Your Car Is Watching You Walk
GM just patented a system that decides if you're too drunk to drive — and the line between safety net and surveillance is thinner than a lane marking.
GM filed a patent for a system that reads how you walk toward your car. Stride length. Sway. Pace. Cameras and sensors building a case before you even touch the door handle.
The intent is clean: stop impaired drivers before they start. Hard to argue with the goal when the alternative is a headline nobody wants to be in.
But here's where it gets complicated. That same system doesn't just see drunk. It sees everything. A long day. A bad knee. Rain-soaked shoes on a slick parking lot. It sees you rushing because it's cold. It sees you shuffling because you're exhausted. It sees you, full stop.
The data has to live somewhere. Decisions get made from it. And once a car starts building a behavioral profile of its owner, the question isn't whether that's useful — it's who else finds it useful later.
GM isn't alone in this direction. The whole industry is drifting toward vehicles that monitor, assess, and intervene. Sometimes that's a good thing. Lane assist has saved lives. So has automatic braking.
This feels different. This is the car forming an opinion about you before you've done anything.
Patents don't always become products. But the fact that someone drew this up, wrote it out, and filed it means the idea is already on the road.