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I can think of a number of conditions where people appear to drive impaired, but aren't. They're probably running for their lives... or the lives of their passe

I can think of a number of conditions where people appear to drive impaired, but aren't. They're probably running for their lives... or the lives of their passengers. Here's a good one (trying to outrun a pyroclastic flow, maybe NSFW, most people seen in this video do not live): https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/13ou6df/escaping_pyroclastic_flow_from_volcano_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/13ou6df/escaping_pyroc...

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
...or driving down a shitty road with giant potholes. https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5bcfy1/driving_sober_vs_drunk_in_michigan/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5bcfy1/driving_sober...
HPsquared 3y ago
This is the biggest thing. This is the harm that will be caused. It will cause deaths, but indirectly.
kkielhofner 3y ago
Less dramatic but an example of false-positives with a system like this. My 2015 Ford has an automated "Driver Rest Suggested" feature with some kind of basic algorithm that detects the driving pattern of someone who's tired (supposedly). I assume it would do the same with an impaired driver? Anyway, at least a couple of times a month it goes off for some random reason. Right now I just hit "Ok" and it goes away. Thinking that it could now lead to forced immobility of the vehicle is horrifying to me. Every time I get in my car I would be thinking "am I going to get to where I'm going"? Telling someone you missed something as minor as a meeting because your car thought you were drunk is ridiculous. Although if this was widely mandated the response would be "Yeah, I hate when mine does that". What a future. Impaired driving is unacceptable but this functionality would either need to be calibrated such that you're ridiculously impaired (repeatedly swerving completely across the road) or it would lead to a lot of stranded motorists (and probably still would). In cold climates especially this could absolutely lead to death.
- beej71 3y ago
  I think because of the lawsuit risk car manufacturers will be pretty liberal with how bad your driving can be before it shuts down. Getting to meetings, funerals, and the hospital on time for your baby to be born so the mother and child don't die in your immobilized car... This is all super ripe lawsuit territory. This particular law should be rolled back, though.
tzs 3y ago
How frequent are such situations? With safety stuff you always have to weigh lives saved when the safety measure works as intended against lives lost when it doesn't. E.g., seatbelts save about 15000 lives a year in the US. But occasionally someone is killed who would not have been killed if they hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, like this guy [1] whose neck was fatally compressed by his seatbelt. Politifact had occasion to look into deaths due to seatbelts [2] and found them rare, and worked out that if every crash that ended up with the vehicle on fire or in water with the occupants wearing seat belts ended up killing them it would be a couple hundred or so per year. The real number is going to be much lower than that. I can't find any statistics on pyroclastic flow in the US, but in the last 100 years it looks like there have been under 100 deaths from volcanoes, which should be a superset of pyroclastic flow deaths. How many more would there have been if those who avoided being one of those 100 by fleeing in their cars had cars equipped with the new system? I'm guessing that it would be less than 10x as many, since it is mostly only going to people who stuck around long past when evacuation was called for. So 10 per year. As a check on that, I've seen estimates that over the last 2000 years in North America there were around 5000 deaths from volcano, so on average less than 3 per year. Since most of those were at times when people didn't have cars, volcanology was much less advanced, and communication was much slows that number should be higher than what we'd have nowadays even if cars were very flakey when fleeing from volcanoes. This suggests that my guess of 10x is very generous. Drunk driving kills about 10000 per year in the US, so to make a persuasive argument based on deaths from false positives you are going to need much more than increased pyroclastic flow deaths. Someone has brought up driving erratically while rushing to the hospital to give birth. I haven't found any stats on that. I'd guess that it is not super uncommon, but also that most of the time if you don't make it to the hospital in time it is not fatal. (And also increased deaths due accidents causes by rushing to the hospital should be considered...). Anyone have other ideas? If the anti-drunk driving technology only prevents a quarter of drunk driving deaths that would 2500 per year, so we probably need at least 50 to 100 deaths per year due to false positives for that to be an effective argument. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608342/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608342/ [2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/jul/13/joseph-trillo/ri-rep-trillo-says-30000-people-have-died-because-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/jul/13/joseph-tri...
- 3y ago

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

...or driving down a shitty road with giant potholes. https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5bcfy1/driving_sober_vs_drunk_in_michigan/ https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5bcfy1/driving_sober...

