I wrote about this in-car surveillance thing. It's going viral. It's sort of fake news. We got to sort of truth-zone it, but also it's coming and it might not matter because if you get in a robo-taxi, there's definitely going to be a camera on you. But the fear is centered around this idea that there will be a requirement from the federal government that every new car sold in the United States will be required by law to have technology that puts constant surveillance on the driver. And this is happening sooner than you think, by 2027. That's just 12 months away. AI in your car will determine if you're sober and fit to drive, automatically turning off the vehicle.
It's almost May, by the way.
I know. We're what, eight months away, I guess, from 2027. This is the real AI 2027 problem. This is a big...
We are having audio issues. It's most likely a nation state, potentially.
Possible. We are under attack, but we are working on it.
It's like watching a dubbed foreign film.
Well, maybe we can play this video of what happened the last time America tried to pull back on driving a car while intoxicated, and some of the response, some of the backlash from...
Any attempt to restrict drinking and driving here is viewed...
Can we pull this up? Okay, we're working on it. Anyway...
Production team is being humbled this morning.
Humbled. Anyway, let me read through some of my take and then we'll play that funny video. So, sounds scary. Yeah, let's play this video.
Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic.
It's kind of getting common when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers.
They're making it laws where you can't drink when you want to. You have to wear a seat belt when you're driving. And pretty soon we're going to be a communist country. Communist country.
What? What? When was that? Was that the... Apparently that's real. I've seen that video before. I always thought it was fake. I didn't realize that that was real. That feels like 80s, 70s, something like that. 80s. Okay. Well, there was backlash then and there's backlash now. Some of it's a little bit overblown. This sounds very scary. You know, constant surveillance. The real crazy version is a camera that's watching you at all times. The government, the police, and the automaker can just turn off your car whenever they want. That sounds bad. What's actually being proposed? What's actually on the timetable? So, the rationale for this is good, and I think most people would agree that it is a reasonable thing to do to try and curb alcohol-related vehicle accidents, drunk driving. There's more than 10,000 alcohol-related deaths each year on US roads. That's a ton. Anything we can do to stop that, reduce that, totally worth working on, totally worth pursuing, as long as it doesn't violate a whole bunch of other liberties or create more problems than it solves. Right? We want net positive impact here. Technology is getting better at detecting intoxication and it's getting a lot cheaper. So why not just ship a drunk driver detection system with every car from the factory? That's the proposal. There are a bunch of potential downsides that we can get into, but it's important to get the facts straight about where we actually stand today. So the core concept here is generally correct. Congress did pass a mandate directing the NHTSA to create a standard for advanced drunk driving prevention technology in new passenger vehicles. Now the 2027 date that people are citing, that's not a hard deadline. The law was passed back in 2024 and in the actual law it basically allowed for delays. So they said the NHTSA will only issue a binding mandate requiring automakers to actually roll out this tech when the tech is ready. And the NHTSA currently says that the technology is not ready. So in theory, the tech feels close, but the scale of the problem is so big. You can see why there's a delay here. Alcohol detection systems exist and are typically deployed for drivers with DUIs. You're familiar with blowing in the tube, probably. Hopefully not personally, but the problem is that those little hoses that you blow into, those are active systems. They require you to actually sit there and do that for a minute. The government doesn't want that. That's not what the proposal is. They want passive. They want passive, which means breath sensing. So there's just like smell-vision. Basically, if it smells alcohol, it doesn't turn on the car. The other one is fingerprint reading. So, you put your finger on the start button and it scans into your finger and sees how many alcohol particles are inside. I guess that sounds sci-fi, but we're close. I guess there's a couple other ways you can solve that. And then camera system. Just look at the driver. If they look drunk, then don't turn on the car. So, all of these seem like they could be close to being roughly accurate right now. Like you can imagine an AI startup or a university lab putting something together at a hackathon that's 90% of the way there, maybe 99% of the way there, maybe even 99.9% of the way there. But the problem is that Americans drive a lot. The rough estimate is that there are almost a quarter trillion driving trips per year in America. It's basically every American, all 350 million of them basically, taking an average of two trips every single day of the year. So 224 billion trips a year is what the rough back-of-the-envelope I did was. And what that means in practice is that if this system is 99.9% accurate, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results every year. And the fact that probably 99.9% of these trips are not inebriated. Like drunk driving is not 50% of trips. It's not 1% of trips. It's a very small amount.
Think about how people would abuse this new system. It would be like students being like, 'Sorry, I couldn't make it to the exam.'
