Briefings
Briefings: reference and analysis on the autonomous-vehicle industry
Company backgrounders, regulatory comparisons, technology explainers and industry history — separate from the 2013–2018 news archive, and kept current.
- Briefings
- 51
- Subject areas
- 5
Index
D20 Index
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Magna and the Contract-Manufacturing Model for Autonomous Vehicles
Magna's autonomy exposure runs through a less obvious channel: building vehicles — including AV-platform vehicles — for other companies' brands.
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TomTom's Mapping Data and Why HD Maps Matter for Self-Driving
A self-driving system needs to know what the road looked like before it gets there. That's the business TomTom is in.
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Volvo AB's Truck Autonomy Programmes, Separate From Volvo Cars
Two different Volvos, two different autonomy stories — the one in the index is the trucks, not the cars.
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Mercedes-Benz's Level 3 Certification and What It Actually Means
Mercedes-Benz was among the first automakers to get a Level 3 system certified for public roads, a narrower claim than 'self-driving.'
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General Motors, Cruise, and What the Shutdown Changed for the D20
An OEM-owned robotaxi unit reaching public driverless service, then being wound down, is exactly what an AV-industry index has to account for.
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Nissan's ProPILOT and the Slow Road to Full Autonomy
ProPILOT is a driver-assistance lineage, not a driverless one — and that gap is the point of tracking it.
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Valeo's Bet on Parking Automation, Not Highway Autonomy
Not every supplier in the index is chasing full self-driving. Valeo built a business around a narrower, already-commercial slice of automation.
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Continental's ADAS Supply Business and Why It Sits in the D20
Continental doesn't sell a self-driving car; it sells the radar, camera and braking hardware that goes into one. That's a different kind of index constituent.
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Denso and the Sensor Supply Chain Behind Autonomous Driving
Denso's link to Toyota shapes how it participates in autonomy — less flagship robotaxi bet, more component supplier at scale.
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Visteon's Shift From Ford Spin-off to Cockpit Electronics
Visteon's relevance to autonomy has less to do with sensors than with what a driver sees on the screen while the car handles more of the driving.
Robotaxi
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May Mobility's Fixed-Route Shuttle Strategy
Not every automated-mobility company is chasing a point-to-point robotaxi. Fixed-route shuttles are a narrower, faster-to-permit bet.
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Weather and Robotaxi Geofences: Why Snow Cities Lag
Sun Belt cities got robotaxis first for a reason that has nothing to do with regulation.
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What 'Public Driverless Service' Actually Requires, Operator by Operator
Every operator uses similar language. The permit conditions behind that language are not identical.
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Zoox's Purpose-Built Vehicle Bet vs the Retrofit Approach
Most robotaxi operators started with an existing car and added sensors. Zoox designed the vehicle around the service instead.
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Why Some Robotaxi Programmes Keep a Safety Driver and Others Don't
The presence or absence of a person in the driver's seat is a permit distinction, not a marketing one.
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Pony.ai and WeRide: China's Other Robotaxi Contenders
Baidu isn't the only Chinese robotaxi operator with public-market backing. Two smaller contenders took a different route to get there.
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How the California DMV Disengagement Report Methodology Has Changed
California's disengagement reports are the longest-running public AV testing dataset in the US, and their own rules have shifted more than once.
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Baidu's Apollo Go and China's Robotaxi Market
China's largest robotaxi fleet operates under a regulatory and market structure quite different from the US permit system this site's tracker was built around.
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Waymo's City-by-City Expansion Pattern
Waymo didn't launch everywhere at once. The order it picked cities in says as much about regulation and weather as about technology.
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Insurance and Liability Questions Robotaxi Operators Answer Differently
Removing the human driver doesn't remove the question of who is liable when something goes wrong — it relocates it.
Regulatory
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How Germany's Autonomous Driving Law Compares to US State Frameworks
Germany legislated Level 4 operation nationally. Most of the US regulates it state by state, permit by permit.
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Why 'Full Self-Driving' and 'Level 4 Autonomous' Are Not the Same Claim
Two phrases that sound similar describe two different regulatory categories, with different legal responsibility attached.
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The EU's General Safety Regulation and Autonomous Vehicles
The EU's vehicle safety rulebook now explicitly makes room for automated driving systems — a different lever than any single member state's own AV statute.
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How Insurance Regulators Are Responding to Driverless Fleets
A fleet with no drivers to underwrite individually is a different actuarial problem than personally-owned cars, one regulators are still working out.
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The Regulatory Gap Between Testing Permits and Deployment Permits
Most jurisdictions split AV regulation into two distinct authorisations — and the gap between them is where most programmes spend most of their public life.
