Though DUI-related deaths have been on the decline in recent years, data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that 12,429 Americans died in alcohol-related crashes in 2023, and 804,926 people were arrested for suspected DUI in 2024, so it’s still a significant concern. Late last year, the IIHS announced that it is adding a requirement for DUI-detection tech to the barrage of crash tests and features needed to earn its Top Safety Pick+ award by 2030, and it looks like General Motors might be well prepared for that.
As GM Authority discovered, GM filed a patent for a system that can detect if someone impaired by looking at how they walk using cameras and sensors, including one lidar sensor. This is only a patent filing so there’s no promise that it will make it to any production cars, but it was actually filed in September 2024 and only just published last month, so GM’s been working on it for a while.
The system uses machine learning to determine if a user is intoxicated
The cameras and sensors determine if an individual approaching the car is swaying or walking in a straight line, how fast they are walking, and the length of their strides — GM describes these as “gait parameters.” As the patent filing explains: “The set of gait parameters is provided to a long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network which determines a gait score by regressing the set of gait parameters. The gait score is compared to an impairment threshold, and the operator is engaged in response to the gait score exceeding the impairment threshold.”
If the score is below the threshold, the person can access the vehicle and drive it as normal. If the score exceeds the threshold, the system has several potential courses of action, from visual and audio alerts to potentially activating secondary detection systems like a breathalyzer or prevent the individual from driving the car all together. GM adds that it’s important for this tech to be transparent and blatantly obvious for the potential operators when they’re still outside the vehicle, so they don’t try to circumvent it and drive away anyway. The patent outlines another potential benefit: identifying medical emergencies using the same cameras and sensors, including ones that the potential operator might not realize they’re having.
In some cases, it seems easy to detect someone’s drunkenness just from the way they walk, but I could totally see this becoming an issue for people with physical disabilities. Regardless, we’ll see if this patent filing makes its way to GM’s production vehicles in the future.
