Passive Detection of Drunk Drivers: Towards a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for Impaired Driving Prevention Technology in Vehicles
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated on Tuesday that it could help end the problem of deaths due to traffic crashes in the US.
There’s no excuse or reason to drive while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, according to NHTSA acting administrator Ann Carlson.
According to NHTSA, it will allow regulators to collect information about the current state of technology used to detect and prevent impaired driving and figure out if it could be implemented nationwide.
Some technologies in development include breath and touch sensors to detect whether someone drank alcohol, as well as cameras that can monitor a person’s eye movements to tell if they’re inhibited, Reuters reported.
“Everyone involved in this rulemaking process at NHTSA and everyone designing impaired driving prevention technologies at car companies need to understand that this is about saving human beings from the horror I’ve experienced and from the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Americans,” said MADD national president Tess Rowland, who was hit head-on by a drunk driver in 2021.
Even if reasonable answers can be found for those questions, the technology would also have to survive the court of public opinion. “The public will reject this if the false positives are too high,” says James C. Fell, a principal research scientist who studies impaired driving at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization. You don’t want to stop drivers who aren’t impaired from driving.
Congress directed the NHTSA to develop regulations requiring advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology in vehicles. The process of creating new regulations can take a long time, with input from researchers, industry and the public.
The NHTSA says that any technology that becomes standard will have to be passive, meaning it can’t do anything except work without help from the driver.
