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
- 50
- 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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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.