Nola Macnab: I've driven a lot of cars. I'm going right back now. A Vauxhall, one of the original Beetles…no, it wasn't, it was a Renault.

Ann Arnold: Meet my mother-in-law, Nola.

Nola Macnab: Then I have driven every model Holden from the original, until the last of the Kingswoods. I've driven a Dodge, a Valiant, a Hillman, a Toyota, a Ford Prefect…oh and Statesman, I'd forgotten the Statesman.

Ann Arnold: Like so many Australians she's had a love affair with driving. And at 83, the idea of not being able to drive any more is confronting.

Nola Macnab: People fear isolation, lack of independence. But if the time comes when there is the possibility that you could be a menace on the road to either yourself or to other people, it's time to give it up.

Ann Arnold: The hard part is knowing when that is. There is conflicting evidence on older driver safety. Authorities are divided over how to deal with it. And the grey vote is a big one. It's an emotional subject which will become more so with the rapidly ageing population. The end of the road can be devastating for elderly drivers.

Mark Yates: What would it be like if you couldn't drive?

Ean Seaton: It'd be hell.

Ann Arnold: Ean, who we'll hear from later, has just been diagnosed with dementia, as are an increasing number of older Australians. Many will still be capable of driving, many won't.

Jude Charlton: Really we don't know yet, in people who do have progressive cognitive decline, how far does one have to decline in order to be no longer fit to drive. We're not good at judging that yet.

Ann Arnold: Hello, I'm Ann Arnold, and this is Background Briefing.

In 40 years time, it's expected that one-quarter of the population will be over 65. By current trends, many of them will be on the roads. In New South Wales, the number of drivers aged 85 and over has doubled just in the last five or six years.

The hot-button issue is compulsory, age-based on-road testing for elderly drivers. The predominant view nationally and internationally is that this kind of testing is unnecessary and discriminatory.

Mark Yates: I think it's unfortunate that whenever there's an accident, albeit often without any injury, involving an older driver, there is a new call to take older people off the road.

Ann Arnold: Geriatrician Mark Yates from Deakin University.

Mark Yates: I think it's just assumed if you're old and you make an error, then you shouldn't drive. I think there are a lot of P-platers who make errors, but we still allow them to drive. We still allow us, as a community, to drive with blood alcohols between zero and .05, and there is error associated with that, but we don't take ourselves off the road. So we as a community are willing to accept a degree of risk.

Ann Arnold: Mark Yates convened a national older drivers' forum in Canberra in August for the Federal Government's Dementia Advisory Group. The forum concluded that there's little justification for age-based testing, although its report has not been released yet.

Two weeks ago, Western Australia dropped its driving test for those aged 85 and over. WA Premier Colin Barnett:

Colin Barnett: If you require older people to do a test, that becomes quite a traumatic experience in itself and is unnecessary. So I think having a medical check-up and if the doctor says, well, you are still fit and able to drive, you are physically capable, that's fine, keep on driving, be careful. But it's quite traumatic for an older person, it's quite traumatic for any person to go through a drivers test. I wouldn't want to do one.

Ann Arnold: Colin Barnett.

Tasmania scrapped its test in 2011. That leaves New South Wales, the state with the largest number of licence holders, now out on its own. And after a recent review, New South Wales is determined to keep the test.

Marg Prendergast: I totally believe that we're at the cusp of a risk that is emerging with an ageing population. And to manage that risk we do need some level of control, and that control is medical testing from 75, and physically having the driving test from 85.

Ann Arnold: Marg Prendergast is the general manager of the New South Wales government's Centre for Road Safety. And she believes that despite WA dropping its test, other states will end up following the New South Wales lead.

Marg Prendergast: Because what we know is that older drivers are over-represented in single-vehicle crashes, in manoeuvring and intersection crashes, we've also seen a lot of low-speed parking type crashes where they mix up the accelerator and the brake.

We also know that Victoria is also facing a series of crashes this year involving elderly drivers, and are currently looking at their system. We may be out on our own at the moment, but we believe that in five years, based on the growing risk, that other states will realise that age-based testing is required to manage this risk.

Arthur Napper: I guess I've been driving now for 60…73 years since my brother and I bought our first motor car between us, in 1938.

Ann Arnold: And what was it, Arthur?

Arthur Napper: It was a T-model Ford, bought at Far-Western Motors at Nyngan, for ten pounds.

