Car Kill Switch Survives Thanks to Reps. Kiley, Kim, Garcia and 16 Other Republicans

The 2021 Biden Infrastructure bill included a mandate that new cars built after 2026 have a system that can “passively” detect whether or not a potential driver is drunk and, if so, keep the car from starting.

Despite absurd protestations from professional media “fact checkers” that haughtily claimed the system should not be labelled a “kill switch,” – the Associated Press even said that since it wouldn’t stop a car already in motion it’s not really a kill switch (note – I didn’t make that up) –  that is exactly what it is.

The as-yet-to be designed device will – somehow – decide if the driver can drive.  Besides the gross privacy and data retention issues, there are also practical near-impossibilities to its even working as advertised to be overcome.

In November, Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie brought an amendment to the bill to the House floor that would have eliminated the funding to develop the device.  It – horrifically – failed by a vote of 229 to 201, with 19 Republicans joining every Democrat save two – one of those, oddly enough, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – to keep the kill switch alive.

Massie was disgusted by the Republican desertion, saying there are now “19 Republicans who are to the authoritarian left of Ocasio-Cortez,” who, Massie noted, told him she had “genuine civil liberties concerns” about the project.

Three of those Republican congress members are from California – Young Kim, Mike Garcia, and Kevin Kiley.

When asked to explain their vote, Reps. Mike Garcia and Young Kim ignored the request while Rep. Kevin Kiley refused to answer.

At the heart of the debate is the prospect of having your car decide if you are drunk (by the way, not otherwise impaired, just drunk, so it seems people can feel free to smoke crack before the get behind the wheel.)

First, the system is supposed to be passive and does not call for every new car to be equipped with one of those breathalyzer tube ignition locks that are currently installed in the cars of chronic drunk drivers.

Would the system check to see if a driver’s eyes are bloodshot, if he dropped the keys, if he slurred his words, if he smells like a distillery, or some other relatively obvious sign of potential impairment?

Putting aside the incredibly creepy thought of your car watching, smelling, and listening to you, there are perfectly common non-being drunk reasons for those occurrences – allergies for the eyes, clumsiness for the keys, driving home from the dentist for slurring, and – most counter-productively if you really want to keep drunks off the road – the fact that the aroma of alcohol could be coming from the person you are driving home because they’ve had a few too many.

The system has also been sold as being a black box from which no data can be taken or essentially put in.

Both claims are absurd.  First, if a person is on probation, for example, for DUI, the court system may want to know – with some justification – how often the guy is trying to drive his car drunk.

Second, in the case of a criminal prosecution for pretty much anything else that involves a car – say, robbing a bank and driving away, etc. – law enforcement – again, with some justification – would want access to that information.

And we won’t even mention the civil (read divorce cases) court usage possibilities for such information – so, no, it will not be “inaccessible.”

As to putting data in, the claim of system isolation is even more ridiculous. Putting aside – for a brief moment – the privacy issues, how do proponents of the system imagine it will be updated and/or repaired?

Except in Utah, where it is .05%, the national blood alcohol content level for DUI is .08%.  But there is constant pressure to lower that – even the federal government’s own National Highway Transportation Safety Board wants the country to move to .05%.  For context, for a 120 pound woman, two drinks puts her at the current DUI limit; for a 200 pound guy it’s four.

If the limit were lowered nationally, exactly how would the system be updated?  400 million door knocks, 400 million hours spent by technicians fanned out across the country – that’s about 200,000 people doing that for a year.

So, of course, no – the system by definition will have to be remotely accessible.  The black box is an obvious lie.

And that’s the main worry with the concept – not that it will keep drunk drivers off the road – maybe, kinda – but that it is the Trojan Horse to open up every car in the nation to constant government monitoring and control.

From an article earlier in the year in January: 

Per usual, the proponents of the bill claim that no nefarious future actions are possible.  From an AP story dispelling the myth of the “kill switch” (serious water carrying there) Robert Strassburger, president and CEO of the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, said any information collected will “never leave the vehicle.”

In other words, it’s not really a “kill switch” and safe drivers really don’t have to worry ever and we’re doing this for your own good and anyone who thinks this device will ever be used in any other way by any government agency is nuts and bad and crazy and might be a domestic terrorist.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Specifically, the system is the perfect way to impose a national vehicle miles traveled (VMT) taxation system.

Briefly, a VMT is a direct tax on driving instead (theoretically, very theoretically) of the gas taxes currently paid at the pump.  The imposition of a VMT has multiple potential permutations, from simply charging a flat rate per mile driven to modifying the rate depending upon when the car is driven (higher for rush hour, for example,) to charging more based on where the car is driven (known as cordon pricing) or even how much the driver earns in a year – for a detailed breakdown of the possibilities, see here.

To make the tax work a vehicle needs to be tracked at all times.  This aspect has led to fierce public opposition to the concept, but if the tracker is already in the car for “safety” purposes, some of this opposition may be tamped down.

The other practical problem with imposing VMT taxes is the issue of borders – if one state has a VMT and the neighboring state doesn’t, how would that work?  With this system enabling a national tax – borders be dammed, which we know the Biden administration is very good at – another impediment to VMT taxes drops by the wayside.

And as a bonus, the system would fit very nicely with another federal idea: mandating the installation of speed control systems in automobiles.

To sum up, the system is impractical, literally impossible as being sold to the public, an egregious invasion of privacy, and the perfect way to impose an entire new form of direct taxation whose rates and strictures and addiotns can be instantly modified with the a few new lines of code.

The system is a perfect – and blindingly obvious –  combination of government stupid and government evil – I guess that’s why Kim, Garcia, and Kiley kept their mouths shut when asked why they thought it was a good idea.