Age alters automotive reality. The need for speed becomes the need for planning. Know exactly where you are going. Leave with enough time to get there. Take your time.

Safety and comfort undergo similar transitions. They are elevated to primary concerns. Items in auto cabins once thought ancillary become as important as speed and handling. Consider, for example, interior ceiling handles. Increasingly, they are needed to help ease older, sometimes aching bodies into car seats.

Ah, and what about those seats? Perforated premium leather cushions, such as those found in this week’s subject automobile, the 2016 Nissan Maxima SR, are far more than luxurious perks. They are welcome additions to comfort — warming sore backs in cold weather and cooling them in hot, sticky climes.

Safety nowadays is often translated into something automotive marketers call “driver assistance” items. I suspect the term allows them to continue selling things such as forward collision warning, blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert (all, along with ceiling handles, are standard items on the 2016 Maxima SR) as optional equipment.

Truth is, according to state and federal safety agencies, those items have helped reduce traffic deaths and injuries. They should, as much as possible, be made standard equipment on all new cars and trucks sold in this country. Nissan, in bringing back its Maxima line after a one-year market absence, seems to be addressing that concern. When it comes to safety features, the Maxima is one of the best-equipped affordable family sedans sold in the United States.

That speaks to a dual reality affecting today’s car business.

In one loud voice, the industry continues to pay homage to the myth of high-speed motoring on “open roads” with “sweeping curves” in “track-ready” cars that “hug the road.”

The Maxima’s marketers don’t go that far with the high-performance jargon. But they come close. The front-wheel-drive Maxima SR, for example, can “lean into” curves by braking “just the inner wheels.” All of this action is controlled by a driver seated in a “deeply bolstered” seat in a “focused driver cockpit.”

But in another voice, increasingly heard in today’s marketing, the car companies are trying to deal with several troubling global realities:

●Car buyers are getting older.

●Governments worldwide are pressuring car companies to help reduce traffic deaths and injuries.

●The final transaction prices of many new cars are getting too high for many people to afford them without jeopardizing other cost-of-living payments — housing, utilities, food, health, education.

Those developments are pushing the cost of the safest, best-equipped, usually most expensive automobiles into the arena of older buyers, most of whom tend to be more concerned about things other than going fast and hugging curves. The new Maxima SR reflects that mind-set, too.

The “safety and security” portion of the car’s specification list is as long as the “mechanical and performance” part, which includes Nissan’s highly praised 3.5-liter V-6 gasoline engine (300 horsepower, 261 pound-feet of torque).

But all of that is swamped by the car’s “comfort and convenience” listing, which includes notations on systems such as active sound cancellation and enhancement, driver’s-seat lumbar support, manual thigh-support extension, and Nissan’s electronic rearview monitor.

The Maxima SR moved nicely through high-speed traffic on Interstates 95 and 66. But the best thing I can say about it is that my sometimes aching back did not feel quite 68 years old after a 220-mile drive. That stole my affection.