Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Your view is that it’s hard now so nobody should bother even thinking about the possibility of working toward a solution like that?
Come on, don’t be so narrow minded.
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We're arguing about something hypothetical that frankly will never happen anyway, but if we're going through the exercise all the same, my view is that what you're asking for is:
i) impossible, because software and hardware can always be defeated or worked around.
ii) impractical, because run-of-the-mill vehicles often have fleet variants that require such things be disabled for special use, and such ability to disable will bring us back to i).
iii) a well-meaning overreaction to the Gaudreau tragedy that hit close for all of us on this forum.
An inconvenient truth is that
GGG's post hit the nail on the head. Hell, impaired driving wasn't even the top contributor to road fatalities per the
latest statistics from Transport Canada and continues to trend downward (and COVID numbers aren't remarkably out of line with pre-COVID numbers) without such an intervention.
Suggesting that
everybody should be subjected to this intervention because, on the seldom occasion, an idiot will have too much to drink and hurt or kill someone, and not being willing to understand why it's a bad idea and never going to happen; it's a non-starter and while maybe not narrow-minded, it's certainly stubborn. If you can enforce it with hardware or software, someone with enough motivation can
un-enforce it.
Offer more and better transit / transportation options for people, enact stiffer penalties for drink-driving; I'm all for it. Or I really like DownInFlames' idea if we're going for ambitious pie-in-the-sky ideas... although I think you actually have a better chance of manipulating how the neurotransmitters and receptors in the human brain deal with alcohol than you do making unhackable software.
Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
This would be a major issue. Humans naturally have some degree of alcohol in their breath. That amount will go up if you, for example, drink fruit juice or eat breads with high yeast content. You'd have to have some set minimum level, which I'm guessing would be .05 blood alcohol volume and then frequently recalibrate.
Law enforcement has to recalibrate their breathatlyzers every 150 uses. You could probably get away with every 300 uses or so, for one that wasn't being used in a court of law. If the thing automatically shut off your car and your car had to be towed every time the calibration was off, that would drive people nuts.
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They can also detect things that aren't ethanol (Paywall; use Reader Mode). When the liver breaks down fat for energy (ie: in ketosis), it creates acetone which is expelled through the breath and urine as isopropanol, the former of which can give a false reading on a breathalyzer.