For years, there has been a push by transportation regulators, insurance companies, and advocacy groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) to mandate a remote means of disabling private automobiles. But, do any of those parties have a right to force car makers to include such a “kill switch” in new cars, or a right to punish drivers for driving on public roads without one?
Terri Hall of Texans Uniting for Reform & Freedom thinks they do not. Her organization’s aggregated coverage of the legislation requiring kill switch technology, and the fight against it, are here.
The 2021 Infrastructure Bill that passed the US Congress mandates a backdoor kill switch be present in all newly manufactured automobiles in the United States. That is, the car must be capable of evaluating the performance of the driver and be able to prevent the car from operating, if the driver is determined by the surveillance system to be too impaired to safely drive.
Not only does such a monitoring system force drivers to provide information about themselves that no one has a right to demand, but automatically shutting down a car has the potential to leave the driver, passengers, and other road users in extreme danger. No one exercising their natural and universal right to travel on public roads consents to be put in danger by a machine algorithm that cannot accurately assess the entirety of a situation including moving motor vehicles. A police officer signaling a driver to stop and pull over is an entirely different thing. This allows the driver to assess the whole situation and gives the driver discretion in how to stop the car in a safe way. In contrast, the automated kill switch may disable the car while moving, or it may disable the car when emergency medical care is needed for someone in the car or when the car is dangerously positioned in the middle of traffic lanes, and it may mistake evasive maneuvers by the driver as impaired driving.
Finally, letting a manufacture’s algorithm, or anyone else, disable a motorist’s car without their permission amounts to theft, and if done in an unsafe way, it is an aggravated theft. As Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times put it, ”Remote kill switches [are] really about taking your car”.
You have a natural right to own and use your property as long as you do not harm anyone in the process, and your RightsBlog editors can think of no local variables that could justify a kill switch mandate anywhere that cars are a normal daily feature of life.
