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A battle is brewing over the future of self-driving trucks in California, and local tech companies are keeping a close watch on Sacramento as it weighs major changes to the industry.
Just last week, the city of Mountain View hosted its Technology Showcase that dove into the latest self-driving trucking technology. But hanging over the event were lingering concerns over a bill, making its way through the state Legislature, that is looking to halt those ambitious ideas in their tracks.
Earlier this month, the California Senate Transportation Committee unanimously passed a bill, Assembly Bill 316, that would prohibit autonomous vehicles (AV) weighing more than 10,000 pounds from operating on the state’s roads without a human operator. The bill, receiving bipartisan support, is now headed to the state Senate for a vote.
While it’s relatively commonplace to spot driverless cars cruising around town with cameras on the roof and no driver in the pilot seat, these aren’t the vehicles this bill is aiming to curb. More specifically, proponents of the bill are trying to keep large autonomous trucks without a driver off California roads for at least five years while a safety record is collected.
The potential ban is ripe with contention between union groups backing the bill and AV companies in opposition, many of which are headquartered here in Mountain View, such as Waymo, Tesla, Aurora Innovation and Kodiak. Mountain View’s Chamber of Commerce has also opposed the bill.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union in support of AB 316, said this bill marks a triumph for public safety and truck drivers, whose jobs may be on the line.
“(AV trucks) are a greedy corporation’s dream. The only thing they love more than underpaying workers is to get rid of workers entirely,” said Jason Rabinowitz, president of Teamsters Joint Council 7. “… If they were honest about just wanting to be able to test this technology and make it work, they would support this legislation because they would want a human operator in there to ensure safety, but they don’t care about safety. They’re trying to make a buck by running these vehicles without a human driver.”
The AV industry claims they can make roads safer by eliminating human error from the equation. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, nearly 5,000 Americans die in truck-related crashes each year. Between 2009 and 2021 the country saw a 71% rise in truck crash fatalities, with the leading cause being driver fatigue.
“What we’ll see with the adoption of this technology is smoother supply chains at lower costs, while saving lives on the road. Autonomous trucks don’t drink and drive, they don’t check their phones when they’re driving, they don’t drive distracted and they don’t have a bad day,” said Dan Goff, head of external affairs at Kodiak, a driverless long-haul truck company headquartered in Mountain View.
But some long-haul truck drivers like Mike Di Bene don’t buy it.
Di Bene, who has been driving trucks for 29 years, said autonomous vehicles can’t interpret road conditions, like poor weather conditions or distracted drivers, as well as humans can.
“The most important thing you can have with the vehicle next to you is eye contact to communicate what you’re doing,” Di Bene said. “Eye contact will save your life.”
Under a Standing General Order, car companies are required to report crashes involving advanced driver assistance systems that cause private property damage on public roads. While there have been no major crashes involving driverless trucks, legislators and Teamsters maintain that there isn’t enough data to demonstrate it’s a good idea to allow driverless trucks to barrel down California highways.
A study published by non-partisan research group Rand Corp found autonomous vehicles likely need to drive hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. Data collected by the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which advocates for and represents leading AV companies, shows that AVs have driven more than 44 million miles on U.S. public roads.
Kodiak’s trucks have driven 2 million miles on public roads, Goff said. Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company and a subsidiary of Alphabet, has a fleet that has driven over 20 million miles total, according to their website.
Di Bene said statistics boasted by autonomous trucking companies are “very conveniently cherry-picked,” because there’s not enough public data available to compare the dangers imposed by human operators versus self-driving trucks.
“These vehicles that they’re pushing are not legally able to be driven on our roads because they have not been proven to be safe. So it’s convenient to point at humans when (AV trucks) don’t have a track record yet,” Di Bene said.
Legislators want more time to study the technology’s safety. Assembly member Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), the head of the Assembly’s transportation committee, said the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry – citing reports of robotaxis causing car jams, blocking emergency vehicles and fleeing from police – that she doesn’t want to make the same mistakes with big rigs this time around.
“The DMV has not done a great job at regulating this space,” Friedman said.
The Department of Motor Vehicles is tasked with issuing permits to all types of AVs, assuming the vehicles adhere to regulations. But legislators want to halt the DMV’s ability to grant those permits to long-haul trucks because of how disappointed they’ve been with the DMV’s deployment of driverless cars in the state.
“A lot of people have this sense that all of this is happening in an unregulated environment or unregulated fashion and simply the opposite is true,” Goff said. AB 316 “adds another layer of political control over a process that has been managed by experts and professionals very diligently,” he said.
Companies in the autonomous vehicle industry have been working hand-in-hand with the Department of Motor Vehicles for over five years to develop rules and regulations for the deployment of AV trucks, Goff said.
How will jobs fare with self-driving trucks?
Beyond safety concerns, proponents of the bill worry that the new technology will eliminate jobs – even those beyond trucking.
“It’s easy to maybe say, ‘Well, you know, Mike’s worried about protecting his job.’ You know, that is a small part of it. But this technology will eventually be pushed to everything with wheels – from truck drivers taking cargo interstate, to bus drivers, to package delivery vehicles,” Di Bene said. “This has the ability to get rid of hundreds of thousands of jobs, coast to coast. And these are hard-working American families trying to put food on the table.”
But Goff said concerns about job loss caused by AV trucks are “misplaced” because there are less long-haul truck drivers than ever before.
The American Trucking Association reports that the country is facing a record truck driver shortage, and it doesn’t look like those numbers will recover anytime soon. The shortage of drivers, which was around 78,000 in 2022, will likely double by 2031. The AV industry says that the driver shortage, combined with an aging average truck driver age of 46 years, will mitigate job loss.
Many AV companies use a “transfer hub” model, in which long driving routes are broken up between an automated truck and a human operator. The idea is to designate less complex highway driving – typically in desolate southern states – to automated trucks, leaving the more complex urban segment of the route to human drivers.
Those inside the AV industry say truck drivers could still find work close to home on short-haul routes or with logistics jobs at transfer hubs. However, a study notes that short-haul routes are unlikely to compensate for the loss in long-haul route wages.
“Our technology is really focused on long-haul driving. There are people who love long-haul driving. But, frankly, there aren’t a ton of them and there are fewer and fewer. Being a long-haul truck driver is a difficult and dangerous job that keeps people away from their families for sometimes days, weeks, months at a time,” Goff said.
Worries swirl over companies leaving California
With limits on self-driving truck technology proposed specifically in California, AV companies argue that the regulations would harm the state’s ability to compete.
“(The bill) will impact the operations of this emerging technology out of California with negative repercussions for California supply chains, consumers and the entire goods movement industry,” Goff said.
Currently, many AV trucking companies, like Kodiak and Aurora Innovation, test trucks out-of-state, in places like Arizona or Texas, where autonomous trucks are allowed to operate on public roads without a human operator.
“Today, most states allow our team to deploy our autonomous trucks and deliver value to our freight customers. In California, however, autonomous trucks are currently prohibited on public roads. This means we can’t bring the benefits of our self-driving technology to businesses and consumers here in our home state. We hope to see California leaders take action to welcome this homegrown technology and prioritize safety on our roads,” Sydnee Journel, senior manager of government relations at Aurora Innovations, said in an email to the Mountain View Voice.
Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), co-author of the bill, isn’t concerned by companies threatening to take business out of state, despite worries of a “tech exodus” trend seen since COVID-19.
“It’s easy for people to threaten to leave,” said Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), co-author of the bill. “People aren’t going to leave because of this,” she said, noting the rich pool of technology talent clustered in Silicon Valley.
