Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over - NHTSA Releases New PSA Videos

The NHTSA has a set of new public service announcements to remind drivers that they should never drink and drive. The two videos are part of their “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” campaign and feature both a male and a female perspective on driving under the influence of alcohol.

Moreover, the clips aren’t only for the Internet to see but will also be shown in US theaters before the new Star Wars movie over the next few weeks, Autoblog reports. Like the guys at NHTSA, we can only hope that more people will get the message these videos ar trying to send: never drink and drive and don’t let a friend drive after consuming alcoholic beverages.

“Drunk driving doesn’t just happen. It’s a decision people make,” explains Mark Rosekind, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is a decision to break the law that can bring fatal consequences both to those who make it and to others around them.

If you ask us, drunk driving can be easily avoided with basic planning: if you want to go out and have a drink, no matter how little alcohol it contains, don’t get behind the wheel afterwards. This can be avoided if you’re in a group, because one of you can become the evening’s designated driver and a group of friends can take turns doing this.

If you have a group of friends who like to go out for drinks, feel free to pick a designated driver and buy non-alcoholic beverages for him or her for the entire evening. This way, the roads will be safer and everyone gets home safe.

If nobody in your group wants to be the designated driver, we’ll have you know that that’s what taxis and Uber are for. In the worst case scenario, you can always call a member of your family or a friend who hasn’t consumed alcohol that day to come pick you up. Just remember to do the same for them if they ever request it.

Full-on drunk driving isn’t the only problem road users face, as the UK’s Department for Transport reports. Research from the Think! anti-drink-driving campaign shows that around 5,500 drivers in the United Kingdom fail a BAC test every year after a night’s drinking. Basically, those people drank too much the night before they were tested or didn’t get enough rest out of sleeping and ended up with a DUI charge.

“People think that going to bed is the same as pressing a reset button,” explains Hunter Abbott, managing director of Alcosense, a renowned manufacturer of breath analyzers. In case you didn’t get the message, just getting a quick nap doesn’t clear the alcohol from your bloodstream.

The most important thing that drivers must understand is that alcohol affects people in different ways and a person can get different BAC figures after the same amount of alcohol. According to scientists, the factors that influence BAC figures and alcohol absorbtion include genetics, body mass index, the amount of alcohol consumed (obviously), time past since last drink, how much sleep a person’s had, food consumed, and many more.

We’ve written over 500 words to send every driver a simple message: never drink and drive!