Ann Arnold: Arthur Napper is 93. These days he drives a campervan and attends motorhome rallies, where a thousand or so vehicles gather up and down the eastern seaboard. He belongs to the Campervan and Motorhome Club of Australia, which has over 66,000 members, most of them aged between 50 and 85.

On the phone from his home in Tuncurry on the New South Wales mid-north coast, Arthur told me exactly how many kilometres he's done in the last year.

Arthur Napper: That's just on 16,000, about 13 months. And I just love the country. And there's a group called the Solo Network, people that travel alone, people that have lost their partners that travel alone, they've been really good to me.

Ann Arnold: Are they mostly men, the Solo Network?

Arthur Napper: No, it's 60% women.

Ann Arnold: Driving the campervans on their own?

Arthur Napper: Yes, and big motorhomes, some of them.

Ann Arnold: Arthur was preparing himself for his annual driving test in a few days' time. He prides himself on his driving skill, and says he's only had one incident in his 73 years of driving.

Arthur Napper: And that was purely my fault. I had a bad attack of the flu and I kept driving when I should have gone home.

Ann Arnold: How long ago was that?

Arthur Napper: A couple of years. Then from that there's a lesson to be learned, and I really concentrate on it now, which I normally do, because I've had a pilot licence for many years, and you don't daydream when you're flying. But I realise at my age my reflexes can't be as good as they used to be.

Ann Arnold: Do you feel pressure in the lead-up to your annual test?

Arthur Napper: Yes, well, you shouldn't really because I'm confident, but I do find it quite a hassle really, quite a worry. Yes. And they're very formal really. They don't chat, they don't talk. I thought after they could tell you how you performed, and what you need to check up on, but they don't.

Ann Arnold: Arthur was choosing his words carefully, anxious not to offend or annoy any driving assessor at his local branch of the Roads and Maritime Service.

But other New South Wales drivers are more fired up about the age test.

Man: Well there's not in the other states, only New South Wales. That's ridiculous anyhow. Plus the fact that O'Farrell went to the last election promising it'd be cut out.

CPSA group singing: 'Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free, with golden soil and…'

Ann Arnold: There were wry grins and looks exchanged at the 'young and free' bit. Driving was a big topic at the annual general meeting of the New South Wales Combined Pensioners and Superannuants' Association last month.

How do you think it should be managed, the system of…when someone…?

Man: If a doctor thinks you shouldn't be driving, you shouldn't be driving.

Man: I agree with that, I agree that if your doctor thinks you're not fit enough to drive, that's the restriction. I don't think this driving test makes sense really. If the doctor says you're fit enough to drive, then there shouldn't be a driving test, in my view.

Ann Arnold: The guest speaker at the event was the federal Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan.

Susan Ryan: And I will quote I thought some very useful remarks from Professor Desmond O' Neill, from the Centre for Ageing, Neuroscience and the Humanities in Dublin.

He says 'most reviews of cognition and ageing focus on what we have lost, and fail to include the wisdom, strategic thinking, and highly developed social cognition of older people.'

He goes on to say this, 'how older drivers, despite an array of age-related disability, remain one of the safest cohorts on the road through their strategic and tactical gains of later life.'

Ann Arnold: The most at risk road users by far are the under-25s. Fatal crash rates drop substantially through our middle years, and then rise again after 75. But many older drivers are offended at the idea of being screened by age. There's resentment, for example, that in New South Wales over-85s are tested on road rules that would catch out plenty of people of other ages.

Man: Because I know people who have been knocked back by either being too close, or too far away from the car in front when they stop at a set of traffic lights. Now, that to me is just total discrimination. It's such an arbitrary thing. And I could go through a whole list of these.

Susan Ryan: Look, these specific things, and thank you for bringing it to my attention and I'll pursue them in so far as I've got scope to pursue them, because things like that, you think, well, what happens to all the other people, of different ages, who stop at this distance? We don't know about them. Is it a rule that there's only a certain…I mean, I don't even know what it is. I don't want to bump into that person so I stop. But I'm 71. I haven't had to have my 85 test yet. So we'd all like to know.

Ann Arnold: Federal Age Discrimination Commissioner Susan Ryan.

As well as the annual on-road test from 85, all New South Wales drivers must have annual medical tests from the age of 75. There is little opposition to that, and most states do have a compulsory medical test. Victoria, however, has no compulsory age-based testing of any kind. The requirement is simply for doctors to refer people for assessment when they think it's necessary. Older drivers in Victoria don't have a higher accident rate than their counterparts in other states.

