Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the archive

The archive holds 4 reports filed under Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spanning 2015–2016. The earliest is “MIT's Localizing Ground-Penetrating Radar Could Be the Solution to Mapping and Sensing Challenges Facing Autonomous Vehicle Technology”; the most recent is “Denso and Google's Alphabet Inc. the Only Bright Spots Among D20's Broad-Based Losses”. Original reporting came via Jennifer van der Kleut, Burney Simpson.

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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology overlaps most often with MIT, driverless cars, D20 Stock Index and Google Alphabet, 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.