(Bloomberg) -- Florence Swanson has lived through every Americancar from the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model S. Now, at 94, she hasstepped into what Google hopes will be the automotive future:self-driving vehicles.

After her painting of a guitar player won a Google contest, shebecame the oldest person yet to ride in a model with the company’sautonomous technology.

“You haven’t lived until you get in one of those cars,” theAustin, Texas, resident said of her half-hour excursion. “Icouldn’t believe that the car could talk. I felt completelysafe.”

Robots are taking the wheel

Google is betting others will share her sentiment. With morethan 43 million people in the U.S. now 65 and older, and 10,000more hitting that mark every day, aging Americans are a naturaltarget market for self-driving vehicles. Mobility needs— getting to the doctor or the grocery store, seeing familyand friends — become paramount for seniors, especially since79% live in suburbs and rural areas.

“For the first time in history, older people are going to be thelifestyle leaders of a new technology,” said Joseph Coughlin,director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLabin Cambridge. “Younger people may have had smartphones in theirhands first, but it’s the 50-plus consumers who will be first withsmart cars.”

John Krafcik, chief executive officer of Google’sSelf-Driving Car Project, featured Swanson during a Januarypresentation in Detroit. His own mother is 96; both she and Swansongave up their driver’s licenses, and the freedom that came withthem, roughly a decade ago.

“A fully self-driving car has the potential to have a hugeimpact on people like Florence and my mom,” Krafcik said. “Mobilityshould be open to the millions around the world who don’t have theprivilege of holding a driver’s license.”

Ford Motor Co. also sees autonomy “as a way to strategicallyaddress an aging population,” said Sheryl Connelly, the Dearborn,Michigan-based company’s in-house futurist. To help design vehiclesfor the elderly, engineers and designers have donned a “third agesuit” incorporating glasses that impair vision and gloves thatreduce finger control and strength.

In Japan, Toyota Motor Corp. is racing to bring autonomous carsto market, partly because elderly drivers disproportionately causeand are injured in traffic accidents. Some of this work is in theU.S., where the company hired Gill Pratt — former programmanager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and headof DARPA’s Robotics Challenge — to lead the Toyota ResearchInstitute. The company is spending $1 billion on artificialintelligence and robotics technology to eliminate driver errors andreduce traffic fatalities.

“We often talk about autonomy as if the goal is just to createautonomy in machines,” Pratt said last fall when his new job wasannounced. The focus is more on people having “the ability todecide for themselves where they want to move, when they want tomove,” regardless of limits imposed by age or illness.

Continue reading...

Autonomous cars could provide seniors with the safety andconvenience they need. (AP Photo)

Baby boomers want to remain mobile

Baby boomers — who came of age in the suburbs and equatecar keys with freedom — want to remain mobile. Older Americansare keeping their licenses longer and driving more miles than inthe past, according to the Insurance Institute forHighway Safety. But advancing age often brings health problems,including poorer vision, memory loss, arthritis and otherimpairments 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. Departmentof Transportation. That’s mainly because the elderly are morefragile and often suffer medical complications from crash-relatedinjuries.

Autonomous cars could provide seniors with the safety andconvenience they need, and older people are willing to use newtechnology “if it provides a clear value to them,” MIT AgeLab’sCoughlin said.

Fully self-driving cars are still years off, however. Automakersand technology companies are using artificial intelligence to helpteach them not just to avoid collisions and read traffic signs butalso to respond to different types and needs of passengers. Olderpeople, for example, might have several medical appointments andwant to tell the car to take them to a specific doctor.

Voice commands

Engineers at Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., areevaluating ways riders can interact with their cars, including bygiving voice commands, according to spokesman Johnny Luu. Thevehicles currently give verbal warnings about their intended path,including lane changes, he said.

The small white robot cars Google is testing seat twopassengers. Swanson rode in a modified Lexus sport utility vehiclewith the same technology. She sat in the back seat with her70-year-old daughter; a driver and another Google employee were inthe front.

When asked if companies will use older consumers as guinea pigsfor autonomous vehicles, Coughlin said he doesn’t think so, partlybecause there are bound to be “transition problems.” Younger people“tend to trust technology without verifying it, while older peoplewant to understand what’s happening.”

This may create a marketing challenge for manufacturersdeveloping robot cars. Many baby boomers, in fact, wouldn’t buy aself-driving vehicle, according to a November 2015 study by MIT’sAgeLab and TheHartford, a Connecticut-based insurance andinvestment company. While 70% of the 302 participants said they’dlike a test drive, only 31% would purchase one, even if it were thesame price as a regular model.

“They’re still less enthusiastic about using systems where theyhave less control,” said Jodi Olshevski, a gerontologist andexecutive director of the Hartford Center for Mature Market Excellence, aunit of The Hartford.

Related: Driver-assist systems seen saving about10,000 U.S.lives a year

June Raben, 86, isn’t ready to yield control to a computer, eventhough she has an iPhone, an iPad and uses WhatsApp mobilemessaging with her granddaughter. She gave up driving a year agoafter an accident totaled her car and left her deeply shaken. Shenow uses the ride-hailing service of Uber Technologies Inc.,which is also working on autonomous vehicles.

“I have always considered myself a forward-looking risk-taker,but I am not ready for technology to be the only one behind thewheel,” said Raben, who lives alone in a Miami Beach condo andlikes the social aspects of chatting with Uber drivers. Asautonomous vehicles evolve, however, “I can guarantee you that my15 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren will all be drivingrobot-driven cars, plus many other robot-driven objects, after I’mgone.”

We’re on Facebook, are you?

Copyright 2018 Bloomberg. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,or redistributed.