A major review of Victoria's system was done in the 1980s to see if other states with testing had lower crash rates.

Jude Charlton: And the answer was very clearly a resounding no. The other jurisdictions had either equal or worse crash rates than Victoria.

Ann Arnold: Jude Charlton is associate director of the Monash University Accident Research Centre. Recently the Monash Centre replicated the 1980s research and got a similar result. There was a question about the differing quality of regional roads between the two states, and that perhaps it explained higher crash rates in New South Wales. Jude Charlton says the researchers tried to control for that.

Jude Charlton: They extracted out purely the urban dwelling residents from Sydney and Melbourne and compared crash rates of those two populations, which arguably would be more comparable, and again found evidence that the crash records for Melbourne drivers indeed were better than those in Sydney.

Ann Arnold: When the New South Wales government established its taskforce on older drivers last year, primarily to review the system of age-based testing, Jude Charlton and her colleagues presented the Victorian research. But the taskforce resolved to keep the age-based testing.

Marg Prendergast, from the New South Wales Centre for Road Safety, said the decision was based solely on New South Wales crash data.

Marg Prendergast: In the last ten years there has been a 14% reduction in casualty crashes for all drivers. A casualty is a fatality or an injury. There's been a 50% increase for drivers aged 75-plus. And there's been 111% increase for drivers aged 85-plus. And that is the basis of our decision.

On the weekend we had five crashes, all of them were 60-plus, including a 75-year-old in a single vehicle and a 78-year-old driving the wrong way on the M5 in the middle of the night. We know that there's been more older driver type high profile crashes than younger driver crashes this year. And that's commensurate with an ageing population.

Ann Arnold: Marg Prendergast. She says the on-road testing helps GPs have that difficult conversation with their patients about their driving.

Marg Prendergast: What we know from the Australian Medical Association is it's really difficult for your local GP to have that conversation because they believe that if they embark on trying to take their license from them, that they are breaching that relationship and that that older person may not tell them things in future which they need to. It's all about that relationship and it's very tricky for a local GP who has been seeing that older person probably for 30, 40 years to make that tough decision.

We also know, and I can speak from personal experience, how difficult it is to have that conversation with your parent. I was in road safety and could not have that conversation with my deceased father. I knew he shouldn't be driving. They all knew I was road safety and looked to me to have that conversation, but you don't tell your father what to do, it doesn't matter how old you get. And so it's a difficult conversation for families and for GPs. And in a way, what the community and GPs were asking us is to remove this decision from them and give it more boundaries so that there is an assessment process that they can work within that is based on the actual physical and cognitive ability of older drivers.

Ann Arnold: New South Wales also has a restricted licence option. If you're 85 or older, you can apply for a restricted licence either without doing a test, or if you've failed the unrestricted licence test. The restricted licence allows you to drive short distances, say 10 or 15 kilometres, or in daylight only. The New South Wales statistics show no spike in crash rates among those on restricted licences.

Based on the task force report, the state government announced aged-based testing would continue. This was despite the fact that Premier Barry O'Farrell had opposed it when he was opposition leader. The government's decision was quietly announced in September this year, on the Monday after the federal election, and received little attention.

The Older Driver Taskforce report has not been made public. Submitted as a Cabinet document, it is protected from Freedom of Information requests as well. Not even the taskforce members have seen the final report. Why, then, would this state government initiate a review of older driver licensing and testing, and then bury its findings? Background Briefing sought an explanation from the Roads Minister Duncan Gay, but the minister declined to be interviewed.

Politically, the older driver voice, with its accusation of discriminatory treatment, is loud and clear. But in New South Wales there's also another, equally potent dynamic involved.

Journalist [archival]: Seven children have been injured, one of them critically, after a car ran out of control and crashed into a childcare centre in Sydney's north. Two of the children were badly burned when the car caught fire. And a warning, viewers may find some scenes....

Ann Arnold: After that horrific accident in 2003, one of the children who was hurt, Sophie Delezio, battled through extraordinary injuries and survived.

Journalist [archival]: Police enquiries are continuing. The 68-year-old driver of the car is being questioned by police.

Ann Arnold: There was enormous public sympathy for Sophie. Then, unbelievably, in 2006 Sophie was struck again, on a pedestrian crossing, by an 80-year-old male driver.

Do you know how much of a role that played in New South Wales' political thinking about this issue?

