this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Driver entitlement episode 456: "what do you mean my death machine needs to have a remote kill switch???"
Insane.
"Disadvantages"
43 000 deaths a year and you cry at the slightest inconvenience
Drivers need a reality check
Car accidents cause about double the number of deaths in America as homicide, but no one ever says "you need to chill about violent crime." Cars cause another 1.5 million injuries on top of that. Cars contribute around 30% of the CO2 pollution in America, but only the truly insane would say people need to "chill" about global warming.
Our entire public infrastructure was gutted, such that we went from a pioneer in public transportation to basically only being able to use cars because oil companies and car manufacturers wanted it that way. We have the least efficient, most expensive, most polluting, most stressful form of travel but it's totally okay you guys because some people really like having a big truck that they can put truck nuts on and drive to the office in and it would be an infringement on their rights if we used taxes to build a fucking monorail or something.
You start with good points but then you fight a strawman of irrational reductivity. This is why no one likes you, it sounds like you need to stretch the truth and exaggerate to make a convincing argument. We all too used to being sold lies, and you make yourself sound like a liar, even though you’re really not.
Get some better PR.
This is the best take I've ever heard. "Reality sounds too much like hyperbole, so no one believes it."
You know, I'm not the biggest fan of personal vehicles, but if you want to talk about "death machines", you might also spare some thoughts towards police brutality and whether cops can really be trusted to hijack people's vehicles at will.
...nevermind that such a backdoor could be exploited by other parties also.
You can get rid of all those uncertainties by just rolling out a pilot and seeing how it goes. There's no way cops being able to stop cars remotely causes any more trouble than them actually flipping cars over if they take .3 seconds too long to park for a traffic stop, like they did to that pregnant woman who died in 2022.
The police has also demonstrated many, many times that they can't be trusted to rationally judge whether to indulge in hugely dangerous car chases or not, and they routinely end up making perps crash into random people/objects for traffic stop evasions that turn out to just be a guy fleeing because they have felony quantity of coke or a revoked license. You give it a pilot and see how it goes, if it does more good than harm, then you keep it.
For security, there are many remote-access-control security dances out there, and it's a solved problem. Tons of them are just a certificate to authenticate, and do a little challenge to solve to be protected from repeat attacks. If one certificate gets leaked or abused you can revoke it and that's that. If that somehow still has flaws - that's why you're doing a pilot.
Oh, stop being sensationalist. A car is a car, that's all it ever will be. It's clear you didn't even read the article because its not talking about remote kill switches.
Cars kill 43 000 people a year in the U.S.
I'm talking about people's reactions in this thread when they haven't read the article. All of those people opposing a hypothetical "cop presses a button" remote kill switch are insane.
Private citizens do not have a right to operating a motor vehicle any way they see fit. You license it, you license your skills, you get it looked at periodically and you use it on public roads with the state's blessing only if you can manage to get along with other people using that same road. There is no sense opposing a kill switch for "freedom".
We can't trust cops with their stupid car chases that result in crashes, and their maneuvers for flipping cars over on the freeway.
You give them a killswitch
I absolutely oppose universal kill switches and I'm not insane. Something about that pesky "innocent 'till proven guilty" thing. If you lose that privilege, you get a breathalyzer lock. That's fair. But I haven't used "smart" tech in a car that hasn't bugged out in unpredictable ways and this won't be an exception. Technology that overrides driver input is a risk to those the vehicle belongs and that's unacceptable to me.
"Innocent until proven guilty" has nothing to do with it. When a cop stops you he's not indicting you. Switching your gas off remotely replaces chasing calling in reinforcements and chasing you over several blocks when you start speeding up, or flipping your car over. Both of those already impair or override the driver's input quite a bit.
Having the opinion that your driver input should override the cop's order to stop, and that society should trust you to stop instead of putting a kill switch in your engine is an insane opinion, and prime driver entitlement.
And I would love the same for drivers without insurance, license removals and cars that didn't pass the tech inspection