I do mind, however, if the data is not immediately discarded, once it does its real-time safety purpose.
For me, I will never own a car with any kind of screen on the dash.
You are also turning away a lot of the advances in electric vehicles. Paying for gas in your old car, could be more than payments on a brand new electric car. (that would require a lot of driving.)
tldr; Impairment detection methods are currently too inaccurate to use (both false positive and false negative).
And then if anything is ever accurate enough they'll have to create testable standards that car manufacturers can easily implement.
And NHTSA is concerned with security and privacy issues as well. They'll keep updating congress on progress once a year.
My take is it's very possible the rule may never get made.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
Except in mid to high end luxury cars, automakers will probably design the sensor to be completely self-contained and merely provide a "driver present, attentive" or "driver distracted" or "no driver." In high end cars they'll use it to switch driver profiles, like what Lucid already does.
Both you and that author need to go look at the massive amount of data that has been getting collected in cars, including location data, for close to two decades in any vehicle that even had the option for telematics and GPS navigation.
Also the issue is not so much the camera system, but the "OS" the car is running. A ton of vehicles now have Google's Android OS running on them and that is also a privacy dumpster fire in and of itsel.
Also, a nationwide network of license plate reading cameras is far more of a privacy threat, too.