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0 pointsbigbubba5y ago0 comments

You know it's totally feasible to make a car that won't turn on for drunk people. Should those systems be installed on all cars, in pursuit of creating systems that don't permit stupid actions?

Maybe such a breathalyzer interlock could be installed on your workstation too. After all, your systems and processes should prevent you from stupid things.

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11 comments · 3 top-level

emodendroket5y ago· 4 in thread

Honestly not a bad idea to install the interlocks on all cars.

AdrianB15y ago

It will be a great idea when the reliability of the system will have a large number of nines, so chances that you are stranded in the middle of nowhere and the car does not want to start because of a fault will be less than being hit by an asteroid. Other than that, people would consider it an unsafe product and refuse to use it and people vote for what finally becomes a law.

I heard the same argument for electronic gun safety measures, except that no government agency even consider using it for their own guns. Why? They are not reliable enough, yet.

WarOnPrivacy5y ago

Yes. I could finally start a failed interlock story blog.

necovek5y ago

Or a blog on being unable to drive your kid to an emergency room because you just finished a glass of wine over dinner.

A problem with devices of that type is that they only test for a potential source of inability to drive safely. What we want is to test for an inability to drive safely.

And while one is easy and might give some quick wins, the drawbacks scare me too much.

2 more replies

thom5y ago

There was a funny story recently in the UK, where a football team was late for a match because their breathalyser-equipped team bus refused to start. Turns out it wasn’t that the driver had been drinking, rather that the alcohol-based disinfectant they’d used to clean the bus triggered it.

KronisLV5y ago· 2 in thread

Replace a breathalyzer with something that's less intruisive (like a camera with AI that would observe the person, AI with thermal imaging or air quality sensors, or another possibly-fictional-yet-believable piece of technology) and suddenly, in my eyes, the technology in this thought experiment becomes a no brainer.

If there was more of a cultural pressure against drunk driving and actual mechanisms to prevent it that aren't too difficult to maintain and utilize, things like the Daikou services ( https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Japanese-daikou-s... ) would pop up and take care of the other logistical problems of getting your car home. And the world would be all the better for it, because of less drunk driving and accidents.

q6fqa5y ago

Mercedes[1] has drowsiness detector, it observes the driver through sensors. It's freakishly accurate.

[1] https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/ATTEN...

Schiendelman5y ago

I think a camera is far more intrusive than a breathalyzer.

cle5y ago· 2 in thread

Don’t be absurd. Of course there are costs and tradeoffs to guardrails, and you have to balance the tradeoffs based on your requirements.

This person had to publicly apologize to their customers. One or two low-cost guardrails could have prevented it and would probably have been worth the cost.

bigbubbaOP5y ago

Is that absurd? Systems should prevent mistakes, unless the part needed to implement that is a hundred dollars or so? That seems like quite the walk-back. Courts order alcoholics to install these things, they're established available technology. What tradeoffs are you balancing here?

TomVDB5y ago

It's a free website to keep scoreboards. Not a mission critical nuclear missile launcher.

(But if your mission critical system relies on that scoreboard website, that's on you...)

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