Jon Miltimore has yet another example of “fact-checkers” carrying water for politicians to obscure actual facts when they’re politically inconvenient:
In November 2021, former US Representative from Georgia Bob Barr wrote a little-noticed political column claiming that buried inside President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation was a dangerous provision that would go into effect in five years.
“Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch'”, wrote Barr, who was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 2008.
Like most Americans, I had never heard of this alleged “kill switch” until a few days ago when Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican, proposed to strip the mandate’s funding.
“The right to travel is fundamental, but the government has mandated a kill-switch in new vehicles sold after 2026,” said Massie. “The kill-switch will monitor driver performance and disable cars based on the information gathered.”
Nineteen Republicans joined all but one Democrat in opposing Massie’s amendment, which failed.
True or False?
The claim that the feds would mandate that every new motor vehicle include technology that could disable the vehicle seemed ludicrous. So I started Googling.
To my relief, I saw several fact-checkers at legacy institutions had determined the “kill switch” mandate was not true.
“Our rating: False,” said USA Today.
“ASSESSMENT: False,” said the Associated Press.
“We rate it Mostly False,” concluded PolitiFact.
(Snopes, a reliably left-leaning fact check group, was a little less conclusive, saying the claim was a “mixture” of true and false.)
Unfortunately, my relief evaporated once I looked at the bill itself.
Sec. 24220 of the law explicitly states: “[T]o ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.”
The legislation then goes on to define the technology as a computer system that can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and can “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected” (emphasis added).
How the system will make this determination is unclear, as is the government’s potential role in apprehending suspected drunk drivers (more on that later).
But the law’s language could not be more clear: New motor vehicles must have a computer system to “monitor” drivers, and the system must be able to prevent vehicle operation if it detects impairment.