Exactly. Dog ate my lunch. My car wouldn't start because of a false positive on this. And so, even if you're at 99%, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results. The vast majority of those are going to be people who were sober, somebody wants to get in their car for their morning commute, they're a little sleepy or they wore some cologne that triggered some sensor system, flags them as intoxicated and prevents them from starting their car. And it's infuriating. The tech will probably get there with enough time and effort. So, it's worth looking into who supports this and opposes it. The mandate was actually bipartisan, but there's starting to be a backlash from libertarian conservatives who are worried about Orwellian government controls. There's an idea that there will be a remote kill switch, which leads to a bunch of dystopian possibilities. That is not in the current provision. That's not what's actually being proposed right now. But you know, it's possible that at the end, the end result of this process of back and forth, you do wind up with that exact capability. And so people are worried about the system going off while you're driving at speed on the roads and then the car just shuts off and you get in a crash. And that's like actually more dangerous than potentially the alternative. And so the middle ground seems to be what's called pre-drive lockout.
We need a tinfoil expert. The tinfoil enthusiasts...
Have been saying that the sort of remote...
Are you using tinfoil enthusiast to mean conspiracy theorist?
I've never heard that before. It's good though.
So tinfoil enthusiasts...
Yes. That the remote shut-off button has existed forever.
Oh yeah. Since the 1985. So when some sort of like, you know, witness or something like that just gets in a very inconveniently timed high-speed wreck, that is...
That's shut down. Okay. I was unfair. Conspiracy theory. It's interesting though. But yeah, so I mean the current consensus is around maybe pre-drive lockout being the more moderate solution than actually shutting the car off once it's driving. Still incredibly inconvenient if there's false positives. And then you also do still run into some potential negative outcomes where you go to the beach, you have a couple glasses of wine, you're not planning on leaving, but then the tsunami warning goes off. You need to get back in your car and your car says, 'No, like I don't care that there's a tsunami. You have had two glasses of wine. You're at 0.08. You can't drive right now.' And you need to tell the car, 'Well, in this case, I'm okay with driving drunk because the tsunami is coming and I'm at the beach and I had a couple glasses of wine.' And the car won't be able to, you know, potentially deal with that nuance, right? And there's a whole bunch of other scenarios that could potentially play out. Just judiciousness is difficult, but potentially unlocked, you know, AI agents, I don't know. You know, you ask these models, what would they do in some certain scenario? Maybe there's a solution. Yeah, I think there's a much stronger argument for rolling this out as soon as the average vehicle has full self-driving capability.
But then you don't need it because you can be as drunk as you want.
No, I still think there's going to be this big window where you're not going to be able to...
Specifically because as long as somebody needs to sit in the front seat of their car to take over in any type of situation.
I like the idea of level four self-driving. You get in the car, there's one button you push to say, 'Hey, just put it in self-driving mode. I've had a couple drinks and don't let me take the wheel.' No matter how hard I try to negotiate. It's just Playmobil level. But then there's a second button and for that you have to do a full blood transfusion. They centrifuge your blood and make sure that you have the purest blood possible to take the wheel and be able to actually drive the vehicle. I don't know, maybe something there.
I did have a take on this though, which is that Doug DeMuro, friend of the show, founder of carsandbids.com, has always talked about the eras of cars, you know, the air-cooled Porsches, then you have the fully manual, no electronic systems, no stability control, no traction control, those types of cars. Then you get into the manual gearboxes, the no turbos, no hybrid systems. And then the modern supercar era, it's just a bonus if it's not a full electric car. It's like, you know, it's going to be a hybrid, but is it at least there's an engine of some sort. And that's what car collectors are sort of marking these moments where it's like it's the last manual, it's the last non-hybrid supercar made by Ferrari or something like that. Yeah. And there's going to be a world where you're like, 'Oh, that was the last one that didn't have the camera that looked at you 24/7 or whatever.' And I think it creates this like new class of like vintage investment grade. Maybe not investment grade, but certainly something that people... I mean you can already see people reacting to this even though the post is like a little bit overhyped. You can already see people reacting to it being like I got to buy a 2026 and hold on to it forever and keep it in great condition because I don't want that. But anyway, there's been a pushback on this stuff for a long time. Tyler, do you have anything on cars? Are you old enough to drive?
I was just thinking like what do you think the premium is for a car that you can still like drunk driving in? I think your car is going to go.
This is not even worth joking about.
