This was a big week for driverless, anti-alcohol, and parking space-sensing cars

For fans of automated autos that don’t need drivers, don’t like alcohol, and sniff out empty parking spaces, this was a big week.

On Thursday, the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed a prototype vehicle with alcohol-detection technology.

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Called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, or a parental-sounding DADSS for short, it features two methods for preventing drunk drivers from driving.

One is a passive breathalyzer on the steering wheel that reads the driver’s breath and determines if the blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) level is over 0.08 percent, which is the legal limit in every state. The other is an infrared scanner on the vehicle’s start button that detects the BAC below the skin of the driver’s finger.

While this is not the first such alcohol detection system, it does have the imprimatur of the NHTSA, which already carries huge clout in the marketplace for its vehicle safety ratings.

The systems, in development with major auto makers, are at least five years away from market availability and are projected to cost $400 as an optional safety add-on. The American Beverage Institute, an industry organization, has raised questions about whether either method can detect blood alcohol levels immediately after drinking.

Elsewhere, for those of us who have spent too much of our lifetimes cruising for empty parking spaces, BMW demonstrated this week at the Telematics Automotive conference near Detroit a differentiator that could save us time.

The company announced it is developing iPark technology (sorry, Apple, you’ve apparently lost that trademark) that can show on the car’s navigation system nearby empty parking spaces and their conditions, like hours when parking is permitted.

The technology, developed by Kirkland, Washington-based Inrix, is also intended to show space availability in parking garages, and will be rolled out to 23 cities worldwide by the end of this year.

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The system uses algorithms that predict when parked cars will leave, which the company said is about 80 percent accurate. Other automakers are also in talks to license the tech.

Of course, many such cars in a neighborhood could mean a sudden convergence on an empty space reminiscent of the last, desperate players in a game of musical chairs.

And finally, for those of you who would like to evolve past the days when humans drove vehicles, Google has agreed to acknowledge accidents involving the testing of its driverless cars.

The new transparency was announced at the end of the week, after Google cofounder Sergey Brin initially said on Wednesday his company would not release such accident reports, which have been rumored to number at least 13.

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The reason, he said, was not to protect the technology, but to protect the privacy of the human drivers involved in those accidents. He has contended the driverless cars have never been at fault.

The cause of the human drivers’ errors, the company has said, appears to be distraction.

Perhaps that’s because they were all thinking of finding a parking space so they could get a stiff drink.