Get out of this drunk drivers

It is a cold wet Sunday morning and you’ve been in the pub reading the newspaper. You jump into the car to drive home for lunch. But before the ignition key will turn a beeper sounds, reminding you to blow into a tube.
You obey and a red light on the dashboard flashes to say you are over the limit. You have had only a pint of lager, but the car is immobilised and you stomp to the bus stop in the pouring rain.
The Department for Transport is already researching “alcolocks”, in-car breathalysers that prevent drivers who have imbibed much more than sherry trifle from starting their engines. Fifty volunteers in Manchester and the West Midlands have had them fitted to their cars as part of a two-year pilot study, with another 50 expected to join before the summer.
The device, which looks more like a 1970s electric razor than the latest high-technology motoring gadget, fits into the car radio slot and has a small mouthpiece that drivers must blow into before they can turn the ignition. The engine will start only if the alcohol reading is below the legal limit, and as part of the study a black-box recorder will register each time the volunteers start their cars and each time the alcolock prevents them.
The volunteers all have drink-driving convictions and were recruited through drink rehabilitation groups. The study will compare their behaviour with that of convicted drivers without alcolocks.
The results are not expected until towards the end of next year but legislation that would enable the device to be used in the sentencing of drink-drivers has been incorporated into the Road Safety Bill, which now will not be passed before the election.
“We might be able to give drink-drivers the option of reducing the length of a ban by having an alcolock fitted,” said a transport department spokesman. “Or we could make an alcolock a compulsory requirement at the end of their ban.”
Britain could soon come under pressure from the European Union to enforce the use of alcolocks more widely. European transport ministers want to halve the number of road deaths in the EU by 2010 and have said technological advances will “play an increasing role in support of enforcement”. These include “automatic speed control systems, speed warning or speed limiting devices, alcohol locks and seatbelt reminders”.
Sweden has become the first country to make it illegal to use a new car without an alcolock. Starting this year Swedish manufacturers will voluntarily fit alcolocks to new vehicles. By 2012 all new Swedish vehicles, including buses, trucks and cars, will be legally required to have the locks. The move is part of an ambitious road safety campaign known as Vision Zero that aims to halve the number of annual traffic deaths to 254 by 2007.
A horrific motorway crash last November highlighted the need to include professional drivers in the alcolock programme. A Hungarian lorry driver who had recently arrived in Sweden by ferry was so drunk that he could not remember being arrested for travelling the wrong way on the motorway, killing a family of five, including one of the country’s most prominent doctors.
On a single day of testing drivers coming off a ferry in Stockholm, 10% of foreign truckers were over the Swedish limit of 20mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood.
Claes Tingvall, director of traffic safety at Sweden’s strategic road authority, which has played a leading role in introducing the devices to the country, denies the government is behaving like a nanny state. He noted that Sweden had been the first country in Europe to introduce compulsory seatbelts, “and now they are seen as natural everywhere”, especially in Britain which, he says, has the highest rate of seatbelt compliance in the world.
Road safety campaigners have welcomed the testing of alcolocks in this country but Nigel Humphries, spokesman for the Association of British Drivers, said his organisation would strongly oppose plans for Britain to follow Sweden’s lead and install alcolocks in new cars. “That would be the nanny state at its most intrusive,” he said.
“We are against drunk driving as much as anyone but if alcolocks were to be introduced on a wider basis it would be like labelling everyone a criminal in order to catch the few who have broken the law.”
The US and Canada already use alcolocks to prevent drivers with drink-driving convictions from reoffending. The American-made locks are designed to anticipate the wiles of the thirstiest alcoholics. Convicted drink-drivers are required to blow into them at the start of their journey and at random intervals during the trip. The aim is to stop them drinking during the journey.
A number of measures have been devised to prevent other forms of cheating. On one type of alcolock the driver has to use a unique “suck, blow code”; on another model he has to hum into the mouthpiece to avoid air being piped in from a bottle or syringe. Yet another model measures the temperature of the exhaled air to ensure it equates to body temperature.
The only way a driver can get round the device is to recruit a sober friend as an accomplice, but the rationale is that few sober friends would want to be driven by a drunk.
Alcolocks are not entirely foolproof, however. In a recent test in Holland a sober researcher had to blow into the lock 75 times before he could get the car started. Researchers concluded that the locks were “not to be recommended for asthmatics”.