Nissan Turns to Technology to Stop Drunk Driving

StonyandCher writes with a ComputerWorld story about new efforts by Nissan to reduce the danger of intoxicated drinkers through technology. A trio of new features installed in a prototype vehicle demonstrated this past week are designed to minimize the damage a drunk behind the wheel can cause. "The first [system] attempts to directly detect alcohol in the driver's sweat and gear shift lever. A second system in the car uses a camera mounted in front of the driver to monitor eye movement. If the driver is drowsy it triggers the seat belt to tighten and this movement will hopefully snap the driver out of their drowsiness or prompt them to take a rest. A third system monitors the path of the vehicle to ensure it's traveling in a straight line and not weaving about the road, as is common with a drunken driver."

Re:Mandatory?

I've seen ignition interlocks where the driver has to blow a breathalyzer before the car will start.


I've seen balloons, blown up before the drinking.

Re:Mandatory?

Wow, just wow...

That's like, premeditated fucktardery...

Re:Mandatory?

But if it's not made mandatory, who would buy it?

Companies.

We've been trialling a system which uses special glasses to monitor the eye movements of dump truck drivers in open cut mining. The goal is to identify impairment - not just drugs and alcohol, but fatigue, illness or anything which might affect the operator's ability to control the vehicle.

In the system we use, the monitoring computer has a three-stage alarm, first notifying the driver and their supervisor of the potential for impairment, second stage suggesting that the operator park up at first opportunity, and in the third stage, loud alarms in both the truck and control room. Third stage also throttles back the truck.

Fully loaded, these trucks mass in excess of 400 tonnes, so any accident is going to be significant. How valuable it will be to transfer the technology to cars is uncertain, but I'd say there are plenty of circumstances where the consequences outweigh the costs, even for small vehicles.

Re:Mandatory?

Give people the chance to fix themselves before alerting their supervisors.

It's not an oppositional situation.

The trial was run in very close consultation with the employees. They, and their supervisors understand that the fatigue or impairment the machines are measuring is a hazard to be managed carefully, not a reason for disciplinary action.

The data collected by the system is also useful in planning things like break times and alertness aids like spot quizzes. This is the system, if you're interested;
http://www.optalert.com/johns_drowsiness_scale.htm l [optalert.com]

Wake Me Up When Its Cheap

Personally, I think that the alcohol detection systems are probably junk. Short of it being installed on a company vehicles (FedEx?) or as some punishment for a DUI, I don't really see the point. Even than, I doubt many shipping companies have alcohol problems so bad that it justifies such silly expenditures. It is pretty easy to tell if you are too drunk to drive, you don't need your car to tell you for you. Besides, a simple pair of gloves will happily void this system, while splashing alcohol on the steering wheel is a great way to piss off your friends.

On the other hand, the sleep detection system would be a godsend. If the price was right, I would happily get one of those things installed. I don't want it turning off my car in the middle of the highway, but tightening my seatbelt, beeping, or in some way warning me that I look like I am nodding off would be wonderful. Obviously, you would want a way to turn off the damn thing so that it doesn't confuse bobbing your head along to music with falling asleep, but so long as you can turn the thing off and it is relatively cheap, I think lots of people would go for it and get it installed voluntarily.

I'm with the Hyperbole Police

...when this is even possible?

Aside from issues with your use of hyperbole (which I hope it is), I would like to defend the parent and perhaps shed some light on the actions and decisions of those fully participating in society.

Sometimes when you're a grown-up, you perform certain actions that have an inherent risk. In fact, most of the actions you perform have some level of inherent risk, e.g. eating at a sit-down restaurant can lead to food poisoning, eating at McDonald's can lead to shame and indigestion, et al. Part of being a grown-up though is making responsible risk/benefit analysis about these decisions. Usually this means that you don't have to even consider the possibility (although real) of food poisoning from your favorite restaurant, unless there has been a spate of recent incidences that you are aware of.

When it comes to driving, we have to assess inherent risks due to a variety of factors including but not limited to:

1) The mechanical condition of our car, i.e. how certain our we that are brakes are good and will respond as we expect when we need them to, and also, the condition of our tires and are we going to be driving in conditions where a tire blowout would threaten our life, or the lives of others around us, etc.

2) The weather conditions, i.e. how less competent of a driver are we in heavy rain, or when the roads are icy, or when visibility is very low (fog)

3) Our physical/mental conditon, i.e. are we incredibly angry about something (we usually make poorer judgments when we are), or are we tired? and how tired are we (could be just a little bodily tired from a good physical workout, or could be that we're drowsy due to lack of sleep), etc.

In combination with all these inherent risks we weigh the benefits of the drive:

Are we returning home from a long absence to those who are worried about, and are deeply missing us? Or perhaps we are just going out for a drive because we have nothing better to do(people who don't know about /. still do this, I've heard). Or, as an extreme example, we're rushing a loved one to the hospital, where every minute counts towards saving their life

In the end, almost every mature adult consciously, or unconsciously, makes this risk/benefit assessment before driving, and very few let their decision to drive be governed absolutely by any criteria about the circumstances of themselves their vehicle, or their environment.

oh no

bad for those of us with a lazy eye, use hand disinfectants, and weave to warm up our tires.

What About Bartenders or Waiters?

Will the car detect the alcohol on their hands (but not in their systems) and refuse to let them drive?

