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30 seconds seems a bit fast to force that though, no? There’s not always a safe place to pull over.

Is this comment a joke or do you not understand how dangerous it is to ask a driver to blow into a breathalyzer while operating a vehicle?

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.

Nothing specific yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid both in the US and in the EU. Starting in July, all new cars sold in the EU will need to be able to fit after-market alcohol interlocks. In the US, interlocks are already mandatory for convicted DUIers in most states, but new cars will also have to come with factory installed drunk driving prevention technology in the coming years. We just don't know how far that mandate will go eventually.

Old cars sound better and better every year now.

There is no proposal to require these janky ass aftermarket units, nor require any type of interlock at all.

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.

No, the 2021 infrastructure bill required automakers to install passive technology (passive meaning not requiring any specific actions from the driver) to prevent drunk driving by some future date. However, such technology doesn't really exist yet.

Not really the same. There are proposals to require OEMs to install driver monitoring, but it’s usually IR camera based rather than blow in a tube fuel cell based. These systems are probably going to be a mess but the technology isn’t really comparable to DUI interlock devices and the unreliability of those systems is orthogonal.

I assume you're joking, Either way. One morning when I took the bus to work the bus driver had repeated problems getting the bus to start due to the breathalyser. I heard him complain to the passenger behind him, about it malfunctioning. The passenger volunteered to test this theory, by also blowing into the device. The driver handed him the hose, the passenger gave it a go, the bus started, and the driver shrugged his shoulders, and off we went, only slightly delayed.

I'm not sure if this is preventable.

Ada is a name, not an all cap abbreviation.

EU has the NIS2 directive, the CRA (cybersecurity resiliency act), and a few sector specific ones (DORA for financial, MDR/IVDR for medical/diagnostical, and there's probably a bunch more)

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

Or maybe it's "the NFPA doesn't need to prevent against your wires suddenly becoming aluminum because somebody discovered new math" like "DSA encryption has been broken" affects software.

Well, in this case because drunks keep murdering people.

In Kentucky there are approved vendors of these devices by the government. I do not know for certain, but I assume if they had outrageous pricing, they would no longer be approved.

Your insurance is going up more than $100/month if you get a DUI.

> 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.

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.

Because the DUI laws aren't designed to protect people, they are designed to extract money out of citizens for the courts and their buddies providing 3rd party services. Someone blows exactly the limit that is within the error range of the breathalyzer? Still get charged just as hard for a DUI because that is literally thousands of dollars the court will receive. Oh sure if you got $10K to drop on a lawyer it will go away easily, but for anyone that has a public defender they are shit out of luck. Defending yourself in court with a public defender is just increasing the risk and liability because if they lose the case they now have to pay thousands of dollars more for court costs, which pushes people to taking shitty plea deals.

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.

>> This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment.

> 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.

The comment you're replying to isn't disagreeing with the sentences but with the additional hassle on top of the sentence. Do you think that additional ad-hoc punishment is justified? Where would you draw the line?

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).

I'm pretty sure even a plea bargain can't result in soldiers being quartered in your home.

More effective, too.

An interlock prevents you from driving drunk. Suspending a license pretty frequently does nothing.

If I offer you the choice to give me your wallet or else be stabbed, I don't believe it would be appropriate to describe this as "willingly" giving me your wallet.

Well, one could remove their licenses instead, however the US is built around the car, and not being able to use one almost becomes a social credit, in that you can not function in the country without a car.

I have no problem sharing the roads with drunks. It's the cars that scare me.

> Take away the car and people cannot live. [...] It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other,

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.

> 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

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.

That seems fair, yet even less likely to happen in America.

The US tried this in 1920 and rolled it back a decade later - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

We tried that once. It caused a lot of other problems.

LOL, exactly! The underlying problem is people's addiction to drugs, not all the symptoms that come from those addictions.

I once read a claim that once you remove the distance that exists between places because of cars (large set-backs, unusable "green space", wide freeways including the medians and buffer around them, giant parking lots, et c.) cars are only an improvement for most car owners for day to day travel before a city adjusts to widespread car ownership, and adds all that stuff. Add in the time you spend working just to pay for the car (depreciation, fuel, insurance) and it's not a great deal at all. After that, it's only consistently a benefit if you can afford a driver. For most, it's a wash with bicycling, if not worse (in the hypothetical world that hadn't bloated way apart to account for tons of cars) except now you also need to schedule separate time to work out to stay healthy.

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.

If by "quickly" you mean reaching a far-away destination in much more time and with higher variance in arrival time than it would have taken if the origin and destination had been sensibly placed closer together, then sure.

The 0.08 BAC limit also has no basis in reality for what impairment is. It's a political reality, not a scientific one. MADD and other organizations lobbied to make this a legal limit across the US and many other jurisdictions around the world followed suit.

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.

We've also become a lot better at distilling high-proof alcohol, and at making it cheap enough that most people have the budget to get absolutely wasted on the regular.

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.