You know what people, especially older people, really love? When some faceless entity tells them what to do with their lives, especially regarding restricting their lives and reducing their autonomy. When has an older person not loved that? Who among us is not looking forward to the day when our loved ones gather around us and tell us that we need to hand over our car keys, because we’re becoming a danger to ourselves and others? I’m being a jerk here, of course; no one likes any of this, though it’s something that may be necessary. It seems that GM is thinking about the problem of people aging out of driving, and have applied for a patent to let a car make that determination for you, with all of the cold rationality we’ve come to expect from GM cars.
Like the Vega. That car was a cold-hearted bastard.
The patent is titled, poetically, SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING A DRIVER RETIREMENT SCORE, and it pretty much delivers on that title, providing a system and – get this – a method for deciding when a driver is too damn old to drive. Here’s how the patent introduction describes the problem:
In general, aging can be associated with physical and psychological declines. These declines can make driving a vehicle difficult or frustrating for some older individuals. However, deciding to retire from driving a vehicle can be difficult as driving can provide a sense of freedom and/or independence that many rely on to perform day-to-day activities. Some systems and methods may evaluate performance of a driver, but they fail to provide objective assessments to the driver for further evaluation. These shortcomings, among others, are addressed by aspects of the present disclosure.
The GM kids have done their homework here; aging can be associated with physical and psychological declines. I say this as someone who has been aging for multiple decades now, and I have direct evidence of both sorts of declines. Not all these declines translate into issues with driving, of course. Some just make people annoyed with me when I ask them to repeat things in a noisy crowd, or when I find myself entering a room and not having any idea what the hell I went in there for. But plenty of these declines do affect driving, and the GM patent seeks to evaluate those, using a lot of sensors to evaluate driver control inputs, sensors to evaluate driver physiological statuses and behaviors, and machine learning algorithms that can vary how much weight these various data points have in the overall evaluation.
The kinds of inputs from the person that the proposed system will take in seem to be divided into two categories, manual and observed:
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Manual Inputs (self-reported):
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Medical condition quantity/type
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Complaint status
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Path-following ability
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Road sign compliance
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Driver confidence
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Physical ability
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Observed Inputs (collected via sensors):
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Fatigue, distraction, squinting
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Speed-limit compliance
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Honking frequency
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Turn signal usage
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Lane straddling, drifting
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Reaction time, following distance
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Driving record, posture, speed control
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Accelerator/brake usage
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Navigation deviation, dangerous behavior
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Honking frequency feels like one that should be taken with a grain of salt. What if there’s a car with a bumper sticker in front of you imploring you to, should you be sexually aroused, honk? What are you supposed to do then? Not honk? Please.
And what if you’re squinting to make yourself look tough and cool to the driver next to you when they pull up to a light and inevitably look into your window? There’s a lot of nuance here that I hope is being respected.
The strangely broad nature of patent applications can definitely be seen here, as one can see in this section about how the accumulated data can be shared with the user, which takes pains to include such outdated tech as cathode ray tubes and strange methods of user interfacing, like tactile feedback:
To provide for interaction with a user, one or more aspects of the disclosure can be implemented on a computer having a display device, e.g., a CRT (cathode ray tube), LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor, or touch screen for displaying information to the user and optionally a keyboard and a pointing device, e.g., a mouse or a trackball, by which the user can provide input to the computer. Other kinds of devices can be used to provide interaction with a user as well; for example, feedback provided to the user can be any form of sensory feedback, e.g., visual feedback, auditory feedback, or tactile feedback; and input from the user can be received in any form, including acoustic, speech, or tactile input. In addition, a computer can interact with a user by sending documents to and receiving documents from a device that is used by the user; for example, by sending web pages to a web browser on a user’s client device in response to requests received from the web browser.
That’s all tangential to the main point of the patent, of course, which is something that will ostensibly tell you when you’ve become too old to drive. Of course, most of the metrics that are being tested for could be applied to determine if any driver is being impaired, if not by age, then perhaps by alcohol or distractions or even just a poor grasp of the task of driving itself. If age is the real factor here, there would need to be evidence that the driving issues detected were consistent over time and unaltered by other outside driving conditions.