Graham Blight: Yes, just enormous.

Ann Arnold: Graham Blight is a director of the New South Wales motoring body, the NRMA.

Graham Blight: It was, as we all know, very public, very tragic; hit twice and both times by older drivers. That's the sort of thing that attracts a lot of attention, a lot of public attention, and people say, 'Well, see, they don't know how to drive, these people,' or, 'They're dangerous.' So that incident created an awful lot of attention on the issue.

Ann Arnold: The NRMA as a body supports age-based testing, but Graham Blight personally does not.

Graham Blight: Why are they being picked on to have a compulsory test at 85 when someone at 45 can have an accident, be driving over the limit, all these sort of things that are bad habits on the road, and they don't get…have to go through a test or anything. After they pay the fine or they do three months without their licence, they get their licence back without a test. And I thought, well, this is unfair.

Ann Arnold: Age-based testing has existed in New South Wales since the 1960s. As a former chair of the NRMA's policy committee, Graham Blight campaigned to have it scrapped, without success.

Graham Blight: I think there's a resistance out there of people to drop the driving test because they think it's a test that's really creating more safety on the road and more safety for older drivers. And yet they do not have one ounce of statistical evidence to say that's so.

Ann Arnold: All the issues around safety are heightened when dementia is involved. A 30% increase in dementia rates is expected just in the next decade.

Ean Seaton: It was eight hours to go from Canberra to Melbourne, and they were long drives.

Clare: You used to have your music too.

Ean Seaton: Yes, I always had music in the car, mainly classical.

Clare: Opera and classical music.

Ann Arnold: Ean Seaton is 84, and has just been diagnosed with dementia. He enjoyed a career as a high school teacher and principal across regional Victoria.

Ean Seaton: I've always liked children. I actually loved teaching, because I think young people are very interesting, and very flexible about all sorts of things.

Clare: You're passionate about young people.

Ean Seaton: Good heavens, fancy that.

Ann Arnold: It's a chilly November day in Ballarat, and we're at the home of Ean's daughter Clare and her family. After a stint of university lecturing, Ean became a director of schools with the ACT Department of Education. And that meant lots of long drives, from Canberra to Victoria to see relatives, with his wife and two children, Robert and Clare.

Ean Seaton: My wife wouldn't sit in the front…

Clare: Because we would fight, so Mum had to sit in the back with me.

Ean Seaton: Yeah. And either Robert or Clare would always sit beside me, and they were wonderful because they would talk with me. It was very important that you had somebody who would keep you alive.

Clare: Keep you awake!

Ean Seaton: Keep you awake. And Robert and Clare were wonderful in that. We wouldn't get home til after 11 o'clock at night…

Ann Arnold: On the day of my visit, Ean has an appointment with his geriatrician, Dr Mark Yates. It was Dr Yates who convened that national older drivers' forum in Canberra.

Ean and his family agreed for Background Briefing to record his consultation with Dr Yates, who checked again with Ean that that was okay.

Mark Yates: I need to make sure that you're comfortable that some of what we're going to talk about today, which is about driving, and your memory and thinking difficulties, will be recorded and will go on the ABC in Background Briefing. Are you…?

Ean Seaton: That doesn't worry me at all. All you're trying to do is to make things clearer for people who are ageing.

Mark Yates: Yep.

Ean Seaton: If it can help anybody, it's worth doing. We're not here to look after just ourselves.

Mark Yates: So Ean, we need to talk a bit about your driving, because when we met last time we talked about you having a condition called vascular dementia. So that's where the stroke that you had a few years ago interferes with parts of your memory and thinking, enough to change the things that you can do for yourself. So currently now you have to make it clear to the licensing authority, VicRoads, that you have a diagnosis of dementia, and in that setting they then will ask me, or your GP, to make a medical assessment. They actually write to your GP, then the GP will write back to me as your specialist, and so it'll go round in circles. So I try and avoid that by making a decision or discussing that directly with you now about what you would like to do. Do you think that you have a problem with your driving at the moment?

Ean Seaton: I don't think I have any trouble with the driving. The only one problem that I do have is turning to the right to try and pick up what's behind me.

Mark Yates: Right, because you've got a sore neck.

Ean Seaton: It's very sore.

Ann Arnold: Throughout Australia it's compulsory for people who've been diagnosed with dementia to notify their licensing authority, although it's a fairly new requirement and not widely known.

