Are elderly drivers a danger on our roads?

Are older drivers more likely to become involved in an accident on the road?

It’s an impossible question to answer definitively, but Volvo’s head of safety says that despite their slower reaction times and poorer vision, elderly motorists are often unfairly stereotyped as being oblivious to all and sundry on the road.

As the Chinese-Swedish brand continues to strive for the death-proof car, Volvo Car Corporation’s senior technical advisor on safety, Thomas Broberg, said ‘older’ does not always equate to being more dangerous on the road – or involved in more crashes.

“There's a lot of myths around that,” he insisted. “That's actually my field of research that I've been conducting on elderly drivers.

“So just to say that there is a certain threshold in age in relation to number of crashes is very, very difficult to say,” he said.

“Chronological age is not a good measure, really.

“I mean, we had one [test subject], he was 94 years and to some extent he was more vital and a better driver, I would say, than some of the 70-year-olds and even some of the younger populations that we had, because he understood his limitations.

“So he actually drove according to that and if you look at it, you will always have a lowest denominator in traffic when you don't know who it is.”

Broberg admitted that older drivers have a “…smaller useful field of view that sort of decreases over age” but said that hadn’t been shown to directly correlate to increased risk behind the wheel of an automobile.

The national road toll statistic for 2022 in Australia showed that among the 1187 fatalities – the highest figure in five years – the 40-64 age demographic accounted for the highest number of deaths (375) and not those aged over 65.

The next highest age group was 26 to 39-year-olds (269 deaths), with the 17-25 group (229 deaths) being the third most represented demographic in the 2022 road toll statistics.

Combined, the 65-74 (104 deaths) and 75-plus (133 deaths) age groups accounted for a reasonable number of road deaths (237), but Broberg said older drivers generally spend less time on the road, which can skew the numbers.

“We also know that if you're older, maybe you're driving less because you don't want to expose yourself. Maybe you're not driving when it's dark, because you don't feel that confident when it's dark. So, you know to some extent your limitation.”

But Volvo’s safety adviser said there is one particular scenario in which elderly driver deaths are overrepresented: intersections and traffic lights.

“What we saw in the research that I conducted, we looked specifically into crossings because that's actually a scenario where you find in most data that older drivers are relatively more involved in collisions than a younger population.

“So we had a hypothesis. We drove with a lot of old drivers and had a comparison with younger drivers and we looked into their case behaviour in intersections and other measures as well.

“We had a hypothesis that maybe it's because well, most older drivers say that they drive slower now. So maybe they are driving slower and also if you think about intersections, there's a lot of things happening in a short period of time.

“Then, if you're driving slower, maybe you have a longer time of exposure for critical situations. So that was one of the hypotheses.

“But we didn't see that. They were driving as fast as they should. What we found was that they had a difference in their in their case behaviour.

“So the older drivers were more focused or spent more of their time watching how they position the car, when they're sort of stopping at the red light or entering an intersection as well. Younger drivers sort of spent more of that time looking at other moving objects like pedestrians, other vehicles and so forth.”

While the evidence suggests that elderly drivers are not a huge risk to themselves or others on the road, they do face persecution and stereotyping as being doddering old codgers.

“I think the discrimination part is important,” said Broberg.

“When you're old, you're feeling a little bit that you don't want to be in the way for other drivers. To the extent they actually felt discriminated in traffic, in the sense that other drivers are sort of pushing them – ‘You're in the way’ – [but] they don't want to be in the way.

“I mean, why should you be discriminated by age? Is that the pure measure? Because similar to young kids, the individual differences are bigger. Same when you get older.”

Another disadvantage for elderly drivers is that they’re generally more frail or fragile, said Broberg.

“That means that if you're involved in a collision, the risk is higher of sustaining an injury. And also if you sustain an injury you are less capable of recovering.

“We need to understand what forces [affect] the body [when it comes to] the differences in sizes, ages, gender, you name it. We have to understand that. We've been building that knowledge for many, many years and I would say the same with understanding sort of how we operate here, with driver behaviour.

“So if you look at our team during the past 20 years or so we have built up, we don't only have engineers on our team, we have behavioural scientists.

“In the same way as we have engineers that have studied biomechanics as such, the understanding about human being [behaviour] is essential – and it's not only building our own knowledge but also cooperating with others.”

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