The U.S. Department of Transportation is eager in its announcement that they have reached a “new frontier in the fight against drunk driving.” The government office has shared its plans to install a state-of-the-art technology that would detect alcohol in several vehicles sometime in the next eight to ten years.

This new technology, aptly called the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, would come with a system called the Tissue Spectrometry, a touch-base system that would be able to detect the presence of alcohol in ones blood concentration. Another option would be to use the Distant Spectrometry device that would detect the alcohol presence in the driver’s breath. Once the system detects that the driver is intoxicated, the car would go into self-disabling mode. Pretty ambitious indeed, thought it might pose a great deal of a problem for those who work in bars and places where they serve alcohol.

At present time, a five-year $10 million cooperative budget effort has been made between car makers and the government in order to make these technologies available. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the project will start with actual demonstrations of these technologies to the public towards the end of this year. Here are some of the car makers that have joined the project: Mitsubishi, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, Porsche, BMW, Ford, Chrysler, Hyundai/Kia, Mazda, GM, Jaguar/Land Rover, Nissan, Honda and Mercedes-Benz. Clearly, this looks like a promising effort being made by the car companies themselves and the federal government to lessen the number of drunk drinking incidents in the US.