MADD Goal: Make Your Car a Breathalyzer

Because MADD won't stop until there aren't any drunk driving accidents. Anywhere. Ever. And even then they'd find a way to keep on kicking.

The threat of arrest and punishment, for decades the primary tactic against drunken drivers, is no longer working in the struggle to reduce the death toll, officials say, and they are proposing turning to technology — alcohol detection devices in every vehicle — to address the problem.

[Ellipsis]

Advocates for interlocks acknowledge that they are not foolproof. They can be easily circumvented if a sober person blows into the Breathalyzer tube, for instance.

Officials say interlocks for first offenders are not a panacea but will reduce repeat offenses. They say the next step will be a program to develop devices to unobtrusively test every driver for alcohol and disable the vehicle. The automaker Saab and a medical equipment company already have devices that may be adapted for that job.

Statistics show that about 13,000 people die each year in car crashes in which a driver was legally drunk.

“We’ve seen no progress in 10 years; we’re completely stalled,” said Susan A. Ferguson, a researcher at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Ms. Ferguson said the most promising technologies would work automatically, like air bags. “We don’t want the soccer mom dropping kids off, going to the grocery store and the preschool, and having to blow into something every time,” she said.

I'm sure Cicero would like it if some soccer mom had to blow him every time she got into her car. That's all the analysis of this stupid idea I can muster.

More here from today's NYT.