For those whose independent living is closely tied to their ability to drive safely, self-driving tech is a future that can't come soon enough. — Chris O'RIley
En español | The car of the future arrives, a silver pod with the face of a robot puppy.
It's not much bigger than a golf cart. The interior is a spacious but spartan affair: a thinly padded bench seat, a lone LCD screen where the instrument panel would be and, most strikingly, no steering wheel. Sitting down in what would be the driver's seat, I face a disconcerting void — an absence of controls.
The Google engineer beside me is careful to describe this as "a very early engineering prototype." Close inspection reveals it to be something less than a finished vehicle. The car's wide-eyed headlights and taillights are just painted on; the thin doors have no windows. It's like a prop car from a direct-to-cable science fiction movie.
But it's a very real and working test bed for the tech company's self-driving technology. Since 2009, Google has been testing a fleet of Toyota Prius and Lexus models. This unmanned prototype, the existence of which was revealed in May 2014, takes those cars to another level: a fully driverless vehicle. Since it lacks manual controls, it isn't legally permitted to venture out on public streets. So today we're taking it for a drive around a parking lot.
Or, rather, it's taking us. After we belt up, the engineer hits a button and off we go. The electric motor's turbinelike whine adds the proper sci-fi sound effects as we scoot around the lot. The vibe is akin to an amusement park attraction: You are, in every sense, merely along for the ride.
After perhaps 10 minutes, we are returned to our starting point. It's just a tantalizing taste of a future in which driving is something that is done for you, in a car designed to run entirely without a flesh-and-blood operator. A post-human automobile.
The implications of such a device have long excited safety advocates, who see a means of cutting the carnage on American highways. But the advent of self-driving technology will also affect the nation's growing number of older drivers. There are more than 45 million people in the U.S. age 65 or older, a figure that stands to grow by another 27 million by 2030. About 36 million current older drivers still hold valid licenses. About 80 percent of them live in car-dependent suburbs or rural areas, not cities with public transit. And nearly 90 percent say they intend to age in place.
What that adds up to is a looming legion of aging hands behind the wheel. For those whose independent living is closely tied to their ability to drive safely, self-driving tech is a future that can't come soon enough.
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