Taking away mom's car keys isn’t easy
Tough conversations can trigger threats, firing the family doctor
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 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.
I raised the issue of safety, statistics and the reality of a driver with vision, hearing and mobility issues that directly impact an ability to operate a 2,900 lb. vehicle.
None of that mattered.
“My driving record was clean,” she said, noting that she was not cited for 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 and often led by children and siblings of aging drivers, said Thad Szott, co-owner of Szott Auto Group, which sells Ford, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram and Toyota vehicles in White Lake, Highland Township, Holly, Waterford and New Hudson, 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
When 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.”
Finally, King flew into Tennessee during hurricane season 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 long 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 they someone would know how old she was.”
Risks to seniors behind the wheel
Crash rates per miles 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, risk of crashes and risk of death increases more noticeably, she said.
Older drivers are not crashing more than younger drivers but they’re involved in more multi-vehicle crashes at intersections, particularly while making left turns, 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 analysts use 1997 as a point of comparison because that’s when the number of motor vehicle crash deaths per population peaked for people aged 70 and older, Cox said. The most recent government data available is from 2022. It showed:
The number of licensed drivers aged 70 and up jumped 92% from 1997 to 2022.
The number of licensed drivers aged 80 and up surged 112% during that period.
A spokesman for the Michigan Secretary of State could not be reached for comment. And a spokeswoman for the American Association of Retired Persons said no one was available to discuss the issue and referred people to their website.
A man in Ann Arbor, who retired as an automotive industry analyst, told Shifting Gears that he worries 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.
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 insist on taking herself where she needed to go, Anne said. “She would often complain of poor design of the roads. She would go 35 in a 55 mile-per-hour zone. She turned left from the lane (meant for cars) going straight.”
The woman, in her late 80s, would slam on the brakes when arrows would change color and not go when it 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 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.”
Editor’s note: As a former political reporter at The Des Moines Register and a guest lecturer at the annual Okoboji Writers Retreat in Iowa, I’m grateful to be part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. See below for a collection of smart, funny and fabulous work by good people.
Yikes. This is chilling. Well done, Phoebe. Thought-provoking, indeed!