A few years ago, I was chatting with friends, who were around my age, about the day we all will not be able to drive anymore. The topic was really about whether we will be smart enough to know when to stop.

Too many older people keep driving even though they can’t see or hear. The other day I thought Eliot and I might have reached that point when our 25-year-old SEL Mercedes all of a sudden lost power when we were driving back home on the Sprain Brook Parkway in Westchester. We had just left a funeral of a dear friend, Irv Shaw, who had died at 99.

We feel the same kind of vulnerability over losing our faculties as when our dependable “wheels” suddenly died. Eliot keeps all our cars in the best of shape, so we were pretty upset to be stranded with cars whizzing by so closely. Two hours later, with the help of a roadside towing company, we were back in business.

We are city people. Automobiles are not part of our daily lives like most folks. Even though we own three cars, two in Miami, we take cabs everywhere. I envision that, some day, someone else will have to do the driving for us.

I just found out that Google has been thinking about the same thing. As we all know, the Internet giant has been working on self-driving cars for quite some time. Now, word has it that Google is thinking about a “robo-taxi” service, a self-driving car that would pick us up and drop us off at various destinations. Google said that, at first, “a human would need to be behind the wheel just in case, but that could easily change as the tech progresses and becomes more reliable.”

As I have said many times before, this is the best time to be in your golden years.