I wonder how self-driving cars would impact this situation? Also: what would happen to a self-driving car that went through a sobriety checkpoint with the drunk person as a passenger?
It's already illegal to drive a car drunk, including a Tesla with Autopilot engaged.
This doesn't stop drunk drivers from ending lives every day, including lives of other people who couldn't reasonably do anything to avoid it. We're just used to that. Self-driving cars promise a future of less death, though not complete elimination. It's a good future.
but eventually when self driving cars are sufficiently advanced, they should be able to drive drunk people home without needing them to provide input (and probably best to forbid them from doing so all together as they’re impaired)
Perfect, let's report all the drunk people! I'd love to live in a world where my car reports me to the authorities whenever I don't obey to its definition of good behaviour! \s
Suppose we have a lot of self-driving vehicles that are slightly better than drunks, and the worst drunks use them. Maybe they can be hooked up to breathalyzers or something.
How can we ensure that the increase in the amount of driving (riding) that drunks do, doesn't more than cancel out the reduction in the rate of accidents?
What if, the self-driving being available to non-drunks, they use it because it's fun and futuristic, and that increases the amount of accidents even more?
I fail to see how this isn’t a step forward, though. Given that there will always be a subset of people who drink at bars who will drive themselves home, then the availability of things like Autopilot can only help to reduce overall the number of accidents that occur as a result.
We've been unwilling to eliminate drunk driving. Breathalyzer ignition lock? Problem solved. Self-driving cars are an extremely poor solution (complexity and cost) to solve this simple problem. People have fought tooth and nail to enable drunk driving - and they've won. Just like they're fighting and winning for mass shootings. Even so, drunk drivers are largely predictable. People know when it's not a good time to be on the streets.
> Stop letting people get behind the wheel after drinking. Solve that problem.
The solution to this problem seems quite trivial to me: to equip all cars with alcohol (and, perhaps, some drug) sensors [not breathalyzers, but rather some more sophisticated remote-sensing devices], strategically located throughout interior to prevent cheating / gaming the system, and integrate them with ignition and engine. As long as the system determines that a driver is drunk or under influence of drugs, it prevents the car from starting or (in case someone starting drinking or using drugs after stopping a car, but leaving it idling) moving.
So basically a super high tech car breathalyzer that uses some black box algorithm to decide if I'm drunk and call the police on me? The self driving car seems a little bit cooler.
Why not just install the existing breathalyzers in every car right now?
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