My guest this week is someone whom many of you may have seen   Welcome to the podcast Lisa. Lisa: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Simon: So, Lisa, you’re an Associate Professor of Driving Behaviour and Director of the Driving Research Group at Cranfield University. You previously founded companies like DriverMetrics, you were co-founder of The Floow. But you’ve now founded a new company called PsyDrive – all of which were to, kind of, commercialise some of the valuable research that you’ve done and make those learnings available to fleet operators. So, perhaps you could start by telling us a little bit about what you’re working on at the moment. Lisa: Sure. So, with Cranfield, some of the work I’m doing right now is looking at behavioural adaptation in response to autonomous vehicles. And so, we’re running a series of studies in the field, looking at how people change their behaviour in response to automated systems over time. A lot of people think that driverless vehicles are going to be safer, but I think there are some things that we really need to understand a bit more about first. So that’s my work with Cranfield. And then, with PsyDrive I essentially developed an accredited CPD course on Human Factors in driving, which is available for fleet managers and anybody working in the fleet industry really, to help them understand a bit more about driver behaviour. Simon: Excellent. Now, this episode of our podcast is part of a range of content we’ve created this quarter around the theme of fitness to drive – which obviously covers physical and mental health, fatigue, wellbeing etc. – and so I wanted to start with an overview of the general demands of driving for work on the driver. We’re focusing generally on commercial vehicle drivers – so vans and trucks – and those drivers are probably doing reasonably high mileages across the year. So I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about what the general demands are for those of us who are largely office based and probably wouldn’t be aware of the demands on a commercial vehicle driver out there all day.   Lisa: Yeah, and that’s an important distinction, because a lot of people who are not driving for work really don’t understand some of the problems of actually driving a truck or a van, and some of the demands that drivers have. Often professional drivers complain about how the road users get in their way, and make things a bit more difficult for them because they don’t really understand things like turning circles, just being able to get around a corner and how they need to be considerate of what a big truck needs. So, yeah, there are a lot of stresses on professional drivers – not only just the type of vehicle that they’re driving, but also the nature of the work. What it is they have to do during the day. Some of the professional drivers have multi-drop kind of activities, others are long-haul, short-haul… it all varies. And they have to engage with customers and these are often quite stressful situations, especially if they’re running late. Management, supervisory practices… and of course there are a lot of issues around the traffic, and having to get through traffic to a tight schedule.   Simon: So I guess the main pressures sort of revolve around workload and time pressure. I often describe these when I’m talking to fleet operators, or warn them against creating unrealistic work schedules where it often doesn’t seem possible to make all of those deliveries, or all of those service visits within the expected time, without the driver having to speed or take other risks. So what does that kind of pressure… what sort of impact does that have on the drivers?   Lisa: Yeah. So, all drivers at some time or other will suffer from driver stress just because of the nature of driving these days. Traffic’s actually moving slower every year, so there are just general demands of the task itself. The work involved in manoeuvring a vehicle is actually quite re