concept car in the archive

The archive holds 2 reports filed under concept car, spanning 2016–2017. The earliest is “BMW's New Concept Car Has 3 Modes: Manual Drive, Assist Mode and Autonomous Mode”; the most recent is “News Roundup: Volkswagen Shows Off Sedric the Level-5 Autonomous Car in China, Major Players Weigh In on California's Proposed Driverless Testing Policies, and More”.

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 concept car overlaps most often with Apple, Barclays, Business Insider and California Department of Motor Vehicles, 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.