Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs.
I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around it.
It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,
As far as DUIs are concerned I’m specifically not in favour of harsh jail time and fines due to their lack of effectiveness and collateral damage.
Interventions to allow a short feedback loop to stop the crimes being prevented simply haven’t been tried at scale for DUIs - think efforts like NYC’s anti-idling laws where you can collect a portion of the fine for reporting idling trucks.
Based on, among other things, my experience living for years without a car in both a medium-sized city and a small town, I find it unpersuasive to claim that anyone, including poor and minorities are better served by having community members drive drunk rather than not driving at all. We’ve quantified the costs of drunk driving (hundreds of billions of $) - I’d welcome anyone to quantify the economic benefits we get from allowing those with DUIs to continue to drive.
We already took their license, we can't double-take it to show we really mean it. Fining them seems a bit rough when they need to drive to get to the job to make the money to pay those fines. Or we're right back to jail time and an even higher prison population.