10,000 people die a year from drunk driving.
20% of car crashes where the car is totaled are caused by drunk driving.
1.5 million Americans have had a DUI.
Drunk driving is a problem and there’s been some call to require every new car made to have a breathalyzer in it, which won’t allow it to go on unless people pass.
Here’s why that sounds really good, but may end up a bad idea.
Used cars
In 2020, 14 million new cars were bought.
39 million used cars were bought.
The general rule in the auto market is used cars are 2 to 1 with new cars in terms of sales and that has been the case for about 30 years.
12.7% of the US meets the criteria to be a definition alcoholic.
While all incomes get pretty hard with drug/alcohol abuse, there is a tendency for lower income people to have higher odds of being an alcoholic.
One negative consequence to this is people aware they have a problem may opt to keep buying used cars to skip the breathalyzer mandate.
This could potentially lead to issues where people have accidents from lower quality cars. This could lead to less overall safety.
The low likelihood of this working.
I’m a person who doesn’t drink alcohol and does go to bars to hangout.
I could see myself in a situation where every 45 seconds, I get asked to blow into someone’s car.
For this in a mandate world, I could envision a situation where guys go to bars and just stand in the parking lot ready to blow into someone’s car for $10 and send them on their way.
There will be the breath boy in every social situation and people coming up with other cheats to get around this.
Evidence drunk driving isn’t the biggest issue.
40% of fatal car accidents happen at night.
That sounds low, but that’s also a small window of the day and driving goes down massively.
The most dangerous hours for fatal car crashes are 1-4 am, for both sober and drunk people.
While drunk driving is obviously a major factor here, there is the fact that it is dark out and harder to drive in for everyone.
While a lot of the people to die during these hours had some alcohol in their system, many likely wouldn’t be considered too drunk.
The numbers are high, but likely not as high as statistics are showing and if drunk driving declined, we’d still see a lot of these deaths from night time driving.
Final thoughts
Not really sold this is the needed solution for drunk driving.
It’s obviously a giant problem and no one should dismiss it, but I just see this as something where people find a fix, be it getting a sober guy in there or just avoiding buying new cars.
I also don’t think it ever passes in a pre self driving car world, but amusing this was debated in congress for a little while.