You're tired. Your eyes are half-buggy from driving through the ground blizzard that whipped up in the last 40 miles. You spent the day working out in the cold, and you only have 10 miles of very uncrowded road to get home. The wind is blowing at 25 MPH outside, gusting to 40, and the powder like snow is blowing past in the -15 degree air. Just 10 more miles, another 20-30 minutes, and you are home.
Then your vehicle decides you are impaired and shuts down.
Now, you are on a sparsely traveled road, wind chill is below -40 degrees, and your vehicle is going to cool to the ambient 15 below quickly. You have your survival kit, and might live, but there is a chance that some other soul might come along and collide with your vehicle, at which point your chances for survival decrease significantly.
Just a thought. Here we have 'rumble strips' on the sides of the road and along the centerlines. If you contact those too often (some arbitrary frequency set by someone in a warm office far from blizzard conditions), will your vehicle be shut down? In the scenario above, there are times you literally 'feel' your way down the road, because none of the lane markings are visible. Preach all you want about whether someone should be out in that weather, but it does happen, and despite weather reports, when it is a couple of hours to the next town, weather changes. Granted, Northern Plains driving conditions are not common everywhere, (Think North Dakota, Eastern Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota), but that's no reason to rig up our vehicles for Galveston or So Cal. One damned size does NOT fit all.
Many years ago, a friend had a vehicle with a breathalyzer interlock on it. Even though he had decided to quit drinking after the incident that led to that, and had done so, the interlock system was required. Periodically, the vehicle would shut off and require the device to be blown into (something which required the driver to bend down below dashboard level) in order to continue running. Had it not been for the interlock kicking in in traffic, he would have been able to continue driving normally, and would not have been in a wreck.
Looking for some ex machina solution to human problems is a mistake.
At some point, you have to trust people to operate their vehicles, and not encumber them with gadgets which will likely get someone killed because they malfunction, or even because they work as designed.
