On January 22nd of this year, the House voted 268 to 164 that starting in 2027, every new passenger vehicle sold in the United States would include technology that passively monitors the driver and can prevent the car from operating if it decides you might be impaired.
Fifty-seven Republicans crossed the aisle to make sure that vote went the way it did.
The mandate comes from Section 24220 of Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and its stated purpose is to prevent drunk driving, which kills around 10,000 people a year.
And look, nobody disputes that drunk driving is bad. That's not the argument. The argument is about what Congress actually built into law to address it, which is this: a system with no breathalyzer, no police officer, and no judge. Just an onboard algorithm that monitors your driving, decides whether you seem impaired, and locks you out if it concludes you do.
Oh and by the way, there is no defined appeal process in the law. No required reset timeline—no human review.
Representative Thomas Massie, who authored the amendment to defund it, asked the right question: "When your car shuts down because it doesn't approve of your driving, how will you appeal your roadside conviction?"
Crickets.
I guess we have to buy the car with the built-in Gestapo before we can find out.
But wait! There’s more!
The NHTSA (the federal agency tasked with actually building the technical standard) admitted just last month that no current system meets the legal accuracy requirement. The error rates, in their own words, are "unacceptable."
The math on this is brutal: even a 99.9% accuracy rate across the U.S. vehicle fleet would produce millions of false positives every year.
Millions of sober people, simply locked out of their cars with no recourse. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Land of the Free™.
It isn’t hard to picture all the ways this will go badly. A wildfire evacuation where the camera misreads panic as impairment, a diabetic driver experiencing low blood sugar, a night shift worker with tired eyes sitting in a parking lot at 2 AM—there are quite literally as many scenarios as there are people.
The technology doesn't reliably work, the law doesn't include any recourse if it fails you, and 268 members of Congress looked at all of that and voted to move forward anyway.
The only silver lining I’m seeing here is that it makes a genuinely excellent civics lesson for you to teach your kids.
The founders designed the Fourth Amendment specifically to prevent preemptive government surveillance: no searches without cause, no punishment without evidence, no restriction of liberty before any wrongdoing has occurred.
The entire premise of this mandate flips that. Every driver, every trip, regardless of history or behavior, is monitored as a potential threat. The system doesn't respond to a crime. It anticipates one. And it penalizes you based on a probability, not a fact.
It’s also a great example of how the government uses fear and crises to expand its power, and it's worth teaching your kids to recognize the pattern.
Government overreach never announces itself as overreach. Instead, it comes wrapped in something genuinely sympathetic (in this case, the very real tragedy of deaths caused by drunk drivers), and the mechanism it builds is almost always broader than the stated purpose.
Right now, the infrastructure for monitoring drivers is being constructed. The precedent for algorithmic lockouts is being set. What the next administration decides to do with that infrastructure is a separate question that nobody in the January vote was required to answer.
(But I’m willing to bet lots of them voted with plenty of ideas in mind for ways this can be used down the road.)
This is exactly the kind of thing our Civics courses in the Tuttle Twins Academy are built around.
We teach how the Constitution was designed to protect individual liberty from exactly this kind of preemptive state control, and the many specific ways that protection has been quietly eroded over time. We describe our Civics courses as "not your typical Civics 101" because they don't just explain how government is supposed to work—they show your teens how and why it keeps going sideways by using real examples they can actually see play out.
The Spring Academy Sale just went live. Use code SPRING20 at checkout to get 20% off your plan.
Oh, and great news for big families: one membership covers all the teens in your household!
I know you're already having versions of this conversation with your kids. You already know something is wrong with a world where 268 elected officials can vote to put a surveillance system in every car in America and call it a safety feature.
The Academy just gives your teens the constitutional and historical framework to understand not just that this is wrong, but that this type of overreach has always been a threat to free and peaceful people. They’ll learn that the founders tried to build a system that would prevent it, and how politicians keep finding ways to skirt those checks and balances.
The kids who have that lens through which to view the world aren't going to be easily manipulated into believing safety is worth sacrificing freedom. And that’s a pretty good start.
— Connor
