Time to stop driving: I took Mom's car keys away 4 years ago, and she's still not OK

When I asked Mom if she wanted to talk about not owning a car, she glared at me.

The topic made her angry.

“When you’ve lost your independence, it’s everything. You live in a completely different world,” she said, leaving the room.

I followed her, asking that she continue to share her thoughts. 

“You immediately enter the twilight zone and become a child. Life as you knew it is profoundly transformed,” Mom said. “You no longer make decisions that affect your life. Other people make those decisions for you. You seem to have surrendered your sense of privacy.”

We sold her 2015 Toyota Corolla in 2020.

And it’s still not OK. 

Even today at 94, mom is annoyed about not having a car to drive.

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I talked about safety, statistics and the reality of a driver with vision, hearing and mobility issues that directly affect her ability to operate a 2,900-pound vehicle. 

None of that mattered.

“My driving record was clean,” she said, noting that she was not cited after an accident that left her passenger side door smashed, with thousands of dollars in damage.

To be blunt, her concern for the safety of others ends where her freedom begins. 

“I’m probably not like other people,” Mom said.

Thing is, I think she is.

The issue of seniors and their car keys is highly charged, often led by children and siblings of aging drivers, said Thad Szott, co-owner of Szott Auto Group in Michigan.

Families go looking to sell those now-unneeded vehicles.

“It’s a very heavy, emotional situation with families,” he said. “We have these discussions when people lose their ability to drive, and families come to dealers looking for solutions and many times end up selling them to us. Kind of like a trade-in but without getting a new vehicle.”

Taking keys away: Tricks and threats

Asked about his experience as a car dealer, Jeff King chose to speak as a son.

“My sister took the car keys away from my mom, then Mom went to my sister’s house in Bristol, Tennessee, with the extra set of keys and stole the car back. Then she got into a wreck,” said King, vice president and general manager at Bozard Ford Lincoln in St. Augustine, Florida. 

“Mom, she was a real estate agent, had to be close to 80. She went to the doctor and he was talking to her about driving. She wouldn’t relay to us the fact that he said she couldn’t drive,” King said. 

“The last 10 years of her life, she had my sister drive and Mom would tell everybody that my sister was getting into real estate and wanted to learn the business. She was just helping Mom get around. People wouldn’t drive with her anymore.”

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Finally, King flew into Tennessee during hurricane season and told his mom he couldn’t get back to Florida unless he drove her Toyota Prius.

King sold the Prius when he got home.

Shopping with an ‘accomplice’

When it comes to customers buying vehicles, King said, the clientele in Florida routinely includes people of all ages. That’s not a red flag. 

But once in awhile, a person will come into the dealership with a secret plan.

“For instance, they have their 89-year-old boyfriend, an accomplice,” King said. “The kids will call later. The purchase was made in somebody else’s name. Family members will come in and say, ‘We took the car away from them.’ People will try anything.”

Taking car keys from adults cuts deep because people can no longer do what they want when they want with whom they want, he said. “You take away mobility, you take away independence. I mean, my mom was strong-willed. She wouldn’t wear her oxygen in public because somebody might see her. She wouldn’t let my sister celebrate her birthday because then someone would know how old she was.”

Risks to seniors behind the wheel

Crash rates per mile driven increase around age 70, said Aimee Cox, a research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Virginia, an organization that provides data to insurance companies.

Once people reach age 80, the risk of crashes – and death – increases, she said.

Older drivers do not crash more than younger drivers, but they're involved in more multivehicle crashes at intersections, Cox said. Newer vehicles have more safety features that benefit everyone, she said.

Still, “intersections can be particularly tricky,” Cox said.

More people on the roads are older, and more older people are keeping their driver’s licenses longer, but they need to be focused on how many prescriptions they’re taking and medical conditions and visual impairments and mobility, Cox said.

"My grandmother was a nurse, so she had the ability to say, ‘I’m not able to do this anymore,’” Cox said. “So, it was a willing situation rather than forceful.”

