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