Many vehicles, IIRC including Teslas, already have this safety feature.
Tesla does absolutely nothing like this. The closest things are that it'll kick you out of AP/FSD if you're screwing around with your phone, and it'll advise you use AP/FSD if you're driving manually and pinging between lane lines.
It’s also a hypothetical at this point because the system doesn’t exist, and there’s no consensus about whether it’s “fail open,” vulnerable to a centimeter square patch of electrical tape, or if it can randomly brick your car when it has errors. I would bet on the former.
That makes it worse, not better. Contrary to popular belief, "$BAD_THING is widespread" is not a defense of $BAD_THING.
But this law would step beyond that. It does require that the car "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected."
I'm not a transit safety expert, but that itself seems potentially dangerous - even just limiting speed, if it happens on a highway, could be difficult to handle. And of course, the detection systems will have false positives.
in my experience it's actually a bad thing for industry to add very specific requirements for them to follow
In this case, there is a kernel of truth: The 2021-2022 "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684...) directs NHTSA to develop an in-vehicle driver system to detect some definition of impaired driving.
In particular, "SEC. 24220" (searchable by that string in the above bill text.) directs NHTSA to either write and publish a rule implementing such, or make a yearly report to Congress as to why said technology is not implementable.
This is the 2026 report: https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
In essence, they state that while they have prototypes, the technology is not yet sufficient. There's nothing in a proposed or final rule yet, to the best of my knowledge.
Personally, I'm wary of this type of rule-making, as it essentially remains 'hidden' from public comment until the notices of final rule-making, making it in my eyes an end-run around the Administrative Procedure Act. I don't expect that to be a very widely held position though.
(Edit: I linked the 2023 report first, not the 2026 one. Whoopsy.)
Business idea: Faraday headwear, so that the tinfoil hat can store the phone. For that fashionably paranoid person in your life.
We'll have to see how the regulators interpret it.
[1] - https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf
rishigurjar•1h ago