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It's very hard to say when people lose the ability to operate their motor vehicle safely. Hopefully, family members would be able to intervene when their elders exhibited unsafe practices. As far as instituting a law mandating a cutoff age, I think that's an un-American idea. I do believe that their should be much stricter limitations on who can obtain the right to drive, based not on age, but on mental and physical ability.
When I turned 16, I took my driving test, and I passed it with flying colors. Based on the 96% score, one would think that I didn't have very much room for improvement. I'm telling you right now, i was a terrible driver. Decision-making ability was poor; driving skill was terrible. Somehow a five-minute exam on an abandoned residential street in the middle of the day earned me the right to put the lives of the general population at risk.
I managed not to kill anybody, but I did have accidents and tickets and my share of close calls. That's a 96% student we're talking about. What about the 76% students? Those are the ones that freak me out. I'm sure I see them all of the time. Entering the freeway at 40 mph; changing lanes without looking; white-knuckling it in the slow lane; no wherewithal. I ask myself all of the time how these people are given licenses.
There needs to be an interactive simulator that calculates a person's reflexes, coordination, ability to multi-task, and decision-making under stress. That would weed out a lot of people who shouldn't be on the road. There is no downside to changing the way we evaluate our drivers. Safer drivers, less traffic, and less pollution would be the immediate results. The people who are deemed incompetent to operate a motor vehicle would have to carpool or take public transportation. Since driving is a privilege to begin with, how could anybody complain?

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