Germany Considers Banning Smoking In Cars, Should The U.S. Follow?

YES! ASAP!

Okay, as much as I am against smoking in public places, and I absolutely abhor it when people are smoking near m e while I am eating, the car is a personal space. That would be the same as outlawing smoking in your home.

I'd love to see evidence behind the "safety" concerns, especially in comparison to other distracted acts (eating, talking on the phone, etc.) while driving.

What about children and infants as passengers? Who will protect them from the concentrated second hand smoke?

Ah yes, the old "think of the children" argument. Don't get me started on that. That is something a responsible adult/parent should take into consideration, it is not the job of the government to mandate moral issues like that. Additionally a law is already in place to protect the children, it's call child endangerment.

Here in California it is illegal to smoke in rental cars, restaurants, work places and in my house.

I'm EL34 and thanks for reading.

Yes, yes, yes!!......If I'm stopped behind someone smoking, or next to someone smoking at a light, it comes directly into my car. People trail their lit cigarettes out the window, even in cold weather. I also hate when people toss their lit cigarettes out the window. If you're behind them at night, it's easy to see how easy it is for the cigarette to blow into your car if you have your window, sunroof, etc open....

As smoking declines what area of life can we tax highly in order to make up for the loss of tabacco revenues? How about trans-fats!

Laws regarding smoking should only exist to protect the health and safety of others. Cigarettes are legal to purchase and are taxed heavily, so it is up to the smoker to protect their personal health and safety.

Land of the free means don't tell me what to do

And pouting about any structure given you. Don't be like a spoiled kid - some structure is for the betterment of us all. (Not saying that banning cigarette smoking in cars is necessarily one of those betterment factions, though.)

They will never get the cigarettes out of the Euro cars until they find the way to get them out of every 1 in 2's mouths! They talk about American unhealthy habits while they smoke their brains out. They pollute themselves as bad as they do their rivers, lakes and seas.

I find it disturbing the amount of "banning" articles I see every day. Even worse, the people who are willing to live under the cascade of new rules, of course, until it affects them. By then its too late. I'd rather live free.

Talking on the phone while driving is also forbidden in Germany, because drivers talking on the phone are paying attention to the conversation not their driving.
This increases the risk of getting into an accident.
Now they also want to ban somoking while driving, because when you smoke you don´t have both hands on the wheel, so the risk of getting into an accident increases.

I think they should stop that stupid discussion.

Yes. The U.S. should ban smoking in cars. I hate it when you buy a used car and someone smoked in it. That happened to my brother. He never got the smell out.

You can get rid of the smell with ozone gas.
I think it´s called ozone cleaning.

I am quite sure that what I am about to say may not be popular, I simply don’t care. I happen to be what is technically considered a classical liberal, as were most of the founders of the United States and as such support things such as private property as an absolute. This has nothing to do with “liberal” in the common rather idiotic journalistic parlance. It is more akin to libertarianism or Goldwater Republicanism, as it were. As such I do not condone of such authoritarianism: it is historically a precursor to worse. The word “safety” has become the bastardized “Necessity Clause” of argument. “It’s for your safety. It’s for everyone’s safety.” So is locking everyone in kennels. Stepping out your door is not safe; staying in your house is not safe. No human is ever safe; that is a condition of living within nature.

This thread demonstrates something rather fundamentally wrong with the western world at this point in history; this problem being a sense of entitlement. This is particularly evident in the United States, with horrible people suing over spilling hot coffee on themselves. These people are stupid in fundamental sense. We should not protect them; we should hope that they remove themselves from the society and more importantly from the gene pool. Sometimes other people die when the fools of the world show their final nature; that happens too, and there is not much that can be done about it. Risk is part of existence. As near as we can tell the human race has actually stopped evolving. The reason is simple: insufficient systemic and environmental pressures exist to induce modification. What is going to happen is that the human race will biologically and intellectually stagnate eventually because our lives are too safe.

As an engineer I am particular sensitive to this issue. 30 - 40 years ago people undertook things, particularly the utilization of something new, with the knowledge that it was to their personal risk. Now, engineers are expected to create things that NEVER fail. That is physically impossible. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, called NASA on their foolish propaganda that the Shuttle would fail once in every 100,000 launches resulting in loss of life. This means that each part on the shuttle would have to have the failure probability of 1 in 1 billion: a physical impossibility. The actual probability is around 1/100 [literally “the order of a percent”]. Now, society is putting itself at the mercy of increasingly complex devices, meaning you should expect failure.

…and if a car smells like smoke: don’t buy the F’ing thing.