Florence Swanson has survived every American car in the Ford Model T towards the Tesla Model S. Now, at 94, she has stepped into what Google hopes will be the automotive future: self-driving vehicles.
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After her painting of the guitarist 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 before you enter one of those cars,” the Austin, Texas, resident said of her half-hour excursion. “I couldn’t believe that the car could talk. I felt completely safe.”
Robots Are Taking 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 day, aging Americans really are a natural target market for self-driving vehicles. Mobility needs — getting to the doctor or even the grocery store, seeing friends and family — become paramount for seniors, especially since 79 per cent live in suburbs and rural areas.
“For the first time ever, older people are going to be the life-style leaders of the new technology,” said Joseph Coughlin, director from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab in Cambridge. “Younger people may have had smartphones within their hands first, but it’s the 50-plus consumers who will be first with smart cars.”
John Krafcik, chief executive officer of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, featured Swanson during a January presentation in Detroit. His own mother is 96; both she and Swanson threw in the towel their driver’s licenses, and also the freedom that included them, roughly about ten years ago.
“A fully self-driving car can have a big effect on people like Florence and my mother,” 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 a maturing 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 promote, partly because elderly drivers disproportionately cause and are injured in traffic accidents. A number of the work is incorporated in the U.S., in which the company hired Gill Pratt — former program manager in 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 quite often discuss autonomy as if the aim is just to create autonomy in machines,” Pratt said last fall when his job was announced. The focus is more on people having “the ability to decide for themselves where they would like to move, once they want to move,” regardless of limits imposed by age or illness.
Baby boomers — who came of age within the suburbs and equate keys with freedom — wish to remain mobile. Older Americans are keeping their licenses longer and driving more miles than previously, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But advancing age often brings health problems, including poorer vision, loss of memory, arthritis and other impairments that may affect driving ability.
Fatal crash minute rates are highest among drivers ages 85 and older, according to the institute’s analysis of information from the U.S. Department of transportation. That’s mainly because seniors tend to be more fragile and often suffer medical complications from crash-related injuries.
Autonomous cars could provide seniors using the safety and convenience they require, and seniors are prepared to use new technology “whether it provides a clear value to them,” MIT AgeLab’s Coughlin said.
Fully self-driving cars are still years off, however. Automakers and technology companies are using artificial intelligence to help teach them not just in avoid collisions and browse traffic signs but also to reply to differing types and needs of passengers. Older people, for instance, may have several medical appointments and want to tell the car to consider these to a specific doctor.
Engineers at Google, a unit 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 said.
The small white robot cars Bing is testing seat two passengers. Swanson rode in a modified Lexus sport utility vehicle with similar technology. She sat within the back seat together with her 70-year-old daughter; a person and another Google employee were in the front.
When asked if companies uses older consumers as guinea pigs for autonomous vehicles, Coughlin said he doesn’t think so, partly since there are certain to be “transition problems.” Younger people “have a tendency to trust technology without verifying it, while older people wish to understand what’s happening.”
This may produce a marketing challenge for manufacturers developing robot cars. Many seniors, in fact, wouldn’t purchase a self-driving vehicle, based on a November 2015 study by MIT’s AgeLab and also the Hartford, a Connecticut-based insurance and investment company. While 70 percent from the 302 participants said they’d like a test drive, only 31 percent would get one, even if it were the same price as a regular model.
“They’re still less enthusiastic about using systems where they have less control,” said Jodi Olshevski, a gerontologist and executive director from the Hartford Center for Mature Market Excellence, a unit of The Hartford.
June Raben, 86, isn’t ready to yield control to some computer, despite the fact that she has an apple iphone, an iPad and uses WhatsApp mobile messaging with her granddaughter. She gave up driving a year ago 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 working on autonomous vehicles.
“I’ve always considered myself a forward-looking risk-taker, but I am not prepared for technology to be the only person driving,” said Raben, who lives alone in 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 many other robot-driven objects, after I’m gone.”
Bloomberg News