HPsquared 3y ago

This is the biggest thing. This is the harm that will be caused. It will cause deaths, but indirectly.

kkielhofner 3y ago

Less dramatic but an example of false-positives with a system like this. My 2015 Ford has an automated "Driver Rest Suggested" feature with some kind of basic algorithm that detects the driving pattern of someone who's tired (supposedly). I assume it would do the same with an impaired driver? Anyway, at least a couple of times a month it goes off for some random reason. Right now I just hit "Ok" and it goes away. Thinking that it could now lead to forced immobility of the vehicle is horrifying to me. Every time I get in my car I would be thinking "am I going to get to where I'm going"? Telling someone you missed something as minor as a meeting because your car thought you were drunk is ridiculous. Although if this was widely mandated the response would be "Yeah, I hate when mine does that". What a future. Impaired driving is unacceptable but this functionality would either need to be calibrated such that you're ridiculously impaired (repeatedly swerving completely across the road) or it would lead to a lot of stranded motorists (and probably still would). In cold climates especially this could absolutely lead to death.

beej71 3y ago
I think because of the lawsuit risk car manufacturers will be pretty liberal with how bad your driving can be before it shuts down. Getting to meetings, funerals, and the hospital on time for your baby to be born so the mother and child don't die in your immobilized car... This is all super ripe lawsuit territory. This particular law should be rolled back, though.

tzs 3y ago

How frequent are such situations? With safety stuff you always have to weigh lives saved when the safety measure works as intended against lives lost when it doesn't. E.g., seatbelts save about 15000 lives a year in the US. But occasionally someone is killed who would not have been killed if they hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, like this guy [1] whose neck was fatally compressed by his seatbelt. Politifact had occasion to look into deaths due to seatbelts [2] and found them rare, and worked out that if every crash that ended up with the vehicle on fire or in water with the occupants wearing seat belts ended up killing them it would be a couple hundred or so per year. The real number is going to be much lower than that. I can't find any statistics on pyroclastic flow in the US, but in the last 100 years it looks like there have been under 100 deaths from volcanoes, which should be a superset of pyroclastic flow deaths. How many more would there have been if those who avoided being one of those 100 by fleeing in their cars had cars equipped with the new system? I'm guessing that it would be less than 10x as many, since it is mostly only going to people who stuck around long past when evacuation was called for. So 10 per year. As a check on that, I've seen estimates that over the last 2000 years in North America there were around 5000 deaths from volcano, so on average less than 3 per year. Since most of those were at times when people didn't have cars, volcanology was much less advanced, and communication was much slows that number should be higher than what we'd have nowadays even if cars were very flakey when fleeing from volcanoes. This suggests that my guess of 10x is very generous. Drunk driving kills about 10000 per year in the US, so to make a persuasive argument based on deaths from false positives you are going to need much more than increased pyroclastic flow deaths. Someone has brought up driving erratically while rushing to the hospital to give birth. I haven't found any stats on that. I'd guess that it is not super uncommon, but also that most of the time if you don't make it to the hospital in time it is not fatal. (And also increased deaths due accidents causes by rushing to the hospital should be considered...). Anyone have other ideas? If the anti-drunk driving technology only prevents a quarter of drunk driving deaths that would 2500 per year, so we probably need at least 50 to 100 deaths per year due to false positives for that to be an effective argument. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608342/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4608342/ [2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/jul/13/joseph-trillo/ri-rep-trillo-says-30000-people-have-died-because-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/jul/13/joseph-tri...

3y ago