As Japan’s massive, dense population of over 120 million people rapidly ages, the government is left scrambling to tackle a wide range of effects touching on nearly all aspects of economics and daily life. Among these is road safety: as drivers age, they experience both physical and mental changes that affect their ability to drive safely. Elderly drivers may have stiff joints and weaker muscles that affect such things as turning their head to look back, turning the steering wheel quickly, or braking safely. As their eyesight and hearing deteriorates, they may have difficulty seeing other cars or pedestrians, reading road signs, or noticing horns and sirens. Aging people have slower reaction times and reflexes, interfering with their ability to prevent crashes, and may have slower attention spans that cause them to “zone out” while driving. In particular, Japan is seeing a rise in crashes caused by pedal confusion (where the driver intends to press the brakes but instead presses the accelerator).
Mental changes play an important role: people with dementia often don’t recognize that they have driving problems, and a sense of pride and fear of losing independence can make it difficult to convince ageing drivers that they are too old to continue driving. These changes make it critical to design interventions that compensate regardless of driver buy-in: if one cannot convince their 85 year old grandfather to let their children or grandchildren get groceries, it may be more effective to create a car that will allow him to drive more safely.
While these problems with aging driver safety and pedal confusion are growing, technology and automobile companies in both the United States and Japan have been investing in automated safety technology. The most notable example of this may be Waymo, the Alphabet company that has nearly completed development of a fully-driverless car. Waymo is followed closely by Uber’s Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technologies Group, which is pursuing a similar goal but was hindered by the death of a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018. Tesla has built self-driving software features on top of its existing cars, avoiding some of the regulatory liabilities of full automation while allowing drivers to arrive at their destination with minimal intervention.
Despite these massive technological advancements, regulatory approval and popular trust in fully automated driving still appear far away. In the meantime, mainstream automakers have raced to develop new partially-automated safety features and “support cars”. I’ve even seen this in my own life: as my own father ages, he bought a Subaru Outback with an “enhanced sight” package that provides a whole range of additional sensors and features that give him new real-time information about his own driving and potential threats, empowering him to drive more safely than ever.
As Prime Minister Abe faces the problem of pedal confusion in Japan, he has promised to speed up the commercialization of these support cars in Japan in response to rising calls to curb these accidents. While Abe’s words surrounding the “new technologies” that he hopes to adopt are vague, his administration does have concrete plans in the works: these include a framework for certifying the performance of automatic brakes and acceleration-control devices, subsidies for consumers of these new safety devices, and a new license category for the elderly that would restrict them to driving support cars.
- Arjun Kumar
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