California Department of Motor Vehicles in the archive

The archive holds 5 reports filed under California Department of Motor Vehicles, spanning 2015–2017. The earliest is “Calif. Proposes Self-Driving Car Laws That Would Require a Driver Behind the (Non-Existent?) Wheel”; the most recent is “News Roundup: Driverless Trucks by Embark Will Create Jobs for Truckers Rather Than Eliminate Them, GM Plans to Launch Self-Driving Cars in Major Cities in 2019, and More”. Original reporting came via Jennifer van der Kleut.

This period matters for a specific reason: it is when the industry's assumptions were set. Testing permits were first issued, the acquisitions that consolidated the perception layer closed, the regulatory frameworks still in force were drafted, and a great many confident deployment dates were published. Almost all of those dates passed without incident, which makes the contemporaneous record more useful now than it was at the time — it can be read against what actually happened.

Coverage under California Department of Motor Vehicles overlaps most often with Google, human drivers, regulations and CNBC, which is a reasonable map of where the topic sat in the industry's attention.

For what the listed companies in this field did over the same period, the D20 index roster tracks the corporate side. For what has since been deployed on public roads, the deployment tracker records operators, cities and dates, and the research library holds the papers this reporting drew on.