Where Driverless Cars Brake for Golf Carts<br />Voyage, a driverless car service, is testing its vehicles with older residents in a gated community in San Jose, Calif.<br />SAN JOSE, Calif. — Molly Jackson, an 82-year-old retired nurse, was sitting in the back seat of a self-driving<br />taxi when the vehicle jerked to a halt at a crossing as its computer vision spotted an approaching golf cart.<br />They say we don’t have to, but I do.”<br />Voyage is starting to expand its driverless taxi service beyond a small test in the<br />Villages, a gated community of about 4,000 residents where the average age is 76.<br />The company had a major selling point: Udacity’s chairman, Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Google’s driverless car project<br />and a pioneer in autonomous vehicle research, was joining Voyage as chairman.<br />Waymo, the driverless car unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, started<br />a trial ride-hailing program in Phoenix this year with several hundred cars.<br />As a longtime resident of the Villages Golf and Country Club, a retirement community<br />in San Jose, Calif., she knew all about aggressive golf cart drivers.<br />How an online education start-up ended up operating an autonomous taxi service in a retirement community is an “only in Silicon Valley” story.
