I once helped someone get their car home after one of these was installed. Their license would not be returned until it was installed, but they weren't allowed to leave it on the lot. Someone else drove it there, and then I got to experience the breathalyzer to drive it home.
The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed
Having to blow while you're already driving is supposed to be a feature. It's to dissuade people from successfully turning on their car, immediately drinking, and then driving.
Nothing specific yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid both in the US and in the EU. Starting in July, all new cars sold in the EU will need to be able to fit after-market alcohol interlocks. In the US, interlocks are already mandatory for convicted DUIers in most states, but new cars will also have to come with factory installed drunk driving prevention technology in the coming years. We just don't know how far that mandate will go eventually.
There is no proposal to require these janky ass aftermarket units, nor require any type of interlock at all.
NHTSA was directed to write some guidelines/rules around the implementation of passive impairment detection as OEM features. They have yet to do so, probably because it is flaky technology.
My guess is that the final rule implementation will be similar to the distracted driver detection that is already in many new vehicles.
Not really the same. There are proposals to require OEMs to install driver monitoring, but it’s usually IR camera based rather than blow in a tube fuel cell based. These systems are probably going to be a mess but the technology isn’t really comparable to DUI interlock devices and the unreliability of those systems is orthogonal.
No, the 2021 infrastructure bill required automakers to install passive technology (passive meaning not requiring any specific actions from the driver) to prevent drunk driving by some future date. However, such technology doesn't really exist yet.
We need to legally mandate a single physical switch that disables all vehicles radios, and a second that factory resets everything but the odometer and vehicle fault logs / black box.
Irrelevant to this issue - the devices didn’t get bricked over the air, but rather they have a “calibration” time lock which must be reset at a service center and the service centers are ransomwared.
We need a software building code. This wouldn't be allowed to happen with non-software. The fact that anyone can build any product with software, make it work terribly, and when it fails impacts the lives of thousands (if not millions), needs to be stopped. We don't allow this kind of behavior with the electrical or building code. Hell, we don't even allow mattresses to be sold without adding fire resistance. The software that is critical to people's lives needs mandatory minimum specifications, failure resistance, testing, and approval. It is unacceptable to strand 150,000 people for weeks because a software company was lazy (just like it was unacceptable to strand millions when CrowdStrike shit the bed). In addition to approvals, there should be fines to ensure there are consequences to not complying.
I have no idea why you'd been downvoted. Everything you said is common sense. I guess this is a case of "it's hard to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends upon him not understanding it."
Either they are alcoholics who can't control themselves or simply just think they are still under control of their ability to drive despite being impaired. Many people just don't know what 0.08 BAC feels like. In college, I got the opportunity to blow on a breathalyzer (not because I was arrested) and found that despite not feeling drunk, I was over the 0.08 limit.
Addiction, mental illness, a defacto requirement to drive to get around low-density towns where walking is often extremely dangerous due to lack of sidewalks and fast roads.
Alcohol abuse has been around about as long as we've been human. We've just constructed a society where Alcohol abuse is far more likely to pick up collateral damage.
The issue here has nothing to do with the device and everything to do with the fact that car-brained America is so cowardly and broken that they will do some Rube Goldberg stunt before they even consider taking cars away from alcoholics.
Nobody in human rights would allow that. Take away the car and people cannot live.
The above is sadly serious. It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people. Taking away someone's car is cruel and usual punishment that cannot be accepted.
> Take away the car and people cannot live. [...] It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other,
As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?
> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.
That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.
Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.
Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.
The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.
Even in cities with public transit often it is so bad that isn't reasonable to expect someone to use it. Reasonable transit must run 24x7/365, at least every half an hour. Miss a day and someone can't get someplace they might want to. More than half an hour between bus/trains and it isn't reasonable. Miss the over night - maybe you can do this if you have taxi service for the same price (which might be cheaper overall for the few people who want to ride at 3am). Half hour is the minimum, it is possible to plan your life around that level of service and not be impacted too badly, but you will hate it (particularly when the line is a little longer than you expected: you miss your bus and so your ice cream melts by the time the next comes)
> It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people
This is exactly what the parent meant by designing the country in a 'car-brained' fashion. It's not true in many/most other countries.
