The Strict Sensor

In most parts of the world, people have little use for alcoholic breath, but the Japanese have dreamed up a way to make it stop a car. Troubled by the steady increase in the number of drunken Japanese drivers and the traffic deaths they cause (1,200 last year), a Honda Motor Co. Ltd. engineer named Kazutaka Monden has developed a puritanical gimmick called the Sniffer that shuts off a car's engine when it detects alcoholic breath.

Installed at the top of the steering column, the Sniffer consists primarily of a thumbnail-sized gas sensor. Whenever the presence of a potentially combustible gas closes the circuit between a pair of tiny electrodes, a yellow panel light flashes. This indicates that the Sniffer has been offended and will cut the ignition in ten seconds--just enough time, its inventor calculates, to allow the motorist to pull off the road.

Before it becomes standard equipment, however, it will have to become more discriminating. It is so sensitive that even when a sober companion shifts a drunken driver to the back seat, it refuses to allow the motor to start; it can still sniff the drunk's breath. Still more embarrassing was the Sniffer's recent refusal to allow a sober woman to drive. The mechanism found her perfume intoxicating.

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