[cipheredStones]

You and afh1 seem to be reading both the article and my comment as focused on whether it's appropriate to characterize a device that prevents a car from starting as a "kill switch".

I didn't say anything at all about that term in my comment, and while the article says it's hyperbolic, arguing about that term is clearly not the focus of the article.

Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false.

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[Headline] Posts distort infrastructure law’s rule on impaired driving technology

CLAIM: President Joe Biden signed a bill that will give law enforcement access to a “kill switch” that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed last year requires advanced drunk and impaired driving technology to become standard equipment in new cars, experts say that technology doesn’t amount to a “kill switch,” and nothing in the bill gives law enforcement access to those systems.

THE FACTS: In November 2021, Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, ushering into law a $1 trillion bipartisan deal to maintain and upgrade the country’s roads, bridges, ports and more.

One provision in the legislation aims to prevent drunk driving deaths by requiring all new vehicles to soon include “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology” as “standard equipment.”

However, in the months since the law passed, some social media users have misrepresented the provision online, falsely claiming it will give police access to data collected by the technology or allow the government to shut down cars remotely.

“Joe Biden signed a bill that would give law enforcement access to a ‘kill switch’ that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026,” read several posts shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false.

That's just the straw man the article is using to claim that it isn't a kill switch. They want the claim to be false so they adopt a version of the claim with a flaw in order to knock it down.

The obvious problem being that the actual implementation is at least as bad. Now you have the law mandating that the car activate the kill switch by itself, with no human in the loop you can even try to reason with.

What happens when you're driving erratically because you're on some dangerous ice road and trigger a false positive that strands you in the wilderness? What happens when you're actually impaired and then turn around to discover a wildfire approaching your location, in which case "don't die in a fire" should override "don't drive impaired" and you should immediately evacuate, but your car won't let you?

It's an ill-conceived and dangerous law and its critics are in the right. The operator should always be able to override the computer.

[cipheredStones]

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing.

If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

(Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time! Valuable criticism that requires nuance is memetically disfavored by comparison!)