Not everyone can afford a taxi home from a bar. Not everyone has convenient public transport options to get them home from a night out. Not everyone lives close enough to their friends to walk home after a lunchtime BBQ.
Hence it is understandable that some people take their car to such places and want to drive home after having a drink. It’s crucial to realize any amount of alcohol can reduce driving safety and it is far better to avoid alcohol altogether if driving.
One thing drivers might do is try and calculate it so they can drink something but still stay under the legal limit. Is this possible?
Trying to count your drinks could easily go wrong
It’s easy to count how many drinks you have had. For example, two bottles of beer, or two glasses of wine. But what a police breath, urine or blood test will measure is the concentration of alcohol in your blood, better known as BAC or blood alcohol content. That is far harder to gauge yourself.
One research team found that between 39% and 53% of the drivers they ran an experiment on underestimated how high their BAC was. If any of them had been in a real-world situation, rather than an experiment, they could well have been arrested had they set off thinking they were OK to drive
So many factors go into determining your BAC, including your sex, weight and age, as well as when you had the drinks and how big and how strong the drinks were. Trying to gauge whether it is safe to drink and drive is a terrible idea. Nonetheless, a conviction is not a given if you try it and make a mistake and end up arrested. There may still be defense options available that could leave you free to learn from your mistake and move forward with your record and liberty intact.