California is home to many autonomous vehicle developers, but until recently its regulations prohibited driverless trucks. This changed in May, when the Department of Motor Vehicles opened its autonomous vehicle permitting regime to heavy-duty vehicles, allowing California to join dozens of other states while still imposing the most restrictive regulations in the country. Unfortunately, this compromise wasn’t enough for the California Teamsters union, which filed suit this month challenging the DMV’s new rules on procedural grounds.
Autonomous vehicles, including trucks, are positioned to improve road safety dramatically. Automated driving systems cannot drive drunk, drugged, drowsy or distracted. They can react far faster than human drivers, “see” in the dark and are programmed to follow the rules of the road. These technologies could eliminate the nine out of 10 crashes caused by human error or misbehavior, and early data bear this out.
Autonomous vehicles also have the potential to significantly reduce operating costs by lessening and eventually eliminating the role of human driving, a shift that has predictably sparked a backlash from organized labor.
The amended California autonomous vehicle rules were approved in April after a two-year process that included robust public input. After multiple rounds of refinement, the new state rules allow heavy-duty autonomous vehicles to operate without drivers on public roads only if certain conditions are met.
First, owners of autonomous trucks must apply for a permit, complete at least 500,000 miles of testing with a human driver behind the wheel and turn over detailed data to the DMV. Next, if the DMV is satisfied that these vehicles are safe, autonomous trucks must be tested for an additional 500,000 miles or more without a human driver.
Only after no fewer than one million miles of testing on public roads, with at least 200,000 of those miles in California, have been safely carried out to the satisfaction of regulators will an autonomous trucking company be approved to deploy commercially.
If granted a deployment permit, autonomous trucking companies would continue to be subject to strict data collection and reporting requirements, the same safety and weight audit requirements as conventional trucks and to constant DMV oversight empowered to immediately suspend the permits of violators.
Today, most states already allow autonomous trucks to be tested and deployed on public roads, but California has by far the most onerous regulations. Yet, this still proved insufficient for the California Teamsters union, which represents truck drivers and filed suit this month challenging the new DMV rules on procedural grounds.
The Teamsters’ main claim is that the DMV failed to properly estimate the economic impact of the new rules. Under the California Administrative Procedure Act, a “major regulation” is one estimated to have an economic impact of more than $50 million. The California DMV predicted annual costs of compliance at several million dollars. But the Teamsters argue the costs over the next 12 months are far greater, due to large near-term investments by autonomous vehicle companies and potential job losses arising from new competition, and thus require a more detailed “major regulation” economic analysis.
The problem for the Teamsters, as the DMV argued, is that the state anticipates autonomous vehicle industry growth to be small and gradual in the near-term. The high burden to achieve a deployment permit in California and the existing deployment track record of driverless trucks outside California support this argument.
The Teamsters present no evidence that the DMV’s new regulations will have material impacts on the California transportation market over the next year, nor do they offer any mechanism to quantify such extreme near-term forecasts.
The Teamsters have made repeated failed attempts to outlaw autonomous trucks in statute. Importantly, California’s Administrative Procedure Act specifically prohibits using regulatory impact analyses to “reassess statutory policy.”
The California DMV’s methodical multiyear process maintained the most stringent autonomous vehicle regulations in the country. The court should reject the Teamsters’ self-serving attempt to abuse the regulatory process, which aims to deny Californians a safer, more cost-effective transportation system.
Marc Scribner is senior transportation analyst at Reason Foundation.