Waymo in the archive

The archive holds 9 reports filed under Waymo, spanning 2017. The earliest is “CES 2017: All the Driverless, Electric and Connected-Car Buzz”; the most recent is “Waymo to Partner With Insurance Startup For Self-Driving Car Passengers”. 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 Waymo overlaps most often with Uber, D20 Stock Index, Google and self-driving cars, 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.