Really, what GM has described here is more of a general shitty-driving detection system that you’d think could be applied to anyone regardless of age. I’m not exactly sure why they decided to couch it in terms of aging drivers specifically, but perhaps that’s something that’s easier to market than a judgmental, always-on system that evaluates how everyone drives, all the time. It’s a lot easier to sell something that you may just think will help you avoid a painful conversation with an aging parent.
Of course, at this point, a system like this can only tell you that it thinks you’re too old to keep driving, and can show you the data it has collected that led it to such a conclusion. I’d think you’re still free to ignore it. At this point, the patent makes no mention of disabling the car if consistently poor scores are met, and there’s no law on the books anywhere that would give a car the authority to prevent you from driving because its algorithms determined you’re too damn old.
And, honestly, I think that’s good. The idea of a computer buried somewhere in my car that can make the call if I can drive or not gives me hives, and it’s far too easy to imagine how such a system could either perform poorly, not fully understanding the complexities of human existence, or be co-opted by capitalist urges, like being connected to your insurance carrier who may choose to raise your rates if you fall into certain categories of scoring.
Sure, older people driving and the resulting troubles they may cause are a real issue, and one that deserves attention. However, I think evaluation systems like these just open a can of worms; I’d rather see semi-automated driving systems that watch in the background and are ready to take over and help if driving behaviors become dangerous. If technology should be applied to this problem, it should be focused on avoiding accidents and keeping drivers safe, as opposed to making judgements on something as fundamental as access to the privilege to drive.
Top graphic images: depositphotos.com
In principal, I wholly endorse an offline, at the DMV skills assessment of this. I’m not exactly sure if one even exists, because from my own personal experience, my father would have 100% failed. Yet he’s still driving.
As I write this, there is a component of immense anger. I’m just a year past the death of my mother who was killed in an accident that should NEVER have happened. My father was at the wheel. And like the immortal drunk driver, he walked away without a scratch.
Even at my age, I hate commuter driving for all the reasons everyone here has cited. Distraction is distraction, whether you’re 18, on the phone, or wondering what 83 years old will look like as you kill your wife for no g*dd**n reason.
My hot take is this; when you’re in the car, you’re a driver. Nothing else. You’re not a child. You’re not a grandfather. You’re not an executive. You are a vital part of a machine and experience that should be bliss when done right.
My late grandpa was widowed the last 5 years of his life. He was never a decent driver, but had the sense to give up driving after his car looked like it had been in a Demo Derby after a year or so. I always appreciated his ability to recognize reality, and act accordingly to it.
It meant that me or my wife were then required to take him to the store, post office, etc. Which meant a 1 hour drive to get to his place, then another hour to get back to our home.
But the extra time it allowed us to be with him and enjoy his company is a great memory now 35 years later.
Yet another reason to stick with older, non-connected cars that can’t rat you out.
Also, CRT screen? Seriously????
I’m swooping in for the patent this for OLED before GM wakes up
I call VR headset!
I’ve seen enough “dangerous behavior” out of teenagers for this to get their licenses permanently yanked before they even hit legal drinking age.
Those teenagers will, theoretically, improve as drivers the more experience they get. The olds will only get worse as time goes on.
Most, yes. Some, Darwinism may take care of, hopefully without any collateral damage.
If not using a turn signal and lane straddling/drifting are the barometers, especially if you gauge abillity to stay in your lane through a turn, 80% of the people I encounter driving shouldn’t be behind the wheel anymore.
shouldn’t be behind the wheel anymoreShould have never been behind the wheel in the first place – fixed that for you.BMW should be forced to license and adopt this.
BMWs have no turn signals so no one would be able to drive one if they adopted this system.
Totally fine. Now extend it to spot use of phones and other entertainment.
Based on their observed inputs I should give my keys to the 15 year old and stop driving.
Exactly. How would it differentiate between old and aggressive? Seems like bad driving and speeding is going to be harder and harder. We’ll be telling our grandkids that we used to be able to drive as fast as we wanted, because it won’t be an option anymore.
