Innovation in the archive

The archive holds 35 reports filed under Innovation, spanning 2013–2016. The earliest is “Preliminary Statement of Policy Concerning Automated Vehicles”; the most recent is “Video: Driverless Cars Spin Out on a Georgia Track”. Original reporting came via Burney Simpson, Jennifer van der Kleut, Paul Godsmark and others.

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 Innovation overlaps most often with Technology, Autonomous, Testing and Driverless, 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.