Most of what we write is for people who have just been arrested and need to know what happens next. This one is different. It is the week before Veterans Day, a month before Repeal Day, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety just published a new study on Utah’s 0.05 law, so we are taking a break from the deadlines and the statutes to tell nine stories about how DUI law came to be — several of which run straight through Utah.
1. The first DUI arrest was an electric cab in London, in 1897
At about 12:45 a.m. on September 10, 1897, a 25-year-old London cab driver named George Smith swerved his battery-powered taxi across New Bond Street in Mayfair and into a building, breaking a water pipe and a window frame. The London Electrical Cab Company’s vehicles had been in service only a few weeks; they topped out around nine to twelve miles per hour. Smith was taken to the Marlborough Street Police Court, pleaded guilty to being drunk in charge of a motor car, and was fined 25 shillings. There was no breath test, no blood test, and no number. The charge rested entirely on what the constable saw. More than a century later, that is still how the “under the influence” prong of Utah’s DUI statute works: an officer’s observations, with or without a chemical result.
2. The first American DUI law had no limit at all
New York enacted the first state law against driving while intoxicated in 1910, and other states followed over the next two decades. None of them defined intoxication with a number, because there was no way to measure it. A case was a contest between the officer’s description — slurred speech, unsteady gait, the smell of liquor — and the driver’s denial. Juries decided. The modern DUI trial, with its video, its instrument printouts, and its expert witnesses, would be unrecognizable to a 1910 prosecutor. What has not changed is the roadside performance: the walk, the speech, the eyes.
3. Utah cast the vote that ended Prohibition
On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment needed ratification by a 36th state to repeal national Prohibition. Pennsylvania and Ohio ratified earlier that day. Utah’s convention met last, and its 21 delegates voted unanimously to ratify, making Utah the state that formally ended the “noble experiment.” Legal alcohol returned to the country that evening, and December 5 is still marked as Repeal Day. The irony was not lost on anyone then and is not lost on anyone now: the state that ended Prohibition went on to maintain some of the most restrictive alcohol rules in the country, including the 3.2 percent beer limit that lasted until November 1, 2019, and the restaurant “Zion Curtain” partitions that the Legislature took down in 2017.
4. The first breath test was a balloon, on New Year’s Eve
Indiana University biochemist Rolla Harger patented the Drunkometer in 1936, and Indianapolis police gave it its first real-world trial on New Year’s Eve 1938. A driver blew into a balloon; the breath was pumped through a purple potassium permanganate solution that changed color in proportion to the alcohol present; and an officer used Harger’s formula to estimate blood alcohol. The machine looked like a portable chemistry set, and it was. Harger also served on the National Safety Council committee that drafted the first model law setting a chemical limit for drivers, and the number they chose was 0.15 — three times Utah’s limit today. A driver at 0.15 in 1939 was presumed intoxicated. A driver at 0.14, the average BAC at arrest in Utah last fiscal year, was presumed not.
5. The “Breathalyzer” was built in a basement, and Utah doesn’t use one
Robert Borkenstein, a photographic technician turned Indiana State Police laboratory director, worked alongside Harger for years and in 1954 built a smaller, more reliable instrument in the basement of his Indianapolis home. He named it the Breathalyzer, a blend of breath, alcohol, and analyzer, patented it in 1958, and watched it become the standard across the world. The brand name became the generic word, and it has outlived the device. The instrument Utah officers use at the station today is the Intoxilyzer 8000, which measures alcohol by infrared absorption rather than by chemical color change. It has its own calibration schedule, observation-period rules, and published margin of error, all of which matter in a case decided by a few hundredths of a point. Our breath test page goes through them.
6. The roadside tests were chosen in a laboratory, in the disco era
The three standardized field sobriety tests — horizontal gaze nystagmus, walk-and-turn, and one-leg stand — come from research NHTSA commissioned from the Southern California Research Institute beginning in 1975. Researchers started with a longer list of roadside tasks, including finger-to-nose and counting exercises, and kept the three whose results best tracked blood alcohol. The target was 0.10, the most common legal limit of the day. The studies were done with volunteers on level indoor surfaces, and even then they misclassified a meaningful share of sober subjects. Everything about how a Utah officer administers those tests on a shoulder of I-15 traces back to that 1970s work, which is why the test conditions matter so much in court. See field sobriety tests in Utah.
7. Utah was the first state to 0.08 — in 1983
Through the 1970s most states presumed intoxication at 0.10. In 1983 Utah became the first state to lower its per se limit to 0.08, with Oregon following that year. It took more than two decades for the rest of the country to catch up: Congress tied federal highway funds to a 0.08 standard in 2000, and the limit became universal in 2005. Utah had been there for 22 years.
8. Utah was the first state to 0.05 — and is still the only one
The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended a 0.05 limit since 2013, noting that most industrialized countries already use it. In 2017 the Utah Legislature passed Representative Norm Thurston’s bill lowering the limit from 0.08 to 0.05, with an effective date delayed to December 30, 2018 — the day before New Year’s Eve. Nearly eight years later, no other state has followed, though bills surface every session somewhere. The research keeps accumulating: a recent Colorado State University study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found larger declines in alcohol-related fatalities in Utah than in neighboring states after the change, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s October 2026 update found Utah’s alcohol-involved crash rate fell while comparison states’ rates rose. Whatever one thinks of the policy, it is the reason a Utah driver can be arrested at a level that is legal in all 49 other states. Our 0.05 BAC law page explains how the per se limit is charged and defended.
9. You can get a Utah DUI on a bicycle, a boat, or a four-wheeler
Utah’s DUI statute applies to operating or being in actual physical control of a “vehicle,” and the definition in § 41-6a-501 is broad enough to reach bicycles and off-highway vehicles. Boating under the influence is its own offense under the boating code, with the same 0.05 limit, and Pineview and Willard Bay produce cases every summer. A snowmobile on a groomed trail in the Monte Cristo range counts too. Most people learn this the hard way; the pages on bicycle DUI and boating under the influence are there so that you don’t.
Bonus: the fact that is not fun
From the night of a Utah DUI arrest, you have 10 days to request a Driver License Division hearing. Miss it and the suspension is automatic, before any court has heard a word of evidence. It is the least-known and most-consequential rule in Utah DUI law, which is why we end every article with it. If you have been arrested, call our office. Staff answer 24 hours a day, and an attorney reviews every case assessment.