Carmageddon is coming!
MOOM! Granpa is off his meds again!
“Back in my day you could feel the front end of your car lift when your speed exceeded the aerodynamic capabilities of the vehicle you were piloting.
MOOM! Granpa is off his meds again!”
I used to DD a Triumph that was shaped a bit like an airfoil. Freeway speeds were enough to notice the lift.
“Speed-limit compliance – Check, you’re joking right?”
Officers Friendly or their associate Judge Hardcase can answer that for you.
AARP will buy up the patent and bury it.
Being 68 and having to observe and deal with the old and incompetent drivers in my area has become a big challenge. There are just too many people trying to drive who have become snail like in both their ability to process real time info and events around them.
I can’t deal with trying to figure out if the lane weaving old person ahead of me is just too old to be driving, and or if they are also impaired by booze and or meds. Either way it becomes a butt puckering experience.
I totally realize that my time will also arrive one day when giving up the keys will be a responsible thing to do for the rest of society. Which will probably be hard to accept, but will happen vs being a threat to the others on the road with me…
I’ve had to add incredulity to my usual head-shaking after getting a look of the terrible driver I had been stuck behind/seen do something stupid in another lane because, while the behavior might recall the traditional oldster, it’s most often someone younger now. It’s not usually phone/car tablet-use, either, as they’ll be staring blankly in the general direction of the windshield. A lot of times when I see this, I already know the cause because I can smell skunk from them even with both our windows up, but the times I don’t, I assume edibles. Legalizing weed in MA has been a disaster.
Most people seem to think driving stoned is OK.
Until they kill or severely injure someone in the process.
Try to tell them, though, and they have every excuse about how it helps them cope with their anxiety and that somehow makes them a better driver and then deflect on some irrelevant rant about alcohol, but I guess that’s what addicts do.
When some idiot crashes their car with a 0.04 BAC we do not usually blame it on the alcohol. People have a much greater idea how many drinks they can have at a restaurant and how many hours they need to wait before driving home, mostly because testing is so much more precise.
For people who genuinely have anxiety, there are high CBD/low THC strains that are basically impossible to smoke enough of fast enough to get intoxicated.
At .04 BAC, that’s about half of the legal limit everywhere that I know of, why should it be blamed? If you’re high, don’t drive. Easy, if you’re not an addict. If I smell skunk from several car lengths back through two sets of closed windows, as I do daily, lack of awareness is not a valid excuse. These aren’t people who had a brownie the night before or whatever (I don’t know how long it effects someone as I’ve never done drugs despite decades of severe PTSD), these are people who are actively smoking or driving immediately after. When it wasn’t legal, this BS was extremely rare, like less than one observance every few years averaging 40k+ miles/yr. The only sort of good side is that, when I smell it, it rarely means that I’m passing the scene where a poor animal got run over anymore.
.04 is the legal limit for commercial vehicles. But honestly, even slightly impaired is still impaired.
I imagine they’d get arrested, then. Or is .04 the limit of acceptable? I don’t drink, so I haven’t concerned myself with the particulars. I think it’s somewhat a matter of exhibiting behavior or other evidence that calls into question sobriety unless some cops just breathalyze everyone. Someone who’s an adapted heavy drinker might not even raise an eyebrow if they were pulled over for something routine, like non-excessive speeding, dead tail light, or whatever, but at least there’s a test. There’s no good test for marijuana, AFAIK, as it stays in the system longer than it causes impairment and it seems like, because of that, cops don’t bother pulling people over for it.
“The idea of a computer buried somewhere in my car that can make the call if I can drive or not gives me hives”
Then you’ll be thrilled to know it’s already mandated! https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technology-mandated-infrastructure-bill
This kind of thing already exists outside of the context of actual driving, it can be extrapolated from other tests on reaction time, attention, and in particular, processing multiple stimuli at once. This is how we knew it was time to take away the keys from my father-in-law; it was part of a dementia diagnosis. Which is why the car reporting this to the driver isn’t very helpful, it’s often not the driver that is deciding they should not drive anymore. Here’s another helpful test that doesn’t require a patent. Just let an elderly driver that is used to keys, knobs, etc. attempt to drive a car where everything is buried in a touchscreen. A while after my F.I.L’s keys were taken away, he insisted he could still drive. So my M.I.L. said “go ahead, try and drive the new car”. He couldn’t get past the pushbutton start, let alone the pushbutton gearshift.
