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Florence Swanson has lived through every American car in the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model S. Now, at 94, she’s entered into what Google hopes would be the automotive future: self-driving vehicles.
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After her painting of a guitar player won a Google contest, she had become the oldest person yet to ride in a model with the company’s autonomous technology.
“You haven’t lived until you enter one of those cars,” the Austin, Texas, resident said of her half-hour excursion. “I couldn’t believe that the vehicle could talk. I felt completely safe.”
Robots Take the Wheel
Google is betting others will share her sentiment. Using more than 43 million people in the U.S. now 65 and older, and 10,000 more hitting that mark every single day, aging Americans are a natural target market for self-driving vehicles. Mobility needs — getting to the doctor or the supermarket, seeing friends and family — become paramount for seniors, especially since 79 percent reside in suburbs and rural areas.
“For the first time ever, seniors are going to be the lifestyle leaders of the new technology,” said Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab in Cambridge. “Younger people might have had smartphones in their hands first, but it’s the 50-plus consumers who will be first with smart cars.”
John Krafcik, ceo of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, featured Swanson throughout a January presentation in Detroit. His own mother is 96; both she and Swanson threw in the towel their driver’s licenses, and the freedom that came with them, roughly a decade ago.
“A completely self-driving car can have a huge impact on people like Florence and my mom,” Krafcik said. “Mobility should be available to the millions all over the world who don’t possess the privilege of holding a driver’s license.”
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Ford Motor Co. also sees autonomy “as a way to strategically address an aging population,” said Sheryl Connelly, the Dearborn, Michigan-based company’s in-house futurist. To assist design vehicles for that elderly, engineers and designers have donned a “third age suit” incorporating glasses that impair vision and gloves that reduce finger control and strength.
In Japan, Toyota Motor Corp. is racing to bring autonomous cars to market, partly because elderly drivers disproportionately cause and therefore are injured in traffic accidents. Some of this work is incorporated in the U.S., where the company hired Gill Pratt — former program manager at the Defense Advanced Studies Agency and head of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge — to lead the Toyota Research Institute. The company is spending US$1 billion on artificial intelligence and robotics technology to eliminate driver errors and reduce traffic fatalities.
“We often talk about autonomy as if the aim is simply to create autonomy in machines,” Pratt said last fall when his job was announced. The main focus is much more on people having “the ability to decide upon themselves where they want to move, once they wish to move,” no matter limits imposed by age or illness.
Baby boomers — who came of age in the suburbs and equate keys with freedom — wish to remain mobile. Older Americans are keeping their licenses longer and driving more miles than in the past, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But advancing age often brings health issues, including poorer vision, memory loss, arthritis and other impairments that can affect driving ability.
Fatal crash rates are highest among drivers ages 85 and older, according to the institute’s analysis of data from the U.S. Department of transportation. That’s mainly because seniors tend to be more fragile and frequently suffer medical complications from crash-related injuries.
Autonomous cars could provide seniors with the safety and convenience they require, and older people are prepared to use new technology “if it supplies a clear value to them,” MIT AgeLab’s Coughlin said.
Fully self-driving cars continue to be years off, however. Automakers and technology companies are using artificial intelligence to help teach them not just to avoid collisions and browse traffic signs but also to respond to differing types and needs of passengers. Seniors, for example, may have several medical appointments and want to tell the car to consider them to a particular doctor.
Engineers at Google, one of Alphabet Inc., are evaluating ways riders can interact with their cars, including by providing voice commands, based on spokesman Johnny Luu. The vehicles currently give verbal warnings about their intended path, including lane changes, he explained.
The small white robot cars Google is testing seat two passengers. Swanson rode inside a modified Lexus suv with the same technology. She sat in the back seat with her 70-year-old daughter; a person and the other Google employee were right in front.
When asked if companies will use older consumers as guinea pigs for autonomous vehicles, Coughlin said he doesn’t think so, partly since there are bound to be “transition problems.” Younger people “have a tendency to trust technology without verifying it, while seniors want to understand what’s happening.”
This may create a marketing challenge for manufacturers developing robot cars. Many baby boomers, actually, wouldn’t buy a self-driving vehicle, according to a November 2015 study by MIT’s AgeLab and also the Hartford, a Connecticut-based insurance and investment company. While 70 per cent of the 302 participants said they’d just like a test drive, only 31 percent would purchase one, even if it were the same price like a regular model.
“They’re still less enthusiastic about using systems where they have less control,” said Jodi Olshevski, a gerontologist and executive director of the Hartford Center for Mature Market Excellence, a unit of The Hartford.
June Raben, 86, isn’t ready to yield control to a computer, despite the fact that she has an apple iphone, an iPad and uses WhatsApp mobile messaging with her granddaughter. She threw in the towel driving last year after an accident totaled her car and left her deeply shaken. She now uses the ride-hailing service of Uber Technologies Inc., which is also focusing on autonomous vehicles.
“I’ve always considered myself a forward-looking risk-taker, but I am not ready for technology to be the only person driving,” said Raben, who lives alone inside a Miami Beach condo and likes the social facets of chatting with Uber drivers. As autonomous vehicles evolve, however, “I’m able to guarantee you that my 15 grandchildren and 10 great- grandchildren all will be driving robot-driven cars, plus a number of other robot-driven objects, after I’m gone.”
Bloomberg News
