Autonomous Vehicle Safety and Test Drivers

Begin building your experience as a driver by getting your driver’s license. Once you have your license, try to drive as often as possible and consider getting a delivery job to accrue time behind the wheel.

Learn as much as you can about autonomous vehicles by watching videos and checking out articles on the Web.

Participate in an information interview with drivers to learn more about their careers and how they broke into the field. Questions to ask the interviewee include: What's a typical day like on the job? How did you break into this field? What are the key skills for success in the field? What advice would you have for an aspiring test driver?

Check your local library to see if it has a subscription to Autonomous Vehicle Engineering, or learn more about it at https://www.sae.org/publications/magazines/autonomous-vehicle-engineering. Another option to check out is the SAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles (https://www.sae.org/automated-unmanned-vehicles). You probably won’t understand all the terminology (use a glossary for the challenging words), but reading these journals will help you to better understand the field.

Participate in autonomous vehicle competitions to learn how to create AV algorithms and build mini-vehicles. For example, Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, offers an Autonomous Vehicle Competition for high school students. The Indy Autonomous Challenge in Indianapolis, Indiana, gathers teams of college students from all over the United States to "compete in a series of challenges to advance technology that can speed the commercialization of fully autonomous vehicles and deployments of advanced driver-assistance systems to increase safety and performance."