Hell, take them to one roundabout. My grandma is afraid she’ll hit someone if she goes to the inner lane, so she goes to the outer lane no matter how far she intends to circle, then gets more scared of the roundabout because people are always honking and flipping her off.
She hid her keys and also managed to drive her pickup into the corner of her garage pretty hard. I think the battery is now disconnected in that vehicle and she doesn’t know what is wrong with it. She still has another vehicle, unfortunately.
I know your pain on the roundabouts totally. I have to navigate 2 of them each trip into town. The worst part is the people who come to a dead stop, either at the entrance of, or half way thru the circle.
The lack of ability to understand a roundabout is beyond belief to me at this point.
But I also tend to “encourage” them to proceed with judicious use of both my horn. And every now and the use of my finger.
There is little that makes me laugh more than seeing some fossil giving me the bird after being shocked into reality by my horn.
Especially the little old ladies who can barely see thru the steering wheel.
Rant over…
“How DARE you hold me accountable!!!”
Also the people who merge onto freeways at 30-40mph and then floor it up to 80 after they’ve already merged and almost caused 12 accidents in the process.
Can totally relate to this as well. Or those fools who actually stop at the top of the merge lanes to assess their chance of entering the actual freeway from a fead stop.
And it’s almost always some dog slow car that couldn’t move off even if the driver wasn’t an idiot so they need to wait for an even longer opening while they cause a back up of the entrance ramp. Every time I see someone rear-ended just past an on-ramp, I wonder if it was the jerk who got hit that was most at fault. Problem is, their insurance will never reflect their true menace.
Yeah, the “I am being careful” then “look how fast I can go”. I saw an older woman yesterday block a major intersection to give the “hand wave of death” to a pedestrian who didn’t appear to want to cross against the light
I almost got sideswiped by an older couple who didn’t yield in a major merge on main st in my town. I got flipped off! They pretended they were parallel parking so I got to verbally let them know they failed to yield. Assholes
They should add it to voting machines.
Old person: “If you enable that shit on my car you are out of the will.”
this information would never be sold to insurance companies. never
Now they need to patent a system that will help the children and grandchildren of these drivers convince them to give up their keys. That’s trickier than figuring out when, in many cases.
Maybe a Tazer like device embedded in the car seats?
Just grasping for a solution here.
YMMV.
Dash display: “Guess what you old bag of bones? You can no longer drive safely. Would you like to continue your independent mobility, and schedule an appointment at your local Chevy dealership to buy a new, autonomous, self driving vehicle? Select YES below. Otherwise, to permanently disable your current vehicle, select NO.”
Can this technology be applied to running for public office?
Whenever I get fired up about an old person driving I try to remind myself that many people don’t have much of a choice – public transit in much of the US sucks and many don’t have a good support system.
Politicians, on the other hand, don’t get my sympathies. You shouldn’t be allowed to make policy that you won’t be alive to see implemented. No elected position should allow anyone to run over the age of 65. Take your old-ass to Florida or Scottsdale and retire with the other Olds.
Being an elected official is a jobs program for people bad at their day job. If you are a good lawyer, engineer, doctor, electrician, HR manager, etc, whatever. You have too much work to run for office. If you suck at your job, run for office and earn that money and health care.
At 102 my aunt was driving better than her younger Southern California cohorts. Her 100 birthday featured her demonstrating an extended Flamenco dance.
I’m mostly just here for a kudos on the “Severe Old Detected” steering wheel light graphic
That’s normal. My kid activates that every time I tell a dad joke.
*Torch 30 years in the future*
Torch: “2CV, please select drive”
2CV: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Torch”
Torch: “Oh no! The automotive Big Brother has finally come for me!”
