DAVID MARCUS: Why I'll take my clunker over any new car with a government kill switch
Back in January, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., proposed legislation to repeal a Biden-era regulation that will require all autoauto manufacturers to put kill switches in their new cars, as well as software to determine if a driver is impaired. It failed, with 57 Republicans opposing it.
Today, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, is leading a battle to kill the kill switch as part of the new FISA legislation, but his effort isn’t looking good, either.
My initial reaction to this bad news is to get my beat-up 2011 Mitsubishi Lancer to the shop, because I might now have to drive it for the rest of my life.
Obviously, I have no plans to drive impaired in any way, but the idea of owning a car, connected to the internet that the government can just shut off at a whim is an Orwellian step too far for me, and I suspect many Americans.
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Sure, it starts with not letting you start your own car if you look drunk, but soon it will happen if you miss a payment, or fail to cover your EZ-Pass bill, or say something controversial on a website.
I may be old-fashioned, but all I want out of a car is an engine and wheels. I don’t want it to talk to me, and I sure as hell don’t want it to listen to me. It's a car, not my boss or my therapist.
I could drive from West Virginia to Utah without my seatbelt on in my Lancer and it wouldn’t sound like the dinging and buzzing inside of a Vegas casino.
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Never does my vehicle, in a soft and dulcet voice, with a blinking red light say, "Dave, you’re driving a bit rapidly, aren't you?"
It’s bad enough that cars are self-driving today, so not only could the government potentially lock your ignition, it could use your own car to take you to jail, which I suppose is at least efficient.
The argument from Democrats and the 57 Republicans who want to control you more is what it almost always is; an appeal to safety, a ballpark figure of how many lives will be saved that will be treated as irrefutable, as if we don’t make life and death tradeoffs everyday.
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To borrow a phrase from the bad old days of COVID, "If it saves just one life …"
But if that really is the bottom line, then why not mandate that all vehicles have governors that max their speed out at 75 miles an hour? That would save an enormous number of lives and make policing traffic vastly easier.
If the issue is drunk driving, then install breathalyzers needed to start the engine. Problem solved.
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The reason we don’t take these invasive measures to prevent auto deaths is that neither can be used as a cudgel, neither of those options makes our personal automobiles more like government controlled public transportation.
What’s next? The government rationing by remote control how often you can drive your own car? Where you can and can’t go in it?
Does that really sound so far-fetched?
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At the point at which we can no longer simply turn on our cars and drive them, without some go ahead from the federal government, our cars stop being our own. We just rent them from the state.
Sadly, it seems as though that point is about to arrive, as once again, too many Congressional Republicans roll over like a cute seal at the zoo and watch our rights get trampled.
To make matters worse, we are now reaping the foul rewards of President Barack Obama’s "Cash for Clunkers" program, which mindlessly took hundreds of thousands of usable used cars off of the market.
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Not only do the Democrats want to control your new car, they want to destroy the old cars they can’t control.
I saw the impact of this myself in North Carolina after the ravages of Hurricane Helene, where families were going from two cars to one car because there just wasn’t any stock of cheap used cars available.
Having a car is a central facet of the American dream, the conquest of distance, the freedom of travel, but that dream can quickly turn into a nightmare if we hand the keys over to the government.
All of this is why my mindset is now that I’m keeping my Lancer until the government pries it out of my cold, dead driveway. If you are anything like me, well, then I’ll see you soon at the mechanic.