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Back in the summer of 1974, when the nation was still trying to decide whether Watergate was a tragedy or a comedy, the federal government decided to solve the problem of unbuckled seatbelts by inventing a car that would refuse to start if you didn’t strap yourself in like a fighter pilot. It seemed, as these things always do in Washington, like a perfectly sensible idea. Engineers had figured it out, bureaucrats had blessed it, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had issued the necessary Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard. For 1974 model-year cars, the seat-belt ignition interlock was born: sit down, don’t buckle, and the engine would sulk like a teenager denied the car keys.
My father, Frank Morrow, a car dealer in Beaver Falls, was one of the men who led the opposition. He wasn’t some wild-eyed libertarian; he was just a fellow who sold Fords, Mercurys, and Lincolns to steelworkers and farmers and knew what happened when you tried to make ordinary people do something by mechanical fiat. He traveled to Washington, testified before committees, and buttonholed congressmen with the quiet insistence of a man who had spent his life listening to customers complain about things that didn’t work. The backlash, as it turned out, was enormous—bigger, some said, than the outcry over the Saturday Night Massacre.
Congress, to its everlasting credit, listened. In October 1974 President Gerald Ford signed the repeal. And Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, bless his heart, later presented my father with the silver and navy blue pen the president had used to finalize the deed. Dad kept it on his desk for years, a small reminder that sometimes the Republic still worked the old-fashioned way: people talked, politicians noticed, and the government backed off.
It was a classic case of what I’ve come to call the Mechanical Solution Fallacy. You identify a human failing—folks forgetting to buckle up—and you hand the problem to a gadget. No messy education campaigns, no nagging PSAs, no trusting people to make the right choice. Just a wire and a switch that says, “No, you don’t.” The imponderables, naturally, were ignored. What if the switch failed on a cold morning when you were late for work? What if a mechanic disabled it with a paper clip and a curse? What if the sheer annoyance of being treated like a child made drivers more reckless in other ways? Unintended consequences, the bureaucrats always reply, are somebody else’s problem. History, however, has a way of collecting those bills—with interest.
Which brings us, with a sigh that feels almost biblical in its weariness, to the so-called “kill switch” now lumbering through the legislative pipeline. It is not, despite the colorful nickname, some remote-control device in the Oval Office that can turn off your pickup if you vote the wrong way. It is, rather, the Congreee’s latest bright idea: a passive impaired-driving prevention system that must be installed in every new passenger vehicle. Cameras, sensors, steering monitors, eye trackers—whatever the engineers eventually settle on—will watch you like a suspicious aunt at Thanksgiving dinner. Drive while the gadget decides you are too drunk, too drowsy, or too distracted, and it will politely decline to let you proceed. Or limit you to a crawl. Or lecture you in some soothing robotic voice until you pull over and repent.
Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra might have said.
Once more the government has decided that human judgment is too risky, that technology will be flawless, and that the public will meekly accept being monitored for its own good. The imponderables are, if anything, even more entertaining this time around. What happens when the system mistakes a harmless swerve for impairment? When a software glitch strands an entire fleet on the shoulder of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? When teenagers figure out how to spoof the sensors with sunglasses and chewing gum? When privacy advocates point out that those cameras are, after all, recording your face and your movements in a rolling surveillance device you paid extra for? And what of the cost—another few hundred dollars tacked onto every new car, cheerfully passed along to the same hard-working folks my father used to sell Fords and Mercurys to?
The deeper problem is philosophical, though Washington hates philosophy almost as much as it hates admitting error. Mechanical solutions that override human decision-making always carry the same hidden defect: they assume people are too stupid or too wicked to be trusted with their own lives, yet wise enough to design, maintain, and obey the machines that will replace that trust. It never quite works out. The seat-belt interlock lasted roughly as long as a bad sitcom. The kill switch, though still in the rulemaking stage as of this spring, has already survived one serious attempt at repeal and several defunding efforts. Its supporters—wellmeaning safety advocates, mostly—insist this time will be different. The technology is smarter. The need is greater. Ten thousand lives a year, they say.
Perhaps. But I keep thinking of my father sitting in a congressional hearing room in 1974, explaining patiently that you can’t legislate common sense into a dashboard. The silver and navy blue pen Senator Heinz gave him sits in a drawer now, a relic of a moment when Congress remembered that Americans do not like being told “no” by their own automobiles. The kill switch will arrive eventually, I suppose, with all its sensors humming and its good intentions glowing. And somewhere in Beaver Falls, if Dad were still with us, he would shake his head, smile that small, wry smile of his, and say the same thing he said in ’74: “They’ll figure it out eventually. After the complaints start rolling in thicker than the steel-mill smoke.”
Some lessons, it seems, have to be learned twice. Or three times. Or until the last bureaucrat finally understands that the most dangerous thing on the highway is not a distracted driver. It’s a government that thinks it can drive for him.
