By Andrii Medvednikov @ Shutterstock.com
In the Tom Woods Letter, Tom Woods highlights an effort by Rep. Thomas Massie to defund legislation that mandates cars sold in the United States will be equipped with a kill switch beginning in 2026. That kill switch technology will allow turn off your vehicle if you are deemed to be driving poorly. In support of his effort to defund the provision, Massie told Congress “Now the question is, how much time do you have once your dashboard tells you that it doesn’t approve of your driving? What if you’re a single mother and you’re out on a in bad weather and you’re trying to avoid some obstacles? Ice perhaps. And you’ve swerved three times and your dashboard says: swerve one more time and you’re going to be put over to the side of the road, that you’ll have 100 yards to park this vehicle in the middle of nowhere with your children in the back seat.”
According to Woods, Massie concluded his testimony on the amendment (which failed), thusly:
Well, we actually don’t know how this technology is going to work. And they don’t know over at the DoD, either, because we’ve sent a letter to them that they haven’t responded to yet, asking them: will this have cameras inside the car? Will it monitor your eyes to see if you’re focused on the road? Will it have cameras on the outside of the car? How will it know what your performance is relative to the road that you’re driving on if it doesn’t in fact know which road you’re driving on?
Will it need to know where you are when you are driving? If so, who has access to this data? Who has access to those cameras? Will the Fourth Amendment be followed? Will you require a warrant for your insurance company to access this data? Will you require a warrant for the government to access this data once your car has been disabled and now you’re on the side of the road with your children in it for reasons you don’t understand? How long until the police show up? Or what if you truly are disabled and you’re over to the side of the road? Does anybody show up? How long do you have to get out of the vehicle? Who decides when your vehicle kill switch is disabled and you get to drive again? Who’s going to adjudicate that on the side of the road?
What if it’s rush-hour traffic? What if you know you’ve already got points against you according to your dashboard, and it’s monitored your performance, and now there’s somebody’s pet in the road, do you swerve to miss it and get your car disabled? What if there’s an emergency vehicle approaching from behind you, and you know, the right thing is to swerve off the road and let that vehicle pass? After you’ve done that three times and now your car says, do it one more time and we’re going to leave you on the side of the road?
This is in the law. This will become law in 2026. Every vehicle manufactured after that. And it’s not about drunk driving. If it were, it would just be about blood alcohol content. This law has far more than that in it. It violates the Fourth Amendment. It violates so many amendments. It violates things that are so fundamental to our rights that they’re not even in the Constitution, like the right to travel. And so I urge support of this amendment. It will defund the law that was passed two years ago, that the other side of the aisle doesn’t even know exists.
Nineteen Republicans voted with all the Democrats to keep funding the invasive rules.
Read more here.
The right to travel is fundamental, but the government has mandated a kill-switch in new vehicles sold after 2026. The kill-switch will monitor driver performance and disable cars based on the information gathered. We will vote on my amendment to defund this mandate tonight. pic.twitter.com/Uf0Z2yVNP1
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) November 8, 2023
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