At the moment, Molly Jackson is 82 years old, and she is a retired nurse. She talks about her experience with self-driving taxis. At one given time, the taxi she was driving in had to make several stops to avoid an approaching golf car. This happened on numerous occasions as she lives in a retirement area where golfing is common. The vehicle she was driving in is referred to as Ford Fusion and is a product of a start-up US company known as Voyage. She says that she is used to the abrupt braking of the self-driving cars. She lives in Village Golf and Country Club located in San Jose, California. As for voyage, it’s now looking beyond the horizon as its expanding its services beyond small tests in these retirement villages. The average age at this region is 76 years and there is a population of only 4,000 people. For starters, retirement communities are usually characterized by tightly controlled roads that can be difficult to navigate in. For instance, this community has just 15 miles of road. This is the strip that the autonomous vehicles must master how to avoid collision with all forms of obstacles that may include roundabouts, pedestrians, golf carts, and other vehicles.
However, these vehicles have a speed limit of 25 miles per hour which is quite good if anything goes wrong. Another good thing about the services of this company is that it does not share its information with regulators. This makes it possible to try out new ideas without much scrutiny. Mrs. Jackson says that self-driving cars can be quite beneficial to the older people. She laments that whenever a person stops driving because of age, they pull back from many activities and settles on interacting with friends. She further says that she has lived in this residential area for over three decades. In fact, she was the first test passengers for the Voyage’s cars. At the moment, there is a limitation in the number of vehicles that can operate in the area. There are two vehicles although a third one is on its way. However, one has to stay in the driver’s seat to control the vehicle in case something goes wrong. This comes as new companies are training their cars on how to interact with regular cars. Some of these companies include Waymo. This is a car that has been designed by the sister company of Google known as Alphabet.
