I had a retail customer once (I sold pc stuff to SMBs in college) who made a big purchase via credit card. The cashier got a weird code, and got transferred to a person who asked for a supervisor (me), and then asked yes/no questions about the physical description of the guy. Then they gave me some code to clear the transaction.

I was checking out the Sunday paper a few days later (this was the 90s), and it turned out that the guy was a fugitive who basically killed his wife and fed her to the fishes.

Pretty freaky stuff.

A little bit off-topic, but stories like this lead me to wonder why mandated ignition locks are not more prevalent.

I once saw a pitch for Google VC by a company selling mandated breathalyzer ignition locks - and insurance. The founders were a criminal lawyer and an insurance salesman (brothers). Their angle was to get state legislation passed, and win per-state government monopolies on the interlocks - and then cross-market auto insurance to drivers who had to buy the interlocks, because most carriers won't insure drivers after a DUI.

It was the creepiest, most cynical thing I've ever seen.

Those guys are gonna be RICH.

That's interesting. You can read it a few ways, one sounds like a company tailored to the problems of being a post-DUI offender. If the traditional systems fail you and you need a vehicle for transportation this might be a solution. The other is a company that has a captive market and squeezes them like the rest of the justice economy.

It's not really two ways of reading an action. It's two separate actions. One is providing insurance to people with interlocks. The other is using a monopoly to promote that insurance.

In oligopoly form, it's exactly what the car insurance companies did paying off legislators to require their product, setting the standards for how the insurance is supposed to be done, selling that now-mandated product at nice profits, and then municipalities and states making nice profits off the tickets and fines (esp off poor people).

And then we add a mandatory breathalyzer check to the remote VPN login. Because if people believe they can still drive, they might just believe they can still answer the pager.

YOLO is not really a phrase you should use on-call. :)

Every time I've seen them discussed, I see brought up that they're not especially reliable.

Denying transport to someone who's got a history of doing anti-social things behind the wheel seems reasonable. But making them required for all vehicles (if I'm understanding your intention correctly) seems likely to have undesirable results.

FWIW Toyota had a drunkenness-sensing steering wheel at least in concept for ~10 years ago: http://www.autoblog.com/2007/01/03/toyotas-sweat-sensing-ste...

Breath tests are notoriously unreliable/inaccurate, to such a degree that in some jurisdictions the law is now phrased entirely in terms of a machine reading since it's been established there's no reliable relationship between the machine reading and blood alcohol level.

Seriously, read up on the history of breath-test machines sometime. Everything from difficult chemistry to literal "oops we misplaced a decimal point in the software".

Not for evidential breath testers used here by police in NZ. The blood tests always back up the breath test, and have done so for years.

They're very expensive and they're not especially reliable.

Like, stupid expensive. Kids, don't ever put yourself in that situation. Call an uber/lyft/whatever.

Yeah, it's a seller's market. If you get a DUI and have to drive to get to work, you have to pay it. And the public is (understandably) largely unsympathetic to extraneous costs for drunk drivers.

There were a few guys at the bar I used to hang out at that had several DUIs, had the ignition lock, yet somehow seemed to get on the road after closing the bar.

"We hired a guy once who, a few weeks after starting, had to take three weeks off to serve jail time for his 3rd DUI'

You flunked your own background check.