Tell Me About It: Driving for work

1. How often are you driving?I drive every day. I drive all kinds of vehicles, cars and trucks, motorcycles and [all-terrain vehicles]. Whatever they need.2. What is an average day?It could be driving, quite often a car, but, depending on what the company needs, I might be driving a [tractor-trailer] for a month, or a straight truck. A couple of years ago we had some motorcycles a customer needed thousands of kilometers on, so I was driving a motorcycle every day, even though it was the middle of winter. So at that time I was putting on a snowmobile suit, snowmobile boots and gloves and going out, below freezing and driving a motorcycle around the track. It's whatever the company needs. They may just assign me to a customer to guide the customer around the facility to help them test.3. On a day when you're just driving this 7.5-mile loop all day, how do you stay focused?We are programmed to have breaks every two hours. They're very welcome. Come in, get a drink, a small snack, then climb back in and take off again. The main point is just to try and be accurate because normally we're assigned a specific routine and that's written down for us, or some of our units have a computer next to us and we tell it which routines we want to do, we go out and listen to the computer. It's just trying to be faithful to what the customer wants. If we drive that routine five times they hope we can do it accurate each time. Most of the testing here is accelerating, holding speed. Some tests we may just cruise at a steady speed for most of the shift, but a lot of it is a program of speeding up and slowing down, stopping and the customer has it all written out. So it's just following their guidelines trying to do a good job for the customer.4. You've been out here 11 years. What's the thing you like to do the most?I'm not doing so much ATV testing now, but up to a couple years ago that was a lot of fun. I got to travel up North for cold-weather testing and down South. That was really a lot of fun. 5. When you go on a vacation do you drive or fly?I usually drive. Matter-of-fact, I was gone two weeks ago and on my week off I drove 2,000 miles.6. What other tests do they put cars through here?We've got a huge variety of facilities. One of the most popular with the customers is the Vehicle Dynamics Area. It's like 50 acres of pavement. The customers can do handling tests, that's a big thing there. We have lots of water facilities here. We have a saltwater trough we drive cars through. There's even a saltwater spray, like quarter-mile long, for corrosion tests. We have one that's just to soak brakes. We have different areas that are made to be slippery. Those are for traction testing. We have bump areas, we have numerous areas embedded with rocks, pavement bumps, potholes. Some places have a series of bumps which cause vibration, chatter. Plus little areas that mimic racetracks and gravel roads.7. What do people think of what you do?Most people think it sounds like great fun, but they don't realize that what we do is very prescribed and defined.