Steering Wheel Checks Alcohol Consumption 436
karvind writes "According to washingtonpost, Inventor Dennis Bellehumeur has made a $600 sensor that can be installed in a steering wheel or in gloves and will test a driver's skin to determine alcohol consumption. Bellehumeur, a real estate agent and deli owner in Wilton Manors, spent 12 years developing his sensor after his then-teenage son crashed into a utility pole while driving drunk and suffered minor brain damage. He received a patent this month and the sensor should complete testing this year."
The Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
And will the car come to a stop if a person only starts drinking (and got drunk) after the car's moving?
And will those drunken teenagers just steal some non-sensored cars which they're not familar to drive with?
I think this "invention" is as good as the censorship card on cable TV, or that running shoes that power the TV. However the only "reactive invention" that I would like to see is a law punishing parents who cannot educate, manner, guide and monitor their children.
If I had to go to jail when my kid killed someone under the influence, I would have had one kid instead of five, and spent more time on that one kid. If I can't afford the time, maybe I am not qualified to have kids at all?
Actually while we are at it, maybe XBox 361 or PS4 can have a built-in features where parents create home work and children must complete them to get to the game?
many uses (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm sure there's a ton of people who would appreciate me doing so.
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
What if.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Common Sense (Score:3, Insightful)
This is -exactly- why we have government-mandated safety equipment. Think of it as a safety device mounted not just in your car, but outside it as well --- every one of these devices is another potential drunk driver kept off the road.
Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
As the number of gadgets that have to function correctly for cars to run increases, the probability of getting from point A to B decreases to zero.
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
For the record I don't think it's lazy parenting, I think it's giving more tools to help parents. As Ronald Regan said "trust but verify"
sigh. (Score:2, Insightful)
after his then-teenage son crashed into a utility pole while driving drunk and suffered minor brain damage
A technical solution to a behavioural problem... yeah, those always work.
NOT Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
And then the work around is that most kids will STEAL A CAR??? please, what part of town do you live in that this is your "obvious" alternative??
This may work, it may not, but those are just rediculous examples of what might go wrong.
It's much more likely that the tech gets circumvented, hacked, or whatever than it it becomes the reason kids steal cars.... lol.
Rational Thought (Score:2, Insightful)
One shot of hard alcohol = one wineglass of wine = one bottle of beer = one FULL hour not driving.
Or if math is too hard:
I've been drinking alcohol tonight. It does not matter how much, I will not be the driver.
Or if an obsessive-compulsive "drinking and gadgets" disorder is present in the person:
There's fifty thousand different types of alcohol analyzers out there that you can buy already. Buy one.
you must be fun at parties! (Score:3, Insightful)
All that doom and gloom, OR they could be pretty standard, universal, very reliable, available in most places... do you feel that your air bags break down all the time and set off sensors, etc?
yes, i realize this is applicable to the ignition system, but so are alot of things that work jsut about every day just fine.
You don't have a right to drive, period. (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe the guy who got a dui (Score:3, Insightful)
It could also be available, like the portable keychain analyzers, to people who would like to know themselves. I know I dont trust my judgement all the time when I'm drunk, but its too late when I wake up with her!!!
Technology easily fooled? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the sensor works by checking the pH of the skin, a lot of things could throw it off (false positives/false negatives). If it works by checking the galvanic properties of the skin, would sweat or lack of sweat not throw it off? If it is looking for a specific molecular signature, wouldn't a good scrubbing of the hands with soap and water just before starting the car not get rid of it?
If all these issues are foolproof, there is still the factor of the alcohol permeating the skin. I'd assume it would take a little while for the alcohol (which has a fairly low boiling point btw, so how much of it would remain on the skin at any given time) to work its way through the dermis and then through the epidermis.
I'm not certain all legally intoxicated drivers would have enough alcohol on their skin to trip the sensor, but perhaps those who could barely stand could be better served with a simple reflex test (get the driver to push and hold one button, wait random amount of time, turn on a light, calculate how much time it takes the person to let go of that button and push a separate button, repeat 10 or 20 times, compute an average and compare it with that driver's norm).
