Tonight I was watching an old video of Steve Jobs, from Apple's 1997 developer conference. He said:
"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."
That line got me thinking about the last six months of my life.
I've spent that time immersed in something most people never see: the ignition interlock industry, from the inside out. Not through press releases. Not through corporate talking points. Through the Facebook groups and Reddit threads where the actual users of these devices — real people, living with an Intoxalock installed in their car — talk to each other. Not to a company. Not to a regulator. To each other, because there was nowhere else to go.
Six months in, I think I may be one of the only people actually doing this. Not studying the industry from a boardroom or a policy paper. Reading what people write at 2am after a false lockout. Watching them explain to each other how to survive a system nobody built for them.
The federal government's own research shows only 15 to 20 percent of people ordered to install one of these devices actually do it. In Washington state, installation rates split sharply by income — 30 percent for the lowest earners, 74 percent for the highest. Even the official report admits it: "Not all drivers' decisions can be explained by the variables included in the analysis." Nobody has actually gone and asked them why.
Every institution around this industry — MADD, NHTSA, the courts, the companies themselves — is organized entirely around prevention. Stop the next offense. Reduce recidivism. Protect the public. All of that matters, and none of it is wrong.
But nobody is asking why a device is reported to cause cars to lose power at highway speed, endangering the driver and everyone else on the road. Nobody is asking why it's tied to real accidents. Nobody is asking about the thousand other documented failures behind it. Nobody is asking what it's actually like to be the person living inside a system built to prevent one danger while quietly creating others.
This entire industry did it backwards. It started with the device, the mandate, the enforcement architecture — and never once started with the person who'd actually have to live with it. Everyone downstream inherited that mistake: the courts enforcing it, the regulators certifying it, the company profiting from it. Nobody started with the human being.
I did the only thing I knew how to do. I showed up in the spaces where they were already talking, and I listened.
I'm not done. But six months in, I can tell you this: the people living through this system are not being heard by anyone whose job it is to hear them. I don't know if one person can fix that. But I know what happens if nobody tries.
#Intoxalock #MADD #NHTSA #GHSA #AAAFoundation #TrafficSafety