*Grandkids sitting on the porch*
“Why is Grandpa Torch screaming while sitting in that rusted-out car that hasn’t ran in years? Maybe it’s time for assisted living.”
I’m pretty sure it would be Grandpa Jason, because depending on context “Torch” could be Otto or one or more of them. That’s the thing about a family name with a really obvious nickname.
It’s MY hypothetical dystopian future, so I make the rules!
Literally all you need to do is show them an AI video of Trump or whoever saying that seniors should all stop driving immediately because MS13 has hacked every car.
Hah!
Can’t wait until this has been rolled out for a few years, and people buy used vehicles with the technology, not even knowing its in there and suddenly they are permanently locked out of being able to use the vehicle.
If they don’t get this 100% right, I smell a class action.
GM is very experienced with class actions.
You’re thinking of old GM!
New GM stands only on the highest moral ground.
Need a fingerprint reader or other biometric when starting the car so it keeps track of which driver is shitty.
Many years ago I had a research fellowship at Intel. I was asked to participate in a group outside my normal work doing a creative design day. Folks flew in from all over to Santa Clara and we had a great time making a good problem statement and designing our prototype. It was an engaging, exciting exercise, and a good way to generate possible new product areas that don’t yet exist.
But when we got to the end, stepped back, and took a critical look at what we just designed we hit the delete button on all of it. Our solution was the most dystopian idea I’ve ever seen outside of a sci-fi novel. To this day it shocks me how far we got feeling good about our work before seeing what we were actually doing.
So I completely understand how some group came to this solution. I do wish they had stepped back and said “ew… we don’t actually want this” instead of “awesome, we were first! File the patent.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if whoever had the idea took a step back and said “oh wait, this sucks” but then GM decided it was a good way to patent a bunch of driver surveillance systems under the guise of “safety”
wow, I’m very curious about this now.
Think Life360 but worse…
And somehow GM will screw the implementation selling data to insurance companies to raise your rates or decide you are such a risk that they no longer want to insure you.
I thought the to old driving score was all the dings, dents, scraped wheels etc.
Old people need to buy a new GM product of course. $$$$
As I am now an old man I now know why old men drive slower
It took me a lifetime of mocking slow old men to finally understand.
Most of the time if I get stuck behind someone driving substantially under the speed limit it’s a phone zombie, not an oldster. This is also strongly correlated with camping in the passing lane and having high beams on at all times.
I must be old too, I love my family/friends/job as much as anybody, but the most relaxing time of my day is in the car. I see no reason to drive like a bat out of hell just to shorten it.
This is me now that I got a sports car again. I’m not holding up traffic, but now I get to laugh at myself for still getting tense when I see a cop and I’m doing about the speed limit. I used to see guys in sports cars driving in the 3rd lane on the highway maybe 10 or so over the limit (which is practically the minimum speed here) and figured they must need to go extra slow because a cop getting a speeder reading on his gun is going to assume it’s them, but what I find is that the car is actually enjoyable at lower speeds. It’s the boring shit that I drive faster and get more road rage in.
This would go perfectly with that patent that Ford has for self-repossessing cars. Combine the two and you can take away grandma’s freedom without any of those messy, difficult conversations!
Unless Grandma was too senile to get out of the car before it repossessed itself.
I wonder how many corpses will be found in the staff-less repo yards.
“I wonder how many corpses will be found in the staff-less repo yards”
Oh, I imagine most of those will still be in the trunk.
Are you suggesting cenetarians can’t also be murderers?
Heck, murder at that age? What they gonna do? Life in prison? Death row? Whatever, not much time left anyway. Heck, now the kids might actually visit.
Apparently a non insignificant people admit to murder on their deathbed, especially women from the days when divorce was neigh impossible.
I dunno what happened officer, one minute he was fine, the next he was on fire.
Spontaneous combustion! It’s real!!
Oh, I’m sure that’s not their first body in a trunk.
Kia/Hyundai could use many of these same kinds of sensor inputs for an anti-Kia Boyz function, as part of a theft-prevention device.