“Life is a highway
I want to ride it all night long…” –Tom Cochrane, “Life Is A Highway”

When I tell people that I’m a test driver, the first question I usually get is “How’d you get a job like that?” And as much as I wish the answer was interesting or unique, it’s really not. It’s actually quite easy to get a job like this. Let me tell you how I started.

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Back in 2013, I was at a crossroads in my life. My personal life wasn’t great at the time, mom had shut down her computer shop, and I was just taking temp jobs to get a little money here and there. Eventually I ended up getting a job at a mail sorting facility. The first day there, I instantly knew that I was gonna hate it. Luckily, I didn’t end up staying there very long, because my third day there, I got a call back from another job I had applied to at around the same time. It was a job at a temp company (which had a contract with a major auto parts supplier that supplied parts/data to all of the Big 3) for an infotainment tester. For those of you that don’t know, infotainment is the fancy word for radio systems in cars. At the time, I had no idea what infotainment was (I didn’t even have a touchscreen radio in my own car, since I was driving my mom’s work van at the time, which was a 2005 Chevy Venture*), but the job requirements were very minimal–literally all you needed was a high school diploma and minimal knowledge of technology–but because I had just started a job, I was hesitant of quitting my current one for one that I didn’t know much about. But my mom convinced me to try out the automotive one. It couldn’t be that hard, especially if the requirements were slim to none.

So, I put in my 2 weeks at the mail sorting place and on the 3rd week, I started at the infotainment job. The job itself was fairly easy–you simply rode around with a driver in a test vehicle on assigned routes, testing all the features of the radio. At first, the hardest part for me to wrap my head around was the checklist. It was insanely long. But my supervisor assured me that it only seemed long because I was new to the job and eventually I’d be flying through it without a problem. And she was absolutely right.

An average day at my job went like this: I’d show up to the facility–which was essentially a giant garage with offices, cubicles & conference rooms for the engineers upstairs–at 5:00 AM. The working hours were from 5 AM to 1:30 PM. I never got used to waking up that early. It was a pain every time, especially because I’ve never really been a morning person. Once I got there, my supervisor–the lead radio tester–would give me my assignment and the key desk (exactly what it says on the tin) would start handing out vehicle keys to the drivers. Every radio tester got assigned a kit, which was a plastic box that contained everything you needed to do your testing: a smartphone, a USB stick pre-loaded with music (which was always terrible), a CD (which they eventually phased out when the cars we were testing stopped having CD players installed), and charging cable for the phone. At first, the testing checklists were handwritten, which was a GIANT pain. Because we were on the road so early in the morning, we’d need the map light on to write. A lot of drivers hated that, to the point where they’d either politely ask you to not turn the map light on or–in the case of one driver, who REALLY wasn’t a morning person–forcefully turn the map light off themselves. Eventually, though, the company switched to iPads for the checklists, which was much easier. You’d still hear complaints from drivers (“Ugh, get that screen glare out of my face!” etc.), but you can’t win ’em all.

As for the routes, there were 5 letter routes (A through E) which were the main ones. Each route was ~300 miles and had a mix of city, country, and highway roads. You’d start in southeast Michigan, where the facility was located, and drive all over the state. Most routes stuck to the thumb area though. There were shorter routes, such as the one the electric minivans drove, which was a simple 45-minute loop consisting of streets around the office. The main letter routes were my favorite, although some were better than others. And on the weekend, you’d end up driving ~400 miles, because the routes driven on the weekends were all highway roads.

The worst part of being an infotainment tester was the driver assignments. You never knew what kind of driver you were gonna be paired up with. Because I almost always worked AM shift (I worked PM shift there one time to get some extra hours but those people were so loud & obnoxious I never did it again) the drivers were mainly old grumpy white guys. Which is fine–I can get along with almost anybody. But some of them were really stuck in their ways and took the whole “driver is in charge” thing a bit too far. One time, I got paired up with a said old grumpy white guy and literally as soon as we got in the car, he looked over at me and said “I don’t want to hear any rap in my car, alright?” So I looked at him and nicely said, “It’s not really your car, so…” He didn’t say anything else to me the rest of the day. Eventually, when the lead radio tester got a promotion and a different job within the company, I became a lead radio tester, which also meant I got to become a driver. Test driving was so much better than radio testing, especially post-COVID, when they got rid of radio testing altogether.

I was at that job for about 9 years and then I quit, mainly because I was a temp the entire time. Not once did they offer me a direct hire position, even though I was told multiple times by multiple full-time employees that I was one of the best drivers they had. I put in my 2 weeks notice there and, on the third week, I got hired at another company. I’ll talk about them in another post. Stay tuned.

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* My mom actually found that van completely by accident. Back when we first bought it, my mom still had her computer shop and was looking on eBay for some metal shelving for the store. But a listing for a minivan kept coming up in her searches and she couldn’t figure out why. Turns out, the van had been part of a fleet for a bank and the back seat rows were removed to make room for some custom metal shelving. She bought the van–we had to drive down to Ohio to get it–thinking we could use the shelving to store parts, tools, customers’ systems and whatnot. Sadly, after she closed her shop, and a year into my radio testing job, the engine in it died. We ended up buying a 2012 Dodge Avenger as our next car. The ironic part is the entire time we owned that van, we rarely used the shelving to store computers or computer parts. Other than the name we gave it (Vanna White, because it was white and…well, you get it), I never really liked that van. If it had only been a work van, I would’ve liked it a lot more, but eventually it became our only vehicle, which made driving very uncomfortable. My mom misses it a lot more than I do.

Thanks for reading.

Song of the Day: Ray Vaughn feat. Samara Cyn & Sydney Leona – JANKY moral COMPASS

Even though the completely pointless beef between him and Joey Bada$$ kinda made me like him a little less, his first album for TDE was one of my favorite albums of last year. This song showed up in my daily shuffle the other day and I’ve had it on repeat for the past few days.