Mark Yates: You have a vascular dementia, so by definition now you can't hold what's called an unconditional licence. You can hold a conditional licence, and VicRoads need to be informed. I have some other concerns though in that you have had a motor vehicle accident, in Wodonga about 12 months ago.

Ean Seaton: Probably two years ago now.

Mark Yates: About two years ago.

Ean Seaton: That's my pig headedness.

Mark Yates: Right, I want to make sure that you're safe, so I would want you to have a driving assessment because of your diagnosis, because of that incident one or two years ago. And also we did some testing last time I saw you, and one of those tests you had quite a bit of difficulty with. Remember the trying to join the dots?

Ean Seaton: Yes.

Mark Yates: You were joining 1s and As…do you want to give that a go? I think it would be probably useful to give that a go again.

Ean Seaton: Oh, well, if you think that's worth…

Mark Yates: I think we should give that a try. So let's go do that again.

Ann Arnold: Ean reluctantly agrees to do the test again. He's given a pen and asked to join numbers to letters, so 1 to A, 2 to B, and so on. The test is timed.

Mark Yates: Okay, that's pretty good. So you didn't do too badly but you swapped it over and you went from 1 to A, then 2 to B, but then you went to C, so went from B to C, then you did alright for a bit.

So it took two and a half minutes really to go from 3 to K, with four errors, so that's a long time. And that's a problem with switching. It's a bit like driving when you have to watch what's in the rear vision mirror, what's in the side mirror, and then, you know, decelerate at the same time. That suggests to me that it's going to be difficult for you on your on-road test. But you're still keen to go ahead with an on-road test? That's what you'd like to do?

Ean Seaton: Oh I guess so.

Mark Yates: What would it be like if you couldn't drive?

Ean Seaton: It'd be hell.

Mark Yates: Why?

Ean Seaton: Well, where I'm living at the moment, I've got to go to find things that you need, such as bread and food. I also have to go regularly to have a blood test…

Ann Arnold: The assessment Dr Yates wants Ean to do is with an occupational therapist who specialises in driving. This is a requirement for anyone who's been diagnosed with dementia and wants to keep driving.

There's a wait, only six weeks for Ean. In some parts of the country it can be six months, and can cost around $800.

Dr Yates showed Ean some brain scans, so he could see the damage from his stroke. Ean believes any brain damage is from a fall he had, not a stroke.

Mark Yates: It is a stroke, and when it happens in the frontal part of the brain, there's often no arm or leg weakness that goes with it, but it changes some aspects of thinking. So that I think is what we're dealing with. Plus, some changes which have gradually occurred over time, which are probably related to further mini-strokes which you aren't aware of.

So that's what's affected the driving. So what I will do…I'll be writing to VicRoads to say I think you should have a driving assessment. My estimate is that the likelihood of passing that assessment so you can continue to drive is low. But I've been wrong before.

Ann Arnold: That was a bit of a surprise, Ian, to be told, you know…?

Ean Seaton: That I won't be driving much longer? Oh yes, it was. It does make me think what I would do, in terms of everything. I suppose the other thing is you don't really know…I don't know how this dementia thing is supposed to work, whether it just gets worse and worse and worse or what I don't know. Haven't got a clue. Nobody's ever said anything about it, to explain it. I've got some thinking to do now.

Ann Arnold: Many people with early stage dementia are still capable of driving. But apart from dementia, there's a range of changes that happen with ageing that affect driving.

There was a study conducted in Brisbane a few years ago of 270 drivers aged between 70 and 88. None had dementia, and they were all regular drivers. They were sent off on a challenge, each with a driving instructor beside them, and an occupational therapist in the back seat, taking notes.

One of the researchers was Professor Kaarin Anstey, director of the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing at the ANU.

Kaarin Anstey: They had to drive about 19 kilometres around Brisbane in suburban streets that involved both simple and complex intersections. And the types of skills that we look at in these types of on-road assessments include observation, so whether or not the person scans their environment, their attention to signs and road markings, the correct use of the mirrors in the car, indication, braking and accelerating, and staying correctly in lanes.

Ann Arnold: And then there was a navigation element too where they had to find their way ultimately to the suburb of Stones Corner, is that right?

Kaarin Anstey: Yes, so the self-navigation part of the test is much more demanding cognitively for the driver. So it tends to show up more errors.

Ann Arnold: 17% of the drivers were rated as unsafe.

