When the Source Material Runs Dry: A Note on What We're Not Publishing Today

I've seen this movie before, by the way. Every time a new platform emerges or a new beat gets hot, there's a period where editors scramble to connect everything to it. In the early days of the self-driving hype cycle, around 2016 and 2017, you'd get pieces connecting autonomous vehicles to literally anything with wheels. A new movie featured a car? Autonomous vehicles angle. A video game had a racing mode? Autonomous vehicles angle. It was exhausting and it didn't serve anyone, least of all the readers who actually wanted to understand what was happening with the technology and the regulatory frameworks around it.

Policy coverage in particular suffers when the beat gets diluted with off-topic material. The NHTSA rulemakings, the state-by-state licensing patchwork, the liability questions that still haven't been resolved in any satisfying legal framework, the ongoing tension between federal preemption and local authority over AV testing corridors, these are genuinely complicated and genuinely important things that deserve careful, sustained attention. They don't get that attention when the beat is being used as a catch-all for anything vaguely car-adjacent.

It's too early to say whether the current regulatory environment is going to produce something coherent or whether we're heading into another few years of jurisdictional chaos, but what I can say is that the story is actually there, in the dockets and the testimony and the quiet lobbying happening in Sacramento and Austin and Columbus right now. That's where I want to be spending my reporting energy.

So here's what today is. Today is a placeholder, honestly. A brief pause to say that we didn't have the material to do something real, and rather than pretend otherwise, I'm telling you directly. Call me old-fashioned, but I think readers notice when they're being given filler. They might not articulate it, but they feel it, and over time it erodes the trust that makes this whole enterprise worth anything.

The Widow's Bay coverage at The Autopian is worth reading if you like cars and good TV writing, and I mean that without any sarcasm. Go check it out. It's a different kind of automotive journalism, lighter and more pop-cultural, and it's well done in that register. Just don't come to me expecting an AV policy hook that isn't there, because I'm not going to invent one.

Next week there's actually something worth digging into on the federal preemption front, and I've got a few sources I've been working for a while who have things to say about where the NHTSA guidance is heading. That's the piece I want to write. That's the piece you should want to read. We'll get there.

If you want to argue about any of this, my email's on the about page.

Robert "Bob" Macintosh · Yesterday · 4 min