Could Your Car Report You For Drunk Driving In The Future?
Sunday, 3. February 2019
Yes you read that correctly, your car could report you for being in charge of your car whilst intoxicated. We’re not talking about normal cars we’re talking about autonomous cars (driverless). This raises a couple of questions, the first is a major misunderstanding about autonomous cars.
I went into detail in a previous report so I won’t repeat myself about ‘drivers’ of autonomous cars but basically if you are one of those that thinks that in a few years time you’ll be able to jump unto your driverless car, go down the pub or club and get absolutely legless then get in the car and tell it to take you home – you’re badly mistaken.
If you are in charge of an autonomous car you will need to be as sober as the driver of a normal car. So that’s possibly messed up your plans of being in a state of permanent inebriation.
The next question is how and is this big brother gone mad? The how is a patent filed by Huawei on a system that measures sobriety of an autonomous vehicle’s occupants. According to Auto Express the system consists of a number of sensors and processors that monitor the condition of the driver, checking to see if they are in a fit state to take over the manual controls of the car in an emergency?
If the system detects that the driver is drunk, it could issue a warning, deactivate the car, or even inform the police. The system not only detects drunkenness the patent describes the car detecting if suspicious items such as weapons or drugs are on board and if the driver is driving whilst using a mobile device (really? One would have thought that if the car can drive itself it would have Bluetooth fitted). It can also sense tiredness.
This is the first time that engineers have considered the possibility of using technology to report drivers for offences. Alongside this development, it was reported last year that autonomous police cars of the future could be mini courtrooms. They would be kitted out to test drivers for alcohol and drugs and scan for weapons. Sentences would be delivered by videolink and offenders autonomously delivered to jail.
The theory behind this is that Bobbies could return to the beat whilst the new cars increased the prosecution rate by removing the courts from the system. Makes you wonder where this is all taking us? By Graham Hill
