Calendar
The automated vehicle events circuit
Six recurring events carry most of the industry's substantive disclosure. This is what each is for.
- Recurring events
- 6
- Archive from
- 2013
- Scope
- Global
- Type
- Industry
Circuit
The automated-vehicle conference calendar sorts into three kinds of event, and confusing them is how people end up reading a product launch as a technical result. Trade shows exist to generate announcements. Research conferences exist to expose methodology to criticism. Engineering conferences exist to solve narrow problems in public. All three appear below, labelled.
The calendar has thinned considerably since the 2016–2018 peak, when the sector supported a dedicated automated-driving event in most major markets. What survived was the events that had a function beyond the hype cycle — the research meetings, the sensing engineering tracks, and the security conferences that were serious before the money arrived.
| Event | When and where | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| CES | Las Vegas, January | The largest single automotive-technology announcement venue, despite not being an automotive show. Most vehicle makers time their automated-driving reveals to it. |
| Automated Vehicles Symposium | United States, summer | The research-facing event, run jointly by transport research bodies. Closer to a conference proceedings than a trade show, and the place where methodology gets argued. |
| AutoSens | Brussels and Detroit | Sensing and perception engineering — cameras, radar, lidar, calibration and validation. Technical rather than strategic. |
| escar | Europe and USA | Embedded vehicle security. Predates the automated-driving boom and became central to it once connectivity turned into an attack surface. |
| ITS World Congress | Rotating | Intelligent transport systems at the infrastructure and public-authority level, where vehicle automation meets traffic management and municipal procurement. |
| TRB Annual Meeting | Washington DC, January | Transportation research across every mode. The automated-driving sessions are where regulatory and behavioural research surfaces first. |
Reading an announcement from the floor
Most automated-driving news originates at one of these events, and most of it is shaped by the venue. A trade-show reveal is built for a press deadline: it will name a capability, usually not the operating conditions, and often not the year. A research-conference paper on the same capability will state the operating domain, the failure rate and the sample size, and will attract a fraction of the coverage.
Three questions separate the two reliably. Where does it work — which roads, which weather, which speeds? Who is liable while it is working? And is anything being sold, or is this a demonstration? An announcement that answers all three is a product. One that answers none is a positioning exercise, which is not worthless, but should not be filed as progress.
How the calendar thinned
Between roughly 2016 and 2018 the sector supported a dedicated automated-driving conference in most major markets, and the archive covers a great many of them. Almost none survive under their original names. What remained were the events with a function independent of the investment cycle: the research meetings, where methodology is exposed to criticism; the sensing and perception engineering tracks, where narrow problems get solved in public; and the vehicle-security conferences that were serious work before the money arrived and continued afterward.
Reporting from these events between 2013 and 2018 is held in the archive, including the CES cycles that produced most of the decade's more optimistic forecasts. Those forecasts can now be checked against the deployment record.
Reference