Teamsters Sues California DMV Over Autonomous Trucking Rules
Another lawsuit in the greatest country on Earth? It must be a day ending with a “y.” In this case it is the Teamsters union suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) over approval for self-driving commercial trucks.
Details
On April 28th, 2026, the California DMV announced new oversight and rules to allow tech companies to apply for testing of autonomous vehicle technology. Now Teamsters California is fighting back, saying that the agency “circumvented laws requiring the agency to study and publicly disclose the economic impacts of allowing self-driving heavy-duty trucks on the state’s roads, thereby denying the public meaningful input on the decision.”
Beyond the California DMV disregarding proper procedure, Teamsters California says that the California DMV did not consider the implications of further studying into fully autonomous vehicles. The writ petition states:
“The deployment of Self-Driving Trucks, authorized by the regulatory changes, has the potential to eventually wipe out the jobs of more than 200,000 employee semi-truck drivers working across California. A similarly large number of self-employed drivers operating commercial vehicles weighing between 10,001 pounds and 25,999 pounds could also be impacted.“
So as with every lawsuit involving the trucking industry, this is going to play out in court over the course of many years and there may or may not be an injunction granted requiring the California DMC to cease the permit application process for tech companies, or even test driving on the road.
Conclusion
Despite minor strides in the development of fully autonomous cars, the advent of them replacing the human driver is still far, far into the future, if it ever happens at all. We wrote at the start of the decade about the obstacles that the technology would need to overcome before it starts taking away good-paying truck driver careers, and over six years later not one of them has been resolved. At the current rate things are developing, it will be numerous decades before a machine can fully perform better than the average person with a CDL, so people currently in the business have little to fear.
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