Independent analysis of the
autonomous vehicle industry
Signals, partnerships, market shifts, safety discussions, and deployment strategy across the autonomous mobility ecosystem. No hype. Just what holds up in the field.
Latest Commentary
Shorter observations on incident response, safety governance, regulatory relations, and operational readiness in autonomous mobility.
Incidents are sequences, not moments
The hardest part of an incident is often everything after it. Intake, triage, handoffs, evidence, after action review, corrective actions, and closure. Trust improves when this lifecycle is consistent and auditable — not just when the initial response is fast.
Most operational breakdowns happen not because a team failed to detect an incident, but because the process that follows detection is informal, ownership is unclear, and the evidence captured is insufficient for the scrutiny that comes later. Regulators and city partners do not only ask what happened. They ask what changed afterward.
UL 4600 is a safety argument that must be maintained
Organisations often treat UL 4600 compliance as a milestone rather than a continuous commitment. The friction appears not at initial certification but in maintenance — specifically in traceability between incidents and safety case updates, alignment between operational data and safety claims, and configuration changes across system revisions.
Safety maturity shows up in governance, not just in testing results. The question is not whether a system passed its initial safety case review. It is whether the safety case is still accurate after 50,000 miles of operational data have accumulated and three software updates have been deployed.
Trust is cumulative for cities and regulators
Stakeholders do not only ask what happened. They ask what changed afterward, how recurrence is prevented, and how consistency is maintained across markets. Evidence readiness and clear narratives make those conversations calmer — and those conversations are increasingly what determines whether an operator keeps its licence to operate in a given city.
The operators who build a track record of transparent, well-documented incident response are in a structurally different position when scrutiny arrives than those who are constructing their narrative after the fact. Trust is not built in a single incident response. It is built across dozens of them.
Start narrow, then scale
The instinct in large organisations is to design the complete end-to-end incident management system before deploying any of it. In practice, this creates a governance framework that is too abstract to implement and too rigid to adapt as operations evolve.
Organisations that make the most progress start with one workflow — incident triage, evidence packaging, or corrective action tracking — prove it works, then expand. Narrow implementation with genuine ownership is more valuable than a comprehensive process that exists only in documentation. The goal is a system that the operations team actually uses under pressure, not one that satisfies an audit on a calm day.
Industry intelligence
Alongside our core research, we track and analyse the broader AV industry — partnerships, deployments, regulatory shifts, and technology moves. Recent coverage published through our LinkedIn platform:
Phoenix is the world's most operationally complex AV market right now
Five operators. Five technology approaches. One dissolved partnership. One active recall recovery. No shared governance framework. ITquette examines what that means for operations and safety. Read the full article →
The Credible Safety Evidence Framework™ — Framework #4
Stakeholders do not trust safety claims because evidence exists. They trust safety claims because the evidence is traceable, verifiable, repeatable, and contextually valid. Read the full framework.
What July 4th revealed about AV incident documentation at scale
Dozens of Waymo vehicles stranded, towed, and involved in fire-adjacent events in a single night. The more useful question is not whether AVs are ready — it is what happens to the documentation afterward. Read on LinkedIn →
Why autonomous vehicle safety fails without scenario classification
A practical note on why incidents must be grouped into usable scenario classes before risk reduction can be measured, attributed, and defended across real-world deployments. Read the full article →
Four partnerships. One week. One signal.
Nvidia, Rivian, Wayve, and Zoox — all in seven days. What the density of AV deals in March 2026 signals about where the industry is heading. Read the full article →
Nvidia × Uber — Level 4 robotaxis in 2027
What Drive Hyperion is, what Alpamayo 1.5 means for edge cases, and why Jensen Huang's GTC announcement is more significant than most coverage suggested. Read the full article →
Uber's AV partner architecture
How Uber became the operating system for the driverless era — and what 25+ partnerships signals about where value will accumulate in the AV stack. Read the full article →
Uber × Rivian — $1.25B and the exclusive clause
Why the exclusivity clause matters more than the investment figure, and what it means that Uber is now buying vehicles rather than distributing them. Read the full article →
Will AVs replace every car on the road?
A data-led analysis of the case for optimism, the structural barriers that remain, and the five milestones that will tell us whether the optimists are right. Read the full article →
What happens to car rental in the AV economy?
Enterprise, Hertz, Avis, and Turo face a structural threat. A use-case breakdown, company-by-company verdict, and three open questions the data does not yet answer. Read the full article →
Visual briefs
Single-page visual summaries of key partnerships and developments — designed for quick reading and sharing. Each brief covers the numbers, the structure, and the ITquette insight in one page.
Working through an incident documentation or safety evidence challenge?
ITquette Autonomous Lab is the research arm of Itquette LLC — a Phoenix-based AV safety operations company. If the analysis connects with something your organization is actively working through in live operations, we welcome that conversation.