The 'blow in the tube' type checks the alcohol being expelled from your lungs. Since it checks the blood/alcohol level, it's a direct path from the blood to your breath through the lungs and is hard to fool. I don't know how well this through the skin version could realistically work.
This is deeply flawed logic. (Score:2, Insightful)
The breathalyzer-style in car test is targeted at people convicted of a DUI. Thus, it has a very small target population. As soon as something similar occurs on all consumer vehicles, modifications to remove the wheel without consequence will pop up for those who want it. You can replace the emissions equippment on a car with commonly available kits. Your car PCU and the happy folks at the inspection station will be none the wiser. This wheel is no different.
All this works on the same flawed principles of DRM, though not in the same moral vein. An engine is a mechanical device, not a digital one. Slap a digital restriction on an inherently mechanical device, and it's a small step to remove it and make it run properly.
Folks (especially teenagers) who want to go fast have always removed emissions equippment for a few cheap extra horsepower. People who want to drive "after only a beer or two" will remove this wheel. Young adults are adept at changing and installing things on cars. Twenty-somethings, the group most likely to drink and drive (even above teenagers) also have the money to get the proper modifications done.
I don't disagree that it won't have some measureable effect. I do think the effects of mandating this particular bit of saftey equippment on every new car will go far into the effects of diminishing returns. I don't want to see the gap bridged from "specialized knowledge of engines required to circumvent" right into "commodity workarounds available" for the devices judges use to keep drunks off the roads.
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be true, but it might also be the problem.
Will this work for beergoggling too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Even a small amount of alchohol can slow your reactions considerably, and there is a great difference between "driving sensibly" as you put it, and being able to react fast enough in an emergency to avoid an accident.
Driving after drinking has two aspects -- one is the weaving-all-over-the-road, crash into a lampost one, which I'll accept you might not do even when twice over the limit. But the other is being able to react quickly and effectively to a child running out into the road, or another car turning unexpectedly out of a side road, or hitting an ice patch and skidding.
I don't know it you did an "emergency stop" type maneuver when learning to drive where you are -- its simple enough: drive with a passenger who will suddenly and without warning tell you to stop. Try this when sober and when twice over the limit and see if you stop in the same distance. Or try driving as quickly as possible through a line of traffic cones (slalom around them). You might be surprised with the result.
Re:YES! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a real stretch, but let's say my e-brake is not set and my car rolls down a hill and pins someone to a building. It weighs 3500 lb, so if I have to push it up a hill, and I've been drinking so I can't start it and back it up, they're just fucked.
Perhaps instead of mandating equipment like this someday, we could just actually start punishing DUIs properly. Why are there people with like eight or nine DUIs driving out there? After one, take their license away for a year. After two, take it away permanently. Caught driving on a license suspended for DUI? If you're sober, a big fine is appropriate. If you're intoxicated, putting you in prison is appropriate.
Re:The Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unfair to you, it's more than fair for everybody else on the road.
Just remember, you own the car, you do NOT own the roads.
Fundamental problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Assume for the moment you could build a device that could accurately read the driver's impairment level from any source - alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, cell phone, nudie magazine, screaming kids in the back seat, whatever. Assume for the moment this device is failure proof, fool proof, and cannot be misled.
Now, there are two primary use cases for this device:
In this case, the person it will be checking has proven they are willing to accept responsibility for their actions, and so the need for the device is fairly minimal - such a person is likely already going to limit their driving if they have been chemically altered, and all this device is going to do is allow them to drive when the are a little altered, as they will not have to leave the "safety margin" they otherwise would have left.
In this case, you open up the whole barrel of worms of legal rights, but most importantly the person being checked will either be
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to laugh if you have a car alarm, especially if you've never had trouble with it.
