California DMV website shows Samsung has secured a permit to test self-driving cars
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's new testing permit slots into a California DMV pipeline that has been filling steadily through 2017: Uber only came around after its standoff with the state, applying for a permit in March after initially refusing, and Lyft followed with its own permit in November. The DMV's public website has become the de facto scoreboard for who is allowed to put autonomous vehicles on California roads.
Samsung is not alone among consumer-tech giants using the state as its proving ground — Apple quietly grew its permitted test fleet from three vehicles in April 2017 to 27 by January 2018. For a company whose core business is devices rather than cars, the permit signals that autonomous driving is now treated as strategic R&D worth a physical presence on California roads.
First-order effects
- Samsung gains legal standing to run self-driving test vehicles on public California roads, joining the same permitted cohort as Uber, Lyft, and Apple rather than watching from outside the regulatory gate.
Second-order effects
- Every new entrant on the DMV list raises the competitive bar for the incumbents already testing there — Apple's rapid fleet expansion shows how quickly permitted players scale once they clear the entry hurdle, pressuring rivals to match headcount and road miles.
Third-order effects
- The permit ladder points from testing toward commerce: by 2023 the same DMV issued its first permit allowing actual sale or lease of an automated-driving vehicle, to Mercedes-Benz for its Level 3 Drive Pilot — suggesting today's test permits are the on-ramp to a regulated commercial market.
The trend: California's DMV permit registry is evolving from a testing checkpoint into the industry's standard path from autonomous R&D to commercial deployment, drawing in tech companies far beyond traditional automakers.