M City in the archive

The archive holds 2 reports filed under M City, spanning 2015. The earliest is “New Xerox Video Imagines Power of Connected Vehicles”; the most recent is “U of M Celebrates Grand Opening of ‘M City’ Testing Ground; 2015 AVS Shows Signs That Debut of Advanced Technologies Could Be Imminent”. Original reporting came via John Estrada, Driverless Transportation.

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 M City overlaps most often with autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, Self-Driving and Testing, 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.