Re:YES! (Score:3, Insightful)
How much do you weigh? 4 beers in two hours would put most people over 0.05%, if not 0.08%. If you're planning a long night out, you'll metabolize most of those first three beers in a few hours and your subsequent "maintenance" beer/hour won't cause a problem. However, if you're going out for a 2 hour dinner you're not going to have time to metabolize those first three beers before it's time to get in the car and drive.
Studies have shown that most people at 0.08% are still fully capable of driving, and that the legal limit should be 0.10% (as it was in most places of the US many years ago). The slow but inexorable lowering of the legal limit is tantamount to a reinstatement of prohibition in small steps. If you live in an area where no public transportation is available (sadly, a very large percentage of the US -- I can't speak to Australia, having never been there), 0.08% means you can maybe have one beer an hour, and then you're risking it due to inaccuracies in breathalyzers and road-side sobriety tests (the "walk a straight line" tests are designed to make you fail, regardless of your actual BAC). At .08 you can get away with having a drink or two and not run into any problems. At .05 I'd have maybe one drink the entire night. Any lower, and you just can't drink at all.
Once you can't even have one or two drinks for fear of getting a DUI on the way home, what's to stop them from starting in on other ways of reinstating prohibition? Make it illegal to be drunk on public transportation? Make it illegal to walk home drunk (already the case in many places where public drunkenness is a crime)? Just because the bars are still allowed to stay open doesn't make it any less like Prohibition. Maybe the teetotallers should get a life and stop trying to make everyone else stop drinking. Reinstate the .10% legal limit, and add tougher penalties if you feel it's necessary, but as things are right now even one drink when you're going to have to drive is just asking for years of pain from a bullshit DUI.
Re:The Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but only for a subtle difference. Those devices protect the passengers, not the people on the outside. (Partial credit for anti-lock breaks, though.. Funny thing is, most insurance companies give you a discount if you do have AL breaks. So you do have an incentive, anyway.) These devices protect everybody else from your driving. They're more like break lights, turn signals, and hazard lights in that regard. All are mandated.
"The last thing I need is the government telling me I have to live in a padded room because I might hurt myself."
Again, the concern here is that you might hurt others. It's more like having to pass a bouncer to get into your car than being locked into a padded room.
" If anything, teach responsibility with alcohol instead, that would do much more good than a piece of equipment on a car,"
Do both. Resonsible alchol drinking has been taught for years. Drunk driving is still dangerous.
This guy's a scumbag (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
But the deal with teens is that their sense of not wanting to get in trouble far outweighs their sense of risk from driving drunk.
When I was a teen, all the local teens went to this guy's apartment (behind the 7-11 and right across from the liquor store) to get him to buy them beer. I was in this apartment on many occasions when this happened and a very common occurance was that the kids would play a drinking game to down all the beer before leaving his apartment. I didn't understand why they did this, so one time I asked. One of the kids explained to me (treating my like I was a little dense in the process) that they had to drink the beer before driving away or they risked getting in serious trouble for having beer in the car with them.
Yes it's stupid, but from their perspective, they risked less driving drunk. Their perspective was actually correct from the narrow view of "getting in trouble" being the main thing they were trying to avoid. How do you argue with logic like that?
NO!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
There's no such thing. If you're consuming alcohol, you're being irresponsible.
Re:YES! (Score:4, Insightful)
Or how about you just don't drink and drive?
Heard of taxis? Have friends? There are plenty of ways to go out for the night, have a drink, and avoid driving home.
There's also nothing stopping you staying in and having a drink.
Maybe the idiots that think they can drive when they've "only had a couple" should get a life and stop trying to ruin others.
A
There's no normal excuse for drinking and driving - it's a proven and easily avoidable cause of a lot of accidents and deaths.
To get back on topic, would I want one of these steering wheels? To be honest, no - I don't ever touch my steering wheel unless I'm sober and I can't be bothered with the thing breaking, or failing to realise that it's not alcohol in my bloodstream, it's windscreen washer antifreeze that spilled while I was filling the car.
~Cederic
Re:The Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
No, just pull the fuck over, you stupid cunt.