Europe may not drive as much as America, but it's still about half. Cars are popular worldwide for a reason, and it is not American corporations magically convincing everyone how useful they are.
It's also entirely moot, as we're not redesigning the country in the short term to cut down on DUIs.
It's actually an easy problem to solve, some places have done it with great success. You can't effectively stop DUI by taking the car away. The problem is the drinking. You make someone test every morning and if they've been drinking they get the slammer for the day. You don't need to take away their transportation.
If “car brained” means recognizing how great cars are for improving our lives, by letting us get to places quickly, then I don’t see anything cowardly or broken about it. Just seems rational.
If by "quickly" you mean reaching a far-away destination in much more time and with higher variance in arrival time than it would have taken if the origin and destination had been sensibly placed closer together, then sure.
I guarantee that basically nothing will come out of this.
People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehicles. They're 100% court mandated, as a punishment for, usually, drunk driving.
This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment. So what 150k people cant use their cars. 'They did something wrong and deserve it', is the usual motto in the USA.
Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
And there is nearly no oversight on how much these private companies are allowed to charge those 150K people for something that is court mandated. These interlocks can exceed $100/month for some of the poorest people in society.
Unfortunately the US public has no interest in this issue. They have a dual morality where lawbreaking is wrong, but profiting off of criminals and the poor isn't. So mandatory prison labor, expensive monitoring, for-profit probation services, and for-profit jails are fine.
Literally if you don't pay or play, you go to jail. But it was a plea so you "volunteered" (to not go to jail).
A lot of bad things will occur (and or should occur) if you get a DUI. I'm not sure what that has to do with private companies/individuals profiting off of the criminal justice system though.
> So what 150k people cant use their cars. 'They did something wrong and deserve it', is the usual motto in the USA.
Maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I do find it pretty fair that people that can't responsible use a vehicle aren't allowed to use a vehicle. You don't see me flying airplanes for hire ...
> Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
You're welcome to demand that the software you use provide a warranty. For some reason government agencies which actually would have the ability to demand this seem to not care. It does seem extremely negligent to allow people who can't use cars responsibly to use cars with provided software without a warranty.
> Maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I do find it pretty fair that people that can't responsible use a vehicle aren't allowed to use a vehicle.
Except they are allowed to use a vehicle. This issue isn't that they aren't allowed to use their vehicles. The danger is the disruption in what they are allowed to do and software/hardware failing. This is dangerous not only for them, but others as well.
And to be clear, this is specifically about people who are allowed to drive with a breathalyzer. So, "aren't allowed to use a vehicle" makes no sense. They are allowed to drive with certain conditions. Just like you and me.
Given that most of these defendants are poor, they're using public defenders.
The choices these defendants are being offered is "We can charge you for 3-10 years in prison, or you can pay a pile of money to the state and our private companies for 1 year of a breathalyzer in your car"
The plea deal is at best blackmail, and enriches the state and 'business partners' (private companies) via more suffering.
And given how this plea deal system works, I would wager that quite a few who pled out didn't do anything wrong, but are still subject to the blackmail and subsequent removal of rights with tenuous due process at bets.
The whole root of this issue is that the USA demolished most of public transit to go all in on the personal vehicle. This was done nationwide to increase profits for vehicle companies and gas/oil companies. If we did have good/great public transit, drunk driving would be a significantly less of a thing. But that would cut into US domestic car production and oil/gas production.
> This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment.
Interlock devices are typically mandated for 6-12 months if it's your first DUI. In California, you will be mandated to use it for three years after your fourth (!) DUI. DUI laws in many parts of the US are ridiculously permissive and your criticism is pretty off-base.
