By Steven Symes 
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is pushing for automakers to include deriver surveillance technologies in all cars. To do that, in the next few years, the organization says it will only give its highly sought after Top Safety Pick+ award to vehicles which include these technologies.
IIHS is responsible for pushing another safety technology most people hate.
On the surface, this sounds like a good thing. After all, the feature a press release from IIHS puts front and center is driver impairment detection systems. The organization emphasizes how many people are killed by drunk drivers every year, which is a tragedy.
Then it goes on to enumerate some of the many ways automakers could monitor drivers for signs of impairment. For example, one measures the driver’s breathing and another analyzes eye movements.
But could those systems produce false positives, stranding someone who isn’t intoxicated? IIHS doesn’t appear to consider such possibilities.
IIHS wants to withhold its Top Safety Pick+ rating for automakers who don’t include this technology starting in 2030, if not sooner.
Another technology IIHS wants to muscle automakers into including in vehicles by 2027 is intelligent speed assistance (ISA) which has been a wet dream of it and other safety-obsessed organizations. Such technologies might just involve an annoying chime when the car is supposedly exceeding the speed limit, or it might limit the vehicle’s speed so the limit can’t be exceeded.
Such systems rely on GPS and maps that have the speed zones everywhere properly plotted. But we know from using navigation that information is surprisingly inaccurate a fair amount of the time.
Perhaps the most concerning part about the IIHS push is it wants automakers to start controlling drivers’ behavior as if they were the government. Big Brother will keep everyone safe by meticulously managing their activities, preventing any deviance from what it has established as acceptable.
All of this is of course couched in the approach of IIHS just trying to save lives. While loss of life on public roads is always tragic, sacrificing all freedoms for that is foolish and shortsighted.
Image via IIHS