Re:What About Bartenders or Waiters?

Or worse yet, it record the alcohol in the cars computer and you get into an accident that they come back later and cite you with a DUI over and consider it your fault when someone else ran a red light.

Hmmm

"The first [system] attempts to directly detect alcohol in the driver's sweat and gear shift lever."

Sorry Nissan, only my wife touches my gear shift lever.

Badum, tiss!

Thanks, I'll be here all week, enjoy the buffet, don't forget to tip your waitress.

Probably a bad idea.

Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk. Experience with ABS systems on cars indicates that it encourages drivers to brake more aggressively. This seems more of the same.

Drowsy driver detection systems have been around for a while, mostly on large trucks.

We're in an annoying period where vehicle control systems can help a bit, but aren't yet good enough to reliably drive cars automatically. That's getting close, though. A few more rounds of the DARPA Grand Challenge, in tougher situations, and we'll be there.

Re:Probably a bad idea.

Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk.

ABS compensates when the driver brakes too hard, but does not discourage the driver from taking such action in the future. A drunk-driving detector won't compensate for your poor driving while drunk, but it will instead warn you of your impairment to discourage you from continuing to drive. Those are two very different concepts.

Re:Probably a bad idea.

ABS compensates when the driver brakes too hard, but does not discourage the driver from taking such action in the future. A drunk-driving detector won't compensate for your poor driving while drunk, but it will instead warn you of your impairment to discourage you from continuing to drive. Those are two very different concepts.

Previously:

One beer... I'm pretty sure I'm sober enough to drive.

Two plus... I'm not sure, better not chance it.

Now

One beer... It lets me start, I'm sober.

Five beers... It won't let me start. Yay, I can rely on this.

Three beers... Eh, I'll give it a shot. Hey, what do you know? I guess I'm more sober than I thought. Let's drive!

Whilst it's true that it's not exactly the same concept as ABS which compensates without discouraging, it does have a huge drawback in terms of giving people the sense that they can pass responsibility off on to a machine to determine if they're too drunk rather than erring on the side of caution.

Of course, the flip side is that many people don't err on the side of caution. It was an eye opener for me, moving from a country where drink driving was a major no-no to one where just about every person I meet seems to have a story about how they got pulled over after having "only had a few" and how unfair they felt it was. For people who err on the side of excess, this system will rein them in - great. For people who err on the side of caution however - and I desperately want to believe there are more people like this - it plays in to all kinds of behavioral psychology weaknesses to encourage them to stop playing it so safe. If that is indeed the larger group, it probably does make things worse overall.

Re:Probably a bad idea.

You'll get my manually-driven car when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

As a volunteer ambulance driver I've performed that service for many people.

Sadly, not all of them were the ones who were taking the risk of driving drunk or fatigued. They just got in the way of someone who'd made that choice.

Yes and no

Anything that takes away functionality like the alcohol detecting system or software locks that limit horsepower or top speed based on car model are bad in my opinion. It seems like a perfect example of (mis)applying technology to solve a social problem. The second system mentioned seems like a good idea because you're providing the driver with useful information, I would prefer maybe an audio alert to the potential strangulation by my seatbelt, but that's just me. And car makers better have the sense to make this easy to disable should it become common place.

Maybe I should just get into restoring cars that were made before the integration of microprocessors :)

Re:Yes and no

Not necessarily... Drunks seem to disproportionately survive thier wrecks while 'selecting' out potentially productive members of society instead.

Shit...

I used rubbing alcohol to clean my gear shift

This looks like a legal nightmare to me....

I don't want to encourage drunk driving, but I don't see it as the car manufacturer's responsibility to put this equipment in the car. I certainly don't want that equipment on my car (either at extra cost to me or not), and would view any car with it as being "less" of a product that I might want to buy. Put short, I wouldn't purchase such a vehicle. Period.

In addition, as the auto manufacturers start trying to determine if the driver is drunk or not, this might put them at a legal risk for any false positives or negatives. IANAL, but I'm assuming that the manufacturers of those breath analysis devices that the court forces convicted drunks to put on their cars are somehow indemnified or otherwise held blameless should the user find some way to defeat them. Because this is something ordered by the court, they may be exempt from legal liability. I'm not convinced that any car manufacturer would be so lucky if they start putting them on "production" vehicles. There are plenty of hungry lawyers ready to start some type of class-action suit on behalf of injured third parties. To this end, I say keep up the good work lawyers, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Just another case of "more nanny state, less personal responsibility."

Drowsy Driving

This is probably more useful for tired drivers than drunk drivers, as more people drive tired than drunk.

The other day, I was traveling down I-90 in Mass and I was pretty tired. At point point I think I closed my eyes for around 5-10 seconds, and snapped out of it and was half-way into the next lane. I stopped, got out and stretched, and finished my drive with the windows down (which did a good job of keeping me awake). Ok, sure, I *shouldn't have been driving in the first place*, but if the automatic system would have snapped me out of it when it saw me going into the next lane, or saw my eyes closed, that would have been a big help.

A new defense?

What do you mean occifer? My car says I'm sotally tober.

In a straight line, eh?

So I guess if you're going to drive drunk in a Nissan equipped with one of these systems, don't travel anywhere with curves?

Alcohol-containing oral rinse solutions?

Would this system work with people who regularly use lots of alcohol-containing oral rinses?