Department of Motor Vehicles in the archive

The archive holds 4 reports filed under Department of Motor Vehicles, spanning 2015–2017. The earliest is “California DMV Will Now Include Reports of All Autonomous Vehicle Accidents On Its Website”; the most recent is “News Roundup: Alphabet Gets Approval for Its Dream 'Digital District,' Two States Push Forward With Driverless Car Testing, 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 Department of Motor Vehicles overlaps most often with DMV, Google, autonomous cars and driverless cars, 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.