About Driverless Transportation

Driverless Transportation exists to keep the record of an industry that generates far more announcement than deployment. It has published on autonomous and connected vehicles since 2013, and the material from that period remains available in the archive, at the addresses it was originally published under.

The site is organised around three things. The first is the D20 stock index, an equal-weighted index of listed companies whose strategy depends on automated driving reaching commercial deployment, introduced in 2014 and rebased in 2015. The second is the research library, a curated set of public papers on safety, economics, law and connected-vehicle technology, including two UMTRI papers hosted here as the original PDFs. The third is the set of datasets that record what is actually operating: the robotaxi deployment tracker and the analysis of the California disengagement filings.

Editorial approach

Three commitments shape what appears here. Sources are named, and where a primary document exists it is linked or hosted rather than summarised away. Figures that cannot be verified are not published — where the archive does not record something, the gap is stated, which is why the twentieth D20 slot is listed as vacant rather than filled by inference. And withdrawn or failed programmes stay in the record, because a tracker that only shows survivors describes an industry that does not exist.

Data and limitations

Market data, corporate events and regulatory decisions are compiled from public filings, regulator publications and company announcements. The disengagement analysis draws on filings made to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, with the comparability problems set out in full rather than glossed. Nothing on this site is investment advice, and the index is a measurement instrument rather than a tradeable product.

What the record shows

Reading a decade of this material back has a consistent effect: it separates the industry's announcements from its deliveries far more sharply than following it in real time ever did. The archive holds a great many confident dates that passed without incident, and it also holds the quieter items that turned out to matter — the first permit conditions, the first liability reallocation, the early work on bounded operating domains that every deployed service now depends on.

That gap is the reason the datasets here are constructed the way they are. The deployment tracker applies a deliberately narrow test, because loose definitions are how a decade of coverage produced the impression that driverless vehicles were perpetually eighteen months away. The disengagement analysis explains why the sector's most-quoted metric will not support the league tables built on it. Both are corrections to a habit visible throughout the archive.

Why failures stay in the record

Programmes that were suspended or wound down remain listed with the reason. One major robotaxi operation reached paid public service and was shut down entirely; another paused commercial operations; a fatal collision during supervised testing ended a third company's programme and changed how the whole sector discusses safety drivers. Removing those would leave a record describing an industry of uninterrupted progress, which is not the industry that exists.

Archive

The archive covers 2013 to 2018 and holds the industry's foundational period: the first testing permits, the acquisitions that consolidated the perception layer, the regulatory frameworks that are still in force, and a great deal of forecasting that can now be checked against outcomes. It is browsable by date and by company. For questions about the site, use the contact page.