Aging Driver Followup: when is Enough Too Much?

Several days ago, I published a piece about the mark that the aging Boomer generation would make on the roads of America. I am part of that generation. Indeed, I'm in the front part of it - not quite retirement age yet (about seven years for that) but close enough to have an opinion that some might find a little hard to take.

My background spells out my biography. I have been in and around new and used cars most of my life. My mom, when I was what was called a latchkey kid of the 1950s, used to drag my younger brother and myself with her to work on Saturdays when she used to be the office manager of a brake lining remanufacturing outfit in Boston. In those days, there was quite a bit of local remanufacturing going on and my brother and I weighed out more boxes or rivets and washers or added up columns of figures on old "comptometers" - adding machines - just to give us something to do. Who knew that all of the asbestos and other goodies that made up the brake linings and shoes that they manufactured could have caused us harm? We didn't in 1955.

That was the start of my road to ruin with cars and things automotive. My Dad, a couple years later, took us with him on his rounds as an insurance agent. One of his hangouts was a new-car dealership in a town not far from where we lived. Dad sold a ton of life insurance to folks who had just bought new cars because you just "couldn't leave your family unprotected" if something should happen to you (the husband of the nuclear family of the 1950s or breadwinner). It was a good gambit and it put a lot of food on the table. It also let my brother and I run around a dealership and get in and out of new cars.

A few years later the Dad of friends of mine, who happened to work at a Chevy dealership, brought home a slide show of all of the new 1960 models and swore us to secrecy so we could see the changes. I was about 10 at the time and who knew?

Well, school things began to intervene in our lives and my brother and I went our separate ways (I have an older brother who bought a classic 1955 Chrysler 300 that I bet he wishes he still had for about $50 and drove it all over. I never did get a chance to ride in it, but he did let me ride in his first car, the $25 1948 Dodge that lasted a week). By now I was hooked on new cars and, of course, spent the obligatory time pumping gas at a Shell station a couple of towns away (when people didn't pump their own) and I hung out at an Esso (now Exxon) station and in the garage of an independent mechanic.

There's a reason for this background that I'll get to shortly. Soon after this I received my license and my first car - a 1959 (you've probably never heard of this) Rambler Custom sedan. Let's just leave it at the fact that my younger brother - he's a year younger than me - and I shared the car. I used to gas it up in the afternoon and the next morning it would be dry. It seems he and his friends like to buy their cigarettes in New York City and since it was only a six-hour round trip (and a tank of gas) he did that many times (we've both long-since stopped smoking).

This was high school and I moved on to college where I bought my first used car, a 1967 Opal Kadett Wagon that was just a love (kept on running even after it was stolen and the idiots who did it tried to use it as an SUV. They banged up the differential, but that's about it. The police found it parked about a block from where it was stolen!)

My first new car was a Mitsubishi Galant, also called the Dodge Colt, at the time, and it was way ahead of its time with a semi-hemi four and a deuce (two-barrel carb) and four on the floor. I traded this car after my marriage because my wife couldn't handle the stick well and I really never missed it because a strange thing happened. I became the auto editor of the newspaper on which I was working, a position I held for more than 12 years. I later became its weekly car columnist, a position I held for more than 30 years. So to say that cars have shaped my life is an understatement. They have been a huge part of my life. I have driven on the order of 4,500 different models through the years (I got three per week for 52 weeks a year for 30 years) and I always managed to find something to say.

I have also taken driving courses and studied the physics of driving and autos so that while I am not an Automotive Engineer, I'm a pretty good lay engineer and do understand a thing or three about cars and driving.

So, now that I have used all this space to establish my credentials (I won't go into all the other careers I've had) as a car person with no agenda. I'll also establish this fact, for nearly the last decade I've also been selling them. You see I worked in high-tech and when that went south about 2002 for me (I blew out my back lifting a computer cover and being a loyal employee never did report it - about a month later I was laid off) I had to do something to put food on the table. My wife was contracting and things in her line were pretty slim, so I went to work for a dealer as the Internet Car Sales Manager for its Preowned store. I also handled overflow retail sales. I later also worked at a couple of domestic stores before I established an Ebay line of business for the first dealer I worked for. I also handled floor sales.

And, one day this older driver who needed a new car came in. She was about 78 years of age and deaf as a haddock, but she wanted a new car and was going to pay cash for it. So, I found her the car and we did the paperwork and delivered the car. I have to say that if I had it to do all over again, I would likely have discouraged any sale at all to this person because she is the type of driver who was like my Mom in her later years. Mom used to invariably plow into walls and lights and she voluntarily stopped driving when she realized she could hurt someone.

It has made me realize that there seems to be a nationwide epidemic of elderly drivers - not drivers in their 60s, but folks in their early 80s and 90s have continued to drive and it is sad to say that over the last six months there have been at least four or five deaths or serious injuries caused by these older drivers.

The funny thing about the accidents is that there is a pattern to them. The old folks say they never did anything wrong, the car just jumped or the brakes failed or something happened, but when accident investigation teams look things over they seldom find anything wrong with the vehicles or there is no sign the brakes have been used or there is no sign the driver has even exercised a modicum of car.

Why, just the other day, according to reports near Boston, a mother and son who were unfamiliar with a neighborhood were walking in a crosswalk and an older driver just pulled out of a spot, never saw them in the crosswalk - in MA you must yield to pedestrians in a posted crosswalk or face a heavy fine - and mowed them down. They were, the last I knew, in intensive car. And, a few weeks before, an 89-year-old driver mowed down a little girl in front of her own grief-stricken grandpa. The little girl was in a crosswalk on a scooter.

Now, I don't know about you, but I have to admit that one of my biggest fears in life has always been little kids near cars. It's a combination that can lead to hurt and pain and that's why I try to always watch what I am doing at all times.

The stories seem to be legion today as older and older drivers, who think they retain the skills they had 50 years earlier, continue to drive. Sure, no one wants to give up the freedom that the car represents, but there's a point at which you have to say to yourself, can I continue driving or will I kill myself or someone else. No one wants to admit this because it demeans a person's self-esteem and respect, but it is a question that has to be asked.

It has to be asked of drivers who are chronically ill and who may be driving under the influence of medication. It has to be asked by the handicapped to which the car or van is a lifeline.

To the elder the car is a lifeline, too, but when is enough, enough? Is it when you kill or injure yourself or someone else? Is it when you've slammed into a tree for the third time in a month and keep wondering who moves the tree all the time?

I have the credentials to say that there is a point at which people should stop driving. There is no other way to say it. I have already told my wife that when I reach that point, I will put down my car keys and turn the driving chores over to her or a limo service or a cab. I don't want to be responsible for anyone's injury or death and I am sure that the drivers who are causing these accidents aren't doing it intentionally either. It's just that they don't have it anymore. Their reflexes may be shot; their memory may be gone; their eyesight may be cloudy, I don't know. It's at this point that they, too, have to say, I've had a good run, but it's time to put things away and let someone else handle the chore for me.

I know no one likes to give up their freedom, which is what the car represents, but if they don't do it voluntarily, the state may do it for them because driving is a NOT A RIGHT, IT IS A PRIVILEGE, conferred by the state and removable by the state.