Because the DUI laws aren't designed to protect people, they are designed to extract money out of citizens for the courts and their buddies providing 3rd party services. Someone blows exactly the limit that is within the error range of the breathalyzer? Still get charged just as hard for a DUI because that is literally thousands of dollars the court will receive. Oh sure if you got $10K to drop on a lawyer it will go away easily, but for anyone that has a public defender they are shit out of luck. Defending yourself in court with a public defender is just increasing the risk and liability because if they lose the case they now have to pay thousands of dollars more for court costs, which pushes people to taking shitty plea deals.
Oh sure there are plenty of people who are guilty and have a problem, they get caught too, but the courts want money so they aren't just going after the problem, they are charging any and every person possible. Some people get charged DUIs for annoying a cop or being tired, and even if their blood work comes up clean, do they drop the case? No. They just argue they were high on some other drug that they didn't test for.
The comment you're replying to isn't disagreeing with the sentences but with the additional hassle on top of the sentence. Do you think that additional ad-hoc punishment is justified? Where would you draw the line?
If the people of the country were more constitution minded, they would want a punishment that fits the crime, and no additional punishment on top of it. So I share this gripe, even though I consider DUI a very serious crime (including those who do it and don't get caught).
I've been hit by a drunk driver before. I know this will be a very unpopular opinion but I believe a single instance of DUI should be enough for a permanent prohibition on an individual owning or operating a motor vehicle. These interlock devices are already a weak compromise catering to people who oppose inconveniencing those who have already proven themselves to recklessly endanger the public when allowed to operate vehicles.
Interlock devices aren't "ad-hoc punishments," they are making sure someone with a history of driving drunk can't start their car when they are drunk for a very, very short period of time. 1 year is common and is extremely lenient.
I'm generally against long term punishments for crimes like this, but operating a dangerous machine like a car is a serious matter. A breathalyzer is a reasonable compromise compared to just taking away your license, right?
I don't think most people realize just how few people in the US obey license suspensions. Studies show the vast majority of people simply keep driving anyway.
"Plea deals" have an interesting caveat that I didn't know - you can agree to punishments that the government couldn't impose as part of a plea deal.
So if the punishment for driving drunk is 3 years in prison, you may be able to avoid it by accepting a plea deal that infringes on your third amendment rights.
They aren’t violations if you are being punished. People who don’t take the deal and get sent to jail or put on probation typically lose those rights as well.
> People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehicles
N=1, but I know of one case where the defendant was offered a lock on their car or an ankle alcohol monitor. Of course they were going to choose the car lock.
If I offer you the choice to give me your wallet or else be stabbed, I don't believe it would be appropriate to describe this as "willingly" giving me your wallet.
Mugging victims didn't make a choice that endangered a bunch of other people that resulted in them getting mugged. Interlock devices are not given to random people for no reason.
Courts (read: prosecutors) routinely use legal blackmail to coerce defendants into agreeing to plea deals. The threat is "we will prosecute you, and add extra charges, and push for maximums, that is unless you agree to these terms".
And those terms, as others have rightly pointed out, can include punishments the court normally isn't permitted to ask for on sentencing.
Also, with our judicial punishment based system, and that those with more money can afford better lawyers. And those with less money get public defenders, who are well known for not doing their job, or the absolute minimum to keep from being investigated by the Bar.
The only way out of here is to ever avoid interacting with police or courts. Once you're in that system, any sympathy is thrown out the window, and you become a money-pinata for the state and private 3rd party companies predating on your socio-economic class.
Well, one could remove their licenses instead, however the US is built around the car, and not being able to use one almost becomes a social credit, in that you can not function in the country without a car.
Yes. I think there are people who would not drive without a driver's license. I don't think magic would be involved.
You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
This is an anecdote. My experience working adjacent to criminal justice gives me the feeling it's indicative of a given mind-set. It certainly would be interesting to see what kind of statistics exist for recidivism
On 2019-04-19 my wife's car was struck, while she was driving, by a driver who was driving under suspension. The driver had a bench warrant out for their arrest for failure to appear in court on a previous driving under suspension violation.