Kaarin Anstey: We looked at the types of errors they made. The most common error that was made was a failure to rate the blindspots, and in fact that's actually something quite easy to intervene in to teach people or remind people to check their blindspot.

I guess the main finding from this study was that the types of errors that drivers made were varied, but in general they increased with age. So the older the participant was, the more likely they were to make errors. It showed us that this phenomenon of deteriorating driving skills occurs in the normal population, it wasn't restricted to a specific group, say, with dementia.

Ann Arnold: Professor Kaarin Anstey from the ANU. One of the important outcomes of the study is that there were people in their 90s who scored exceptionally well in the test.

Nola Macnab: 'Towers'. Six letters…

Ann Arnold: My mother-in-law, Nola Macnab, is 83, and adjusting to life alone after caring for her husband Mac who died last year.

Ann Arnold: 'Eiffel'?

Nola Macnab: No. Something, something, something, D, something, N…

Ann Arnold: Nola lives in Yarra Junction, east of Melbourne. Every Thursday she goes to Warburton, nine kilometres away, to the supermarket. She used to live there, and enjoys the social interaction.

Nola Macnab: …they just built this place here, with all this land. The Yarra is lovely up here, it's not like it is by the time it gets to Melbourne.

Ann Arnold: And here we are at pretty little Warburton, with all its lovely old weatherboard buildings.

Nola Macnab: Go on round sport.

Ann Arnold: You haven’t got your indicator - he maybe doesn’t know what you’re doing. Well done.

Nola Macnab: Hello Shane, how are you going.

Shane: I’m very well thank you.

Nola Macnab: Thanks Pat

Pat: I’ll catch you later Nola.

Man: How have you been?

Nola Macnab: Oh just getting old!

Man: Where’s the car? Oh, that’s too easy. You need a hand to put this in the car? Is that it for the boot?

Nola Macnab: That’s it.

Man: Excellent. You have a lovely day.

Nola Macnab: Thank you so much, and you too.

Woman: See you later.

Nola Macnab: And that is one of the reasons I love here.

Ann Arnold: When people stop driving, the loss of social engagement can have multiple health effects. Jude Charlton from the Monash University Accident Research Centre:

Jude Charlton: Well, one of the really important health consequences that we have evidence on is depression. And so those drivers who've had their licence taken from them involuntarily are more likely to suffer depression, and all of the society costs that come with that mental health disorder are not inconsequential.

Nola Macnab: Now here's the bus…

Ann Arnold: That bus, that's a private bus line, isn't it, that runs from here, because there's no train, there's no other public transport…

And there's only that bus that can take you. But do you use it?

Nola Macnab: I find it very difficult now, unless they have those steps that are lowered. Because I went to get out…I took so long to step down from this extremely high step that he closed the doors and I got jammed in the middle.

Ann Arnold: Oh you poor thing!

Nola Macnab: That was the last time I rode on a bus.

Ann Arnold: I'm not surprised!

Jude Charlton: Interestingly research tells us that older people can drive longer than they can use all kinds of other alternative transport options, so for an older person it's much easier for them to just walk out into their own driveway and hop into the comfort of their own car. So from that point of view it's an easier option. They're also more likely to sustain a fall when using public transport options as well. So there are some safety benefits to keeping them driving for as long as it's safe for them to drive.

Nola Macnab: Now, tell me something Ann, I'm curious. Just a quick answer you can give me. Knowing my age, have you passed my driving, or not?

Ann Arnold: I have, but I'm not a driving assessor. I noticed a couple of small errors, but nothing that I probably wouldn't do myself, or plenty of others.

Nola Macnab: What were they?

Ann Arnold: Oh, I think you didn't put your indicator on when you stopped to park outside the IGA?

Nola Macnab: Yes, I did.

Ann Arnold: Okay.

Nola Macnab: That is something that I never fail to do, because it is one of my pet aversions, people that don't indicate.

The people up there, you just don't worry about it. You just sit patiently and wait. Honest to goodness, I don't know why people live in cities.

Ann Arnold: When you think about your driving future, how do you look at that?

Nola Macnab: You're responsible for your own actions really. If the time comes when there is the possibility that you could be a menace on the road to either yourself or other people, it's time to give it up. But the whole point of the thing is, what you can't change you have to accept.

Ann Arnold: Background Briefing's co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Leila Shunnar, and the executive producer is Chris Bullock. I'm Ann Arnold.

And a postscript: grey nomad Arthur Napper has had his driving test, a few days before his 93rd birthday. And he passed.