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Your uncle on Facebook says the feds are putting remote kill switches in new cars starting in 2027. It's not true, but... it's not crazy talk either.
The controversy goes back to 2021, when the federal government passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Tucked in that massive bill was a provision called Section 24220 that directed the NHTSA to create a rule requiring “advanced drunk driving prevention technology” in new cars that would detect if a driver is impaired and prevent the vehicle from starting, or force it to stop.
It went mostly unnoticed at the time. The NHTSA then missed its first deadline to create the standard in 2024, saying the necessary technology wasn’t commercially available yet, which triggered an extension to November 2027. But that delay gave people time to catch up, read the fine print, and suddenly a panic was born. A group of lawmakers in Congress even tried to repeal it earlier this year, but the vote failed.
The phrase “kill switch” is nowhere in Section 24220, but critics say the anti drunk-driving argument is just a cover to give the feds a backdoor into controlling your car. Crazy as that sounds, those fears are based in reality: automakers already have the ability to remotely control your car. New cars are already gathering huge amounts of data on you. A law now exists requiring companies to intervene in limited cases.
So in reality, once the tech is ready, the only thing stopping a real federal kill switch in new cars is a stroke of a pen.
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0:00 Intro
1:15 Origins of Section 24220
3:01 The fight begins
5:14 History of in-car kill switches
8:25 Automakers want your data
11:52 Liability nightmare