Data junkies point to 1997 because that’s when the number of motor vehicle crash deaths per population peaked for people aged 70 and older, Cox said. Since then, the number of licensed drivers 80 and older has jumped 92%, according to the most recent government data, which is from 2022.

A man in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who retired as an automotive industry analyst said he worries that bringing up the topic of car keys could potentially threaten his status in the father’s will. So he’ll leave the issue to be handled by siblings.

A spokesman for the Michigan Secretary of State could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for the American Association of Retired Persons said no one was available to discuss the issue and referred people to the group's website.

When a marriage is on the line

Anne, a retired pharmaceutical saleswoman from Highland, Michigan, who asked that she be identified by her middle name only, said wrestling with driver’s license issues can be exhausting and sad for younger family members used to independent parents.

She watched her mother-in-law struggle with confusion while driving but still insisted on taking herself where she needed to go, Anne said. “She would often complain about the poor design of the roads. She would go 35 in a 55 mph zone. She turned left from the lane going straight.”

The woman, in her late 80s, would slam on the brakes when signals would change color and not go when they turned green, Anne said. “I decided my children, in middle school at the time, would no longer ride with her. I said something to my husband.”

Being the bad guy

As seniors lose friends and pets to death, adding the loss of transportation is just too much to process.

“In this country, we do not have the infrastructure and support to take care of people who can no longer drive,” Anne said. “If you cannot get around, you can't go where you want. You can get someone to drive you, but how do you do things you like to do? Even if you don't want to go somewhere, knowing the vehicle is in the garage and you can go if you want matters.”

Anne never took the keys away.

“It would have cost me my marriage,” she said. “I was the bad guy. I was the mean daughter-in-law.”

A friend, she said, took a more nuanced action and simply disconnected something in the engine so it wouldn’t work for a parent, Anne said. “They said, ‘Let me take it in and have it serviced.’ And they never brought it back.” 

Dad crashed before surrendering keys

Terri McCoy, 65, a paralegal from Ann Arbor, said she and her brother told their 82-year-old mother that her brother’s car was broken. He needed to borrow her Saturn. 

“She kept asking about it,” McCoy said. “But we told her, ‘We’ll run errands for you’ and ‘We’re here if you need anything.’ She bought that until her dying day.”

Meanwhile, McCoy’s father, a retired economics professor who taught at the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University and Western Michigan University, gave up his car in his early 80s after getting into an accident while making a left turn on the way to his doctor. 

Symptoms of dementia had begun.

Hurt feelings 

William Chopik, associate professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, said family members cannot look the other way when public safety is at stake.

“Families have to deal with this,” he said. “You want to have harmonious relationships, and this is a major source of disagreement. Some people have (disabled) the engine ... and said the car is the problem. It’s called compassionate care because it’s a way of preserving egos and the family dynamic. Attributing the car to being broken, in a way it’s an outright lie but it might be beneficial.”

Everyone is getting older and dealing with this matter legislatively is “radioactive,” Chopik said. “At some point, we’ll have to have our feelings hurt.” 

Trying to get help from a family physician

Adult children, seeking to avoid conflict, may ask the family doctor for guidance. 

In Anne’s case, the physician determined his patient had reached an age when she needed to prove her driving ability, and he wrote a prescription to get a driver’s test at the Secretary of State’s office.

“When my sister-in-law took her mother, they never gave the note,” Anne said. “And she found a new doctor.”

This strong-willed woman worked in the family business and went to Pearl Harbor when it was still burning to help with the American Red Cross. She taught herself to drive at age 14 in rural Michigan. She lived to be 100.

She had her Chevy Equinox to the end, Anne said. “She said she would make my life a living hell if I did anything to take it away.”

The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Phoebe Wall Howard, a Detroit Free Press auto reporter for nearly seven years, now writes a column on car culture, consumer trends and life that will appear twice monthly on Freep.com, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Those columns and others will appear on her Substack at https://phoebewallhoward.substack.com Contact her at phoebe@phoebehoward.com.