HITCHING RIDES WITH ROBOT CHAUFFEURS
After moving to the Villages Golf & Country Club in San Jose, an active community for people over 55, Jerry Neece formed an advisory committee. Its mission: using technology to allow the 4,000 Villages residents to live in their homes longer and enjoy more independence.
So when Neece heard about a Silicon Valley startup called Voyage seeking a retirement community to test its selfdriving car technology, he volunteered the Villages.
“It provides convenient transportation, doesn’t eat up parking spaces, and helps people who are disabled,” said Neece, 69, who retired from a career as a technology “thought leader” at places like Oracle, Sun and Amdahl.
Robot cars, the ultimate sci-fi-style advance, might seem the province of early adopters, stereotypically young people who want to leap on the latest innovations. But in fact, driverless vehicles seem well-suited for the elderly, whose own driving skills may deteriorate if their vision dims and reflexes slow. Statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety show that drivers over age 70 have a sharply higher incidence of fatal crashes. With the huge generation of Baby Boomers aging, a “silver tsunami” soon will hit California and other states, according to the California State Plan on Aging, which found that the number of people age 60 and up will soar 40 percent by 2030.
“As people get older, they become more anxious about their personal safety,” said Tim O’Keefe, CEO of the Golden Rain Foundation, which runs Walnut Creek’s Rossmoor, an active community for those 55 and up. “They recognize that their eyesight and hearing aren’t as good; they may have mobility issues; not be able to turn their heads quickly when driving. Selfdriving cars are the way to keep seniors independent longer.”
O’Keefe has made it his personal goal to get self-driving cars at Rossmoor, which has about 10,000 residents living on 1,800 acres with 14 miles of private roads. He’s already talked with Voyage, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, and hopes it will come to Rossmoor next year.
“Once (seniors) understand it’s safer than human driving, it will be transformative for them,” he said.
At the Villages, a 1,200-acre property with 7.5 miles of private roadways, Voyage’s three white Ford Fusion hybrids with spinning rooftop lidar sensors have operated for several months, offering free taxi rides to residents through an app similar to that of Uber or Lyft. A Voyage engineer sits in the driver’s seat but keeps his or her hands off the wheel, so the passengers see it rotate in mid-air. Most rides are on simple loops between places like the golf course and community centers.
Retired nurse Molly Jackson, 82, was among the first passengers. She appreciated that Voyage’s staff person showed her how the car worked before her ride to the swimming pool. She’s not ready to totally commit, however.
“To get to the clubhouse or the auditorium or somewhere close by, like CVS or the bank, it would be helpful,” she said. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable going out on the freeway in it.”
Neece was impressed at the robot cars’ perception. The Villages is home to about 60 deer. On a recent ride, his self-driving car spotted two of them under a shady tree — they showed up as moving dots on an internal screen displaying what the car “sees” — and stopped well before they sauntered into the roadway.
“To me, that was the proof that this stuff works,” he said. “It drives better than probably 90 percent of the people who live here.”
Voyage, which has $5.6 million in funding, was spun out of Udacity, an online education company that offers classes to train autonomous-car engineers. Udacity chairman and founder Sebastian Thrun, widely considered the father of autonomous driving for his work at Google, helped start Voyage, but he is no longer involved because he’s the CEO of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk, essentially a competitor.
Voyage’s goal is to offer robot taxi services, perhaps by retrofitting existing cars. It homed in on the idea of testing at retirement communities and other private campuses, which set their own traffic rules.
“Retirement communities are very much like mini cities, typically with restricted speed limits and poorer transportation options,” said Oliver Cameron, Voyage CEO. “Their scale is massive in some cases. It’s a perfect marriage of people and problems to solve.”
Within the sprawling communities, residents often drive to get from their home to the golf course, restaurants or gym. Those short hops on closed roads make a great fit for robot cars. But as the cars — and regulations — evolve they could also take residents to nearby places outside their communities, according to Ruzena Bajcsy, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who studies technology to help seniors live independently.
“If they are safe and they are prompt, they will be used,” she said. Bajcsy, 84, said many of her contemporaries no longer drive. But for seniors who may need assistance getting in and out of the car, or have cognitive impairments, it could be helpful to still have a human attendant on board the driverless cars, she said.
Cameron, Voyage’s 29-yearold CEO, said he was pleasantly surprised that so many of the Villages residents, whose average age is close to 75, welcomed driverless cars.
“Silicon Valley often ignores the senior population when building products; it seems less exciting than building social networks, for instance,” he said. “The biggest learning for us was how eager for new technology solutions seniors are, and how quickly they adopt them.”