in place for curbing drunk driving. Laws around drinking and driving are a common core of driver's education, and installing breathalyzers into repeat offender's cars is a fairly feasible situation
But that's not even touching on the actual issue. The real issue is the pivot to a car-centric society has ultimately devastated America. Highway policy was actively racist, leaded gasoline lead to decades of increased crime, and the average American commuter spends 30 minutes a day in traffic.
Some more 'fun' facts, the majority of American suburbs were constructed before drunk driving was even a crime. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) cares more about punishing drunk drivers than preventing it from happening (specifically by ignoring solutions like sober cab services, public transit options, etc.), and public transit systems were explicitly culled by auto manufacturers. DUI law also is frequently used as a justification for racist stops.
Also, I sincerely do not know where you're getting the 12,000 fatalities figure. A total of ~40,000 people die in America per year from any traffic related fatality.
Finally, this 'solution' to a public policy issue increases the police state, without actually providing a real solution. Putting Cameras and Microphones in people's cars, and monitoring them automatically is an absurdist solution.
How about instead we ban people with a history of drunk driving from owning a car?
I don't think alcohol is even the most common type of driving impairment nowadays, either. I can smell weed at practically every other traffic light. I'm going to guess DWI statistics aren't that granular about the type of impairment.
I can recall seeing a woman smoking a bowl in her car while driving on 520 near Seattle. I just can not understand the mindset of people who would drive impaired. The sheer selfishness is unfathomable.
The reality is that the level of impairment between marijuana and alcohol for driving are not even comparable. Otherwise we would see huge amounts of marijuana related crashes and incidents like we did with alcohol back in the 70's and 80's. We don't see this at all. If you happen to be in the camp that any impairment is too much while driving then we will need to examine people drinking coffee before or while driving too, as that is also impairment. Coffee is ok? How about a bump of coke? That is just another stimulant, how about a small amount of Methamphetamine? How about people on diet pills? How about people on any kind of medication? Where do we draw the line?
Alcohol is probably worse for driving than weed, but weed is still pretty bad. Anyone who’s been more than a little buzzed knows how slowly you react. It’s not as bad as being super drunk, where you do things you don’t even remember, but it’s absolutely not fit for commanding 1000+ pound steel death machines.
Caffeine and cocaine are going to make you better at driving (well, cocaine, to a point). Caffeine is very well studied - it’s not going to blunt your reaction speed, up until dosages where it kills you.
Cocaine and meth are illegal to consume to begin with anyway? So I doubt anyone is concerned about making it illegal to use while driving?
What are you talking about? Ozempic? Semaglutides show zero change in reaction speed, motor impairment l, or any other factor that would cause motor death in clinical trials
We do this thing called “a scientific study” to find out what the substance does to your brain chemistry and if it negatively impairs your ability to drive, that’s where the line is drawn.
It might have something to do with tolerance and my years of use as I've been a daily smoker for 25 years, I don't even think about if I'm high or not when I get in the car, it's been so long and so regular it isn't even something I consider. I don't normally drink at all and I would not even consider driving even after 2 drinks.
What I was getting at with the rest of my comment is that what we considered intoxicated or impaired while driving is very not set in science. If we were to judge it by reaction time most people over 60 would not be driving anymore. People on opiate pain medications are allowed to drive. Generally 2 drinks is ok... maybe 3, not 4 though. I actually like the field sobriety test, I think if you can pass that successfully then you are good to drive.
I really don't believe marijuana intoxication is any problem when it comes to driving for a regular user, I've known many people over the years who regularly drive stoned. I spent years smoking a joint on my commute home every day, while I don't do that anymore I never had an incident.
This is only sort of true. Many of these drugs come with a recommendation/warning to not drive, and you can 100% receive a DUI charge for being on opiate pain medications.
While alcoholics "can" drive at truly ridiculous BACs, that doesn't make it okay and, more to the point, they have completely lost the ability to accurately judge what impaired means. Feeling unimpaired is empirically not the same as being unimpaired. If you don't even think about whether you're high before you drive anymore, the same, I am afraid, goes for you. This has been scientifically tested.
Look, I agree with you that it's sometimes a more difficult question than it appears. (Driving tired, for instance, which is also very bad but most people will do sometimes). But I think you're being way too cavalier about driving chemically impaired.
I’m guessing you drive while high on THC? This seems like a lot of cope. Diet pills? Please.
I use cannabis regularly and I’m confident it would significantly impair my ability to drive. Not that I’ve ever tested. I’m sure caffeine could be proven to reduce mistakes made while driving. Maybe the same for small quantities of coke and meth (but I have no experience with either so I am guessing wildly).
I don't think this has been studied with coke or meth, but I do know that drivers with ADHD have an increased risk of serious transport accidents, probably due to increased distracted driving, and research has shown this risk is dramatically decreased when treated with stimulant medication. While these results obviously can't be generalized to the normal population taking recreational stimulants, I wouldn't be surprised if small enough doses of stimulants would even improve focus for neurotypical people.
