U.S. Department of Transportation in the archive

The archive holds 2 reports filed under U.S. Department of Transportation, spanning 2016. The earliest is “Google is Looking to Hire a Few Good Autonomous Test Drivers”; the most recent is “News Roundup: Google Forms Self-Driving Car Company Called 'Waymo,' Uber Starts Testing Driverless Taxis in San Francisco Without Permission, 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 U.S. Department of Transportation overlaps most often with Safety, Testing, Business Insider and DMV, 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.