Your car may soon be watching you. Not just the road. Not just seatbelts. Not just airbags. But the person behind the wheel.
Under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, federal regulators were directed to create a safety standard for advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.
In plain English: future vehicles may be designed to passively detect whether a driver appears drunk, tired, or impaired, and then limit vehicle operation if the system decides something is wrong.
Safety matters. Impaired driving kills people. But this is also bigger than safety.
It fits a larger pattern: more of daily life is being monitored, measured, and scored.
The issue is not only privacy. It is power without appeal.
If a human officer misreads your behaviour, you can give context. But if a dashboard system misreads exhaustion after a long shift, the system may intervene first and ask questions later.
That is the deeper shift: automated systems gaining the power to restrict human action without a clear duty to explain, correct, or review the decision.
Any system with the power to stop a person should include a real path for human correction when it is wrong.