I've had similar thoughts, but the problem is that wouldn't negate access to a car. A lot of households have multiple cars, or use one shared car, so many banned drivers would likely still have access to at least one vehicle. Heck, there are plenty of stories of people with suspended licenses and/or a history of dangerous driving goading relatives into lending them their cars—or just taking the keys without asking. I've seen so many stories of relatives finding out about the driver "borrowing" the car when they get a call about the crash.
Banning ownership might cut down on some crashes, but it wouldn't really help with the overall problem.
Sure we'd also need punishing laws for driving after you've been banned from doing so.
I don't think it's really a matter of considering driving cars a "human right" so much as a necessity. A majority of the US just isn't that livable without access to a vehicle in some way. In my old neighborhood, it was half a mile just to get from our house to the neighborhood entrance. Google maps estimated it'd be about 50 minutes to walk to the nearest businesses, which would involve crossing some fairly busy roads. As a non-driver, I occasionally described living there as feeling physically trapped. Options for non-remote work or shopping without a car are very limited.
Then you get into areas that are food deserts, or unsafe to traverse on foot or bike for reasons like crime or a lack of pedestrian infrastructure, or far from other vital services such as health care and pharmacies... Just, there's a LOT of very basic things dependent on access to a vehicle. This past month I had some medical tests done, and had to leave scheduling appointments to my mom because as a non-driver I'm dependent on her schedule. My options to find work are also limited since I'd need to depend on either her or Uber, and I'm not a fan of how much Uber rates can vary or how inconsistent the wait time for rides can be.
More urban areas are better since there are more businesses and residences close together, so it's easier to find places in walking/biking distance, or to have a decent public transit system set up for longer distances. But living inside a city, or even just a more commercial area, can be prohibitively expensive or not viable for other reasons. Then as you get into more suburban and rural areas, cars really do become a necessity because everything's so spread out. Public transit in those areas also isn't likely to take off anytime soon for various reasons, including the fact most people already own cars to commute to work or run errands.
Just... The majority of US infrastructure is built around and dependent on the idea of individual people having cars. Restricting access to cars can be genuinely devastating and even life ruining, so yeah, the government restricting car ownership is a non-starter. It's a big problem not just with drunk drivers but with other unsafe drivers in general. Some people just should not be driving, period, but unless you live in a city or some other place with stuff in walking distance or a decent public transit system, most people especially will end up needing a car.
That, and automobile companies would lobby hard against it. Too much of the population has drunk driving records or other unsafe driving practices, they'd be losing a lot of potential sales. They already crippled public transit infrastructure long ago, they're pretty happy with the current status quo.
This is why I hate the "fuckcars" nonsense. I'm sorry, but the fact is that in my state, the workforce would collapse if nobody who ever drove drunk was allowed to drive again. That has nothing to do with the right to drive, and everything to do with pragmatic concerns. Until the average person can go from home to a bar/liquor store and back home just as easily as they can from home to work to the store and back without getting into a car, it is effectively dispossession.
Just as easily to work and a store and back as the bar run.
They are not. This is why oceanic haulers burn crude and we fill the air with poison. Practically, where I live, foregoing cars would leave most people unable to walk to another person with enough money to conceivably pay them, let alone work. Obviously nobody should drive drunk, and cars can be systematically removed from the core of our lives. But the cars are the epicenter of the problem, not the actual cause.
This is where authoritarian governments have it easier. One of the major reasons China adopted EVs so quickly is not just that they’re cheap and available. In every major city, in order to reduce emissions, if you own a gas car you are heavily restricted on when you can use them (eg, on tuesdays, only license plates ending in 2 or 3 can enter Shanghai). These do not apply to EVs.
The net change almost everyone can agree is an improvement. Shanghai went from being chaos in the 2010s to being dead silent when I visited in 2025. Like, it’s eerily silent. No honking, no gas cars. You can be on a pedestrian bridge overtop a gigantic intersection and hear the birds chirping.
It’s the kind of thing that would be fought tooth and nail in the US. God knows NYC congestion pricing was a political battle.
Being next to a street in Shanghai and hearing mostly humming and whirring noises from cars, with the ICE ones (HGVs were still non-electric, at least when I was there) standing out was a bizarre experience. I would love that where I live. Where I live the air around streets stinks of vehicle exhaust, it's genuinely unpleasant. Diesel fumes are really noticeable and clingy.
I wonder how much of it is that a portion of the politicians are guilty of driving impaired.
I honestly feel like if Elon hadn't blown his political capital they'd have just shoved this out the door too.
I feel like he still got a little bit of influence inside the administration, just simply from placement of his DOGE guys, I’m just not sure to what extent. It certainly feels like he’s got some sleeper agents placed throughout the US government now. Maybe it’s just that the moves Trump is making lately are so pro billionaire that it doesn’t really matter if he has control over the administration or not or any political cachet with them, he’s still going to benefit simply by dint of being one of them…
From the article:
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Instead of cars, what about putting the breathalyzer tech into busses & Ubers and give impaired people a free ride home? Incentivize the drunkards to do the right thing...
Maybe think a little more about the incentives that creates…