You posted: Please see my post #25.........these things are notorious for failure. Failure of one of these can result in fatalities.
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I’m not sure where I come down on these alcohol detectors, but the fact that they might fail is not a good enough reason, in my mind, to reject the idea. I have brakes on my car, and brakes fail sometimes. Engines fail, too. As I understand this device, it would just power down the car. All you do is pull over, just like you would anytime your engine cuts out. It would sure be a pain, but I don’t think it is any more dangerous than having a flat tire.
This doesn’t mean I approve of the system. I am not sure yet.
I have no problem with them being part of a sentence for a drunk driving CONVICTION. My problem is EVERYONE having to have one. so far there is no mandate, but the auto companies see it coming and that is why they are starting to put them in.........that is wrong.
I commented in another post, when I had some bloodwork done in the fall my BAC was .04, which is half the legal limit----yet I had not had any alcohol to drink in nearly a week, and even that was only a couple of glasses of wine with Thanksgiving dinner.
There is a DUI firm in FL which actually maintains their own breathylizer. They have an excellent record showing how the machine can be made to do whatever you want.
Thinks like: airblank calibration hardwired to read zero, electical spikes which cause a .4 BAC reading (aka you are a corpse),air contamination from paint, breathmints causing false high positives,the machine can’t tell if you rate is going UP or DOWN, making the person wait for the reading to allow the body to absorb more alchol from the stomach.
BTW the last one REALLY makes the device useless, in theory if you have three shots of booze very fast and take the test right away your body does not yet have the alchol in the blood yet.
again, these machines are mere fundraisers.
MADD needs to go the way of the DoeDoe Bird.