US DOT in the archive

The archive holds 21 reports filed under US DOT, spanning 2014–2016. The earliest is “Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015”; the most recent is “Hype-less AVS 2016 Asks the Right Research Questions”. Original reporting came via Burney Simpson, Jennifer van der Kleut, John Estrada 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 US DOT overlaps most often with Safety, Technology, Connected Vehicle and Autonomous, 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.