America is aging & this trend could lead to accelerating support for self driving cars. For example, the below charts shows the number of states that have close to 14-15% of citizens over the age of 65. Florida lead all states with about 17% of the total population being over the age of 65. AARP recognizes the value of self driving cars in a graying America and is a big supporter of it.

Catering to the growing base of senior citizens is a well developed network of retirement communities. For example, the largest retirement community in the world is “The Villages” which has more than 110,000 people. The humble golf cart is the preferred transportation mechanism of choice in these large retirement communities and the The Villages alone has more than 50.000 of them in operation. Senior citizen focused communities will be one of the first places to take advantage of robotic mini-cars and golf carts. Already large corporates such as Facebook have self driving golf carts in service to help employees move around the corporate campus.

An example of an autonomous golf cart would be Navia by Induct which can sit up to eight people. One of the target markets for this vehicle are large retirement communities. Dr. Adrian Sussman laid out the following scenario for usage in retirement communities: “In say, a retirement community, a person could tell the vehicle that he wants to see Dr. Jones. “The vehicle knows where that doctor is and will choose the best route to go to his building,” said Sussman.”

Navia’s system has several advantages over larger driverless systems initiatives because its designed for estate transit as opposed to larger highways. For example, it can detect pedestrians and change directions in a tenth of a second.

Google themselves are targeting the retiree community with their latest self-driving, non-steering wheel car. Brad Templeton, one of the consultants on the Google self driving cars , noted that liability and car insurance issues could make getting permission for wide spread road usage an uphill battle. But, if the concept can be proven to be safe in self contained environments such as retirement communities, then it would be easier to gain widespread regulatory & consumer acceptance.