I searched my local court database and found this driver had driving under suspension or driving in violation of restriction charges on: 1999-07-12, 2000-01-27, 2000-02-03, 2000-02-14, 2000-05-03, 2001-07-23, 2011-07-13, 2013-07-10, 2013-10-24, 2016-03-10, 2016-05-23, 2016-08-15, 2016-09-09, 2018-04-09, 2018-05-03, and 2019-04-19 (when my wife was struck).
The driver has since had additional driving under suspension charges on: 2019-08-15, 2022-04-29, 2022-08-18, and 2025-10-21.
The driver had served jail time, in the past, for some of these violations, too.
I tend to think people who don't respect the law prior to conviction don't magically begin to respect the law after conviction.
> Yes. I think there are people who would not drive without a driver's license. I don't think magic would be involved.
That isn't what I said, you're misrepresenting me. That isn't very nice.
I said someone who _already broke the law_ in a very provable way, most likely doesn't give a fuck about driving without a license.
> You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
I didn't say everyone. There you go again, making shit up and putting words in my "mouth" as it were. This isn't a good-faith conversation. Take care.
You're right - but of course it's telling that "don't go outside" is the only prescription to respond to qualms about terraforming the entire planet in service of one industry's (statistically quite dangerous) product.
...but even though it's impractical to avoid these machines entirely, in many parts of the world it's possible (and enjoyable) to simply choose a bike instead.
The issue here is not an OTA thing, for what it’s worth. That is to say, it’s not that these devices phoned home directly and a cloud server is down; rather, these devices require periodic “calibration” (due to a combination of regulation, legitimate technical need, and grift) at a service center and the service centers are out of commission, presumably due to ransomware.
The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed
NHTSA was directed to write some guidelines/rules around the implementation of passive impairment detection as OEM features. They have yet to do so, probably because it is flaky technology.
My guess is that the final rule implementation will be similar to the distracted driver detection that is already in many new vehicles.
Disabling all of them would have silly consequences, and wouldn't be compatible with other safety regulations.
Alcohol abuse has been around about as long as we've been human. We've just constructed a society where Alcohol abuse is far more likely to pick up collateral damage.
The above is sadly serious. It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people. Taking away someone's car is cruel and usual punishment that cannot be accepted.
As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?
> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.
That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.
Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.
The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.
This is exactly what the parent meant by designing the country in a 'car-brained' fashion. It's not true in many/most other countries.
Europe may not drive as much as America, but it's still about half. Cars are popular worldwide for a reason, and it is not American corporations magically convincing everyone how useful they are.
It's also entirely moot, as we're not redesigning the country in the short term to cut down on DUIs.
People dont willingly put these alcohol breathalyzer interlocks on their vehicles. They're 100% court mandated, as a punishment for, usually, drunk driving.
This country is so hell-bent on making criminals' lives worse and worse as a never-ending punishment. So what 150k people cant use their cars. 'They did something wrong and deserve it', is the usual motto in the USA.
Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
Unfortunately the US public has no interest in this issue. They have a dual morality where lawbreaking is wrong, but profiting off of criminals and the poor isn't. So mandatory prison labor, expensive monitoring, for-profit probation services, and for-profit jails are fine.
Literally if you don't pay or play, you go to jail. But it was a plea so you "volunteered" (to not go to jail).
Maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I do find it pretty fair that people that can't responsible use a vehicle aren't allowed to use a vehicle. You don't see me flying airplanes for hire ...
> Now, lets have a discussion about software liability....
You're welcome to demand that the software you use provide a warranty. For some reason government agencies which actually would have the ability to demand this seem to not care. It does seem extremely negligent to allow people who can't use cars responsibly to use cars with provided software without a warranty.
Except they are allowed to use a vehicle. This issue isn't that they aren't allowed to use their vehicles. The danger is the disruption in what they are allowed to do and software/hardware failing. This is dangerous not only for them, but others as well.
And to be clear, this is specifically about people who are allowed to drive with a breathalyzer. So, "aren't allowed to use a vehicle" makes no sense. They are allowed to drive with certain conditions. Just like you and me.