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Japan's Approach to Level 4 Certification
Japan certified a Level 3 production vehicle before most other markets — and built its Level 4 path around defined services rather than blanket approval.
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South Korea's Robotaxi Pilot Zones
South Korea's regulatory sandbox model authorises autonomous services zone by zone rather than nationwide.
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The UK's Automated Vehicles Act and What It Covers
The UK took the legislative route rather than the permit-by-permit route — closer to Germany's approach than to the US model.
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Singapore's Long History as an Autonomous Vehicle Testbed
Long before robotaxis reached US streets at scale, Singapore was already hosting one of the industry's earliest and most closely watched pilots.
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SAE Levels of Driving Automation, Explained Without the Marketing Spin
Levels 0 through 5 are a specific engineering taxonomy, not a marketing scale, and that gap is where most confusion about self-driving starts.
Technology
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How Automation Is Cutting Processing Times in Transport
Most of the time lost in transport is spent standing still. Automation's clearest gains so far come from removing those waits, not from moving faster.
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The Economics of Robotaxi Fleets: Vehicle Cost vs Ride Revenue
A robotaxi's unit economics rest on a different cost structure than a human-driven rideshare trip — and on assumptions that are still being tested at scale.
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What HD Maps Actually Contain, and Why They Go Stale
An HD map is a much denser object than a navigation map — and precisely because it's so detailed, it needs constant re-surveying to stay useful.
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Sensor Fusion Explained: Combining Camera, Radar and LIDAR Data
Most production autonomy stacks don't pick one sensor type — they combine several, and the combining is its own hard problem.
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Why Automakers Chose Different Compute Platforms for Autonomy
Some companies buy their autonomy chips, some design their own — and that choice says something about how each treats the compute layer strategically.
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How Automated Trucking Differs From Robotaxi Development
Highway-only automated trucking and urban robotaxi service look similar from a distance and solve very different problems up close.
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LIDAR, Radar and Camera-Only: The Three Sensor Philosophies
There isn't an industry consensus on which sensors a self-driving car needs — three different philosophies are all still in commercial use.
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Simulation Testing: How Miles in Software Compare to Miles on Roads
Companies routinely cite simulated-mile totals that dwarf their real-world driving. The two numbers aren't measuring the same thing.
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Teleoperation: The Remote-Assistance Layer Behind 'Driverless'
"No one in the vehicle" doesn't always mean no human involved at all. Remote assistance is a specific, limited role worth distinguishing from remote driving.
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V2X and Connected Vehicle Technology, a Decade After the First Pilots
Vehicle-to-everything communication was pitched as a companion to automated driving years before robotaxis existed. Its rollout took a different path.
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The Edge Cases That Still Trip Up Autonomous Vehicles
Most automated-driving failures cluster around a small number of well-documented scenario categories, not evenly across all driving situations.
History
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A Decade of D20 Constituent Changes: Who Was In, Who Dropped Out
An index that tracks a fast-moving industry cannot stay static. Some names that once defined this space are no longer in it.
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How the D20 Index Methodology Handles Mergers and Delistings
An index built to track a specific industry needs a published rule for what happens when a constituent gets acquired, delisted or renamed.
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China's Robotaxi Regulatory Timeline, City by City
China's robotaxi permitting built out city by city over several years, with Beijing and Wuhan among the earliest and most closely watched.
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The Role of State DOTs Versus Federal Regulators in the US
The US has never had a single federal agency granting driverless-deployment permits, and that split shapes every state-by-state comparison.
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What Changed After Cruise's California Permit Suspension
A single regulatory action in October 2023 set off a chain of events that ended, a little over a year later, with GM winding the programme down entirely.
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The DARPA Grand Challenges and Where Today's AV Companies Came From
A surprising share of the autonomous-vehicle industry's institutional lineage traces back to a handful of early-2000s government-funded competitions.
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Argo AI's Shutdown and the Lesson About OEM-Backed AV Units
Ford and Volkswagen both backed Argo AI heavily. Its 2022 shutdown became a reference point for how OEM-funded AV units get evaluated afterward.
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The Uber ATG Sale and What It Signaled for the Industry
Uber spent years building its own self-driving unit, then sold it — a decision that told the rest of the industry something about the cost of going it alone.
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Autonomous Shuttle Pilots in University Towns and Airports
Long before robotaxis reached most people, low-speed autonomous shuttles were already running fixed routes on campuses and at airports.
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IPOs and SPACs: How AV Companies Went Public in the Early 2020s
A wave of autonomous-vehicle companies went public via SPAC merger in the early 2020s, and their aftermarket record split sharply afterward.