We note that Amazon has just opened a digital storefront called “50+ Active & Healthy Living”. This site is a portal that gathers hundreds of products sold elsewhere on Amazon.com, and presents them in nine categories: Nutrition & Wellness, Exercise & Fitness, Health Care, Medical Supplies, Incontinence*, Personal Care, Beauty, Travel & Leisure, and finally Entertainment.

There’s a ‘Resource Center’ on the site, with links to posts on Beauty 101, Losing Weight, Boosting Brain Power, and Care-Giving. That creates an illusion that Amazon sees this site as a real resource. But following those links leads to a single page of repurposed content cadged from Grandparents.com. The content presented is OK, for what it is, but it’s not anything you’d go back to.

So on one level, we’re heartened that Amazon’s decided to acknowledge 50+ consumers, but less than impressed by the way Amazon seems to view us — as pants-wetting diabetics obsessed with our visible signs of aging. Honestly, we expected more from Amazon, which is extremely adept at mining its customers’ data, and could have used the purchase choices of 50+ consumers to shape a site that sold product, sure, but also catered to our real and varied interests.

*Really, Amazon? There had to be a whole category devoted to incontinence?

In Driving Miss Daisy, Jessica Tandy plays a woman who comes to terms with reality when her chauffeur (Morgan Freeman) himself becomes too old to drive. But this view of aging drivers is not something the boomers share. After all, we associate cars with freedom and self-actualization.

In the not too distant future Thelma and Louise’s car probably wouldn’t let them drive off the cliff. But seriously, what’s in store for the aging driving population? At re: we know that Miss Daisy will drive herself, thanks. The consensus is that as we age, will continue to drive — probably putting in even more miles than our parents did when they were in their 60s, 70s (or even 80s.)

We’ll drive more because we need to; boomers are blurring what used to be a bright line between ‘working years’ and ‘retirement’, so our lives as commuters won’t necessarily change when we hit 65. Boomers want to live independently, and for most Americans that means living in neighborhoods designed around cars. We’ll also drive more for emotional reasons; cars represent freedom and independence, and we’re unwilling to let change be forced upon us as we age.

Luckily, the car industry is rapidly developing technology that will make it easier for seniors to drive longer.

This ad for the Nissan Pathfinder highlights a new Around View Monitor feature that provides the driver with a bird’s eye view of his vehicle that makes parking easier. That’s nothing compared to some new Fords, that offer completely automated parallel parking.

New Audis are available that steer themselves to stay in their traffic lane and cars equipped with adaptive cruise control — another new option — will automatically adjust speed to maintain a safe following distance in traffic.

Of course, the holy grail of automated driving is a fully automated car that will drive itself to a programmed destination. That would have sounded preposterous just a few years ago, but Google has made huge strides on that project. It has fully self-driving prototypes in testing right now.

So far, the automotive industry has advertised these ‘driver aids’ in commercials featuring Gen X and Gen Y actors. But at re: we know that it’s aging drivers who will benefit most from new car technology.

The first car brand that intelligently markets these aids to aging boomers and positions itself as the company that understands and appreciates older drivers will be setting itself up for decades of, dare we say, booming sales to older drivers.