The choices these defendants are being offered is "We can charge you for 3-10 years in prison, or you can pay a pile of money to the state and our private companies for 1 year of a breathalyzer in your car"
The plea deal is at best blackmail, and enriches the state and 'business partners' (private companies) via more suffering.
And given how this plea deal system works, I would wager that quite a few who pled out didn't do anything wrong, but are still subject to the blackmail and subsequent removal of rights with tenuous due process at bets.
The whole root of this issue is that the USA demolished most of public transit to go all in on the personal vehicle. This was done nationwide to increase profits for vehicle companies and gas/oil companies. If we did have good/great public transit, drunk driving would be a significantly less of a thing. But that would cut into US domestic car production and oil/gas production.
Interlock devices are typically mandated for 6-12 months if it's your first DUI. In California, you will be mandated to use it for three years after your fourth (!) DUI. DUI laws in many parts of the US are ridiculously permissive and your criticism is pretty off-base.
Oh sure there are plenty of people who are guilty and have a problem, they get caught too, but the courts want money so they aren't just going after the problem, they are charging any and every person possible. Some people get charged DUIs for annoying a cop or being tired, and even if their blood work comes up clean, do they drop the case? No. They just argue they were high on some other drug that they didn't test for.
If the people of the country were more constitution minded, they would want a punishment that fits the crime, and no additional punishment on top of it. So I share this gripe, even though I consider DUI a very serious crime (including those who do it and don't get caught).
An interlock prevents you from driving drunk. Suspending a license pretty frequently does nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
So if the punishment for driving drunk is 3 years in prison, you may be able to avoid it by accepting a plea deal that infringes on your third amendment rights.
This can even occur in a civil case.
N=1, but I know of one case where the defendant was offered a lock on their car or an ankle alcohol monitor. Of course they were going to choose the car lock.
Courts (read: prosecutors) routinely use legal blackmail to coerce defendants into agreeing to plea deals. The threat is "we will prosecute you, and add extra charges, and push for maximums, that is unless you agree to these terms".
And those terms, as others have rightly pointed out, can include punishments the court normally isn't permitted to ask for on sentencing.
Also, with our judicial punishment based system, and that those with more money can afford better lawyers. And those with less money get public defenders, who are well known for not doing their job, or the absolute minimum to keep from being investigated by the Bar.
The only way out of here is to ever avoid interacting with police or courts. Once you're in that system, any sympathy is thrown out the window, and you become a money-pinata for the state and private 3rd party companies predating on your socio-economic class.
I've had my license suspended. It was just speeding. It's my only traffic ticket, let's not focus on that too much.
Do you know what was stopping me from getting in my car and driving it to work? Absolutely nothing.
You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
On 2019-04-19 my wife's car was struck, while she was driving, by a driver who was driving under suspension. The driver had a bench warrant out for their arrest for failure to appear in court on a previous driving under suspension violation.
I searched my local court database and found this driver had driving under suspension or driving in violation of restriction charges on: 1999-07-12, 2000-01-27, 2000-02-03, 2000-02-14, 2000-05-03, 2001-07-23, 2011-07-13, 2013-07-10, 2013-10-24, 2016-03-10, 2016-05-23, 2016-08-15, 2016-09-09, 2018-04-09, 2018-05-03, and 2019-04-19 (when my wife was struck).
The driver has since had additional driving under suspension charges on: 2019-08-15, 2022-04-29, 2022-08-18, and 2025-10-21.
The driver had served jail time, in the past, for some of these violations, too.
I tend to think people who don't respect the law prior to conviction don't magically begin to respect the law after conviction.
That isn't what I said, you're misrepresenting me. That isn't very nice.
I said someone who _already broke the law_ in a very provable way, most likely doesn't give a fuck about driving without a license.
> You are free to backup your claim that magically _everyone_ that illegally drives drunk will not abstain from driving becasue they don't have a license.
I didn't say everyone. There you go again, making shit up and putting words in my "mouth" as it were. This isn't a good-faith conversation. Take care.
...but even though it's impractical to avoid these machines entirely, in many parts of the world it's possible (and enjoyable) to simply choose a bike instead.