Why Boomers Will Drive Adoption of Driverless Cars
From social media to streaming amusement, it's typically the immature who flock to new technologies. But with self-driving cars, the early adopters may non be teens and college kids but senior citizens.
"For the first time in history, older people are going to exist the lifestyle leaders of a new technology," Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Engineering science'south AgeLab in Cambridge, told Bloomberg Business. "Younger people may accept had smartphones in their easily first, merely information technology's the l-plus consumers who will be first with smart cars."
I'1000 function of that group, having recently reached the point where those dreaded AARP solicitations appear in my post box. But I like to retrieve it's more my affinity for tech than my historic period that makes me open to self-driving cars.
I've ridden in autonomous vehicles in locations ranging from Volvo's hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden to Google'south headquarters in Mountain View, California, and willingly confess that I've quaffed the self-driving machine Kool-Assistance. While I dearest driving and probably always will, at that place have been plenty of times I've arrived at my home airport tardily at night and wished a self-driving automobile could take over rather than having to white-knuckle it on a nighttime and rainy highway on the hour-plus drive to my town.
I besides think about my father—who at 89 is still driving and reluctant to give upwards the keys, even after being involved in a serious accident a few years back—and how a self-driving auto could become him where he wants to get safely.
From the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model Due south
Florence Swanson is a few years older than my dad and "has lived through every American car from the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model S," she told Bloomberg Business. After Swanson became the oldest person to ever ride in a Google self-driving because a painting she submitted as part of a contest was selected, the 94-yr-old now shares my sentiments on self-driving technology and its benefits.
"You haven't lived until you make it one of those cars," Swanson said later her half-hour ride in one of Google'due south self-driving Lexus SUVs. "I felt completely rubber."
Of course, not everyone does, as a AAA poll released this calendar week showed. And reports on the first at-fault accident by a Google cocky-driving car has helped fan flames of doubt near the technology.
Only with a rapidly graying population—more than 43 one thousand thousand people in the U.S. are at present 65 and older, and 10,000 join the age group every twenty-four hours—elderly Americans are going to face tough choices about driving. And we all will have to deal with the dangerous consequences.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), older Americans are keeping their licenses longer and driving more miles than in the past. Just health issues such every bit reduced vision, retention loss, and other ailments negatively touch on their driving capability. Another sobering statistic proves this: IIHS has found that fatal crash rates are highest amongst drivers ages 85 and older, in role considering the elderly are more than fragile and often endure medical complications from crash-related injuries.
Fortunately, my dad survived being t-boned while pulling out of the hospital, as luck would accept it, after a concrete therapy visit following a articulatio genus replacement. But the legions of aging baby boomers, for whom the automobile has always equated with freedom, may not exist so lucky equally they enter their gilt years and take to the route in record numbers.
But possibly all those graying boomers—who take blazed a trail in everything from pushing the boundaries of social mores in their younger years to reinventing retirement equally they anile—will be the vanguard of cocky-driving car adoption. And information technology couldn't come up at a meliorate time for me and my firsthand family.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
About Doug Newcomb
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/cars-auto/10796/why-boomers-will-drive-adoption-of-driverless-cars
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