Can’t quote it exactly, but I think it was Ben Franklin who said you can have safety or freedom, but you can’t have both.
This is IN SPADES what’s going on today. The left has finally raised enough fearful children in our schools, and they are frightening them into submission. COVID, racism, “safe spaces”, gun control, and now a kill switch to stop drunk driving.
I once worked with a guy who said he could stop all crime. When pressed, he answered, “Death Penalty for parking tickets.” I wouldn’t go down the violation ladder that far, but actually using it for murder and treason would be a good start.
Drunk proofing cars is an interesting intellectual exercise. Ignition interlocks with built in breathalyzers are complex, prone to failure, and are easily dodged by just driving a different vehicle. Mandating them for all new vehicles punishes the innocent with undeserved and expected failures and at best a significantly higher price tag. Ideally you want a system where the risks are disproportionately born by the guilty with minimal cost and risk for the innocent. Minimal does not herein mean zero. Keeping the status quo implies keeping higher insurance and repair costs and keeping the injuries the status quo allows drunk drivers to inflict. Cost benefit analysis should be possible and should be done before changing anything.
My starting point would be that someone with a suspended license shouldn't have their butt behind the steering wheel of a moving car. Seeing as such butts rarely arrive except when the car is already stopped, a stopped car shouldn't be allowed to start moving with such a butt behind its wheel. If the only restriction is such butts, and it is only enforced when starting to move then the car shouldn't fail from this in motion. If it's stuck in the wrong location any one with legit butt can move it. But how to validate butts. My answer would be to use a mature, widely available and I presume inexpensive, technology. Chip the sufficiently guilty butts and have driver's seat chip readers that can determine if such a chip is present over it, as opposed to in some other seat. Getting chipped to require due process and suitably written laws. I'm not aiming to guess at and chip future first offenders, but rather those repeaters the court deem won't comply with lesser measures. Based on the veterinary experience the medical risks are relatively small and the perp might be offered a suitable prison term as an alternative. Satisfy the court long enough and they might let you have it removed. While chipped the courts should require periodic chip checks to make sure it hasn't been illicitly removed. Paired with chipping this needs suitable chip reading systems installed in new cars. Given time most cars available to drunks will be equipped and the system would work. Now that requires the system to be both technologically feasible, cost effective (compared to the costs inflicted by drunks it can block) and otherwise relatively problem free. I'm guessing the answers to the last are ok, but am not expert. Perhaps experts can improve on my concept, but I'd caution against complicated systems. Small, simple, safe, and cheap would be my goals. The only thing complex would be the court's choice to chip or not to chip.