Legal in the archive

The archive holds 38 reports filed under Legal, spanning 2014–2016. The earliest is “Our Top Ten Quotes about the Google Driverless Prototype”; the most recent is “News Roundup: Michigan Senate Passes Law Allowing Driverless Cars to Operate Without Humans, French City Debuts World's First Driverless Bus Service, and More”. Original reporting came via Jennifer van der Kleut, Anurag Maheshwary, Burney Simpson 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 Legal overlaps most often with Driverless, Insurance, Future and Consumer, 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.