The Battle Over Driverless Trucks in California Resumes

Last summer, a legislative battle broke out in California over the issue of a new generation of self-driving vehicles, specifically trucks capable of carrying freight. The legislature passed a bill that would require such vehicles to have a human “safety operator” in the cab while it was in operation, along with other restrictions. Governor Gavin Newsom disagreed and vetoed the bill, leading to breathless headlines such as “Gavin Newsom sides with the robots in autonomous vehicle debate.” Newsom may have won in the first round, but the opponents of autonomous delivery trucks are back and their backers in the legislature have introduced a new version of the same bill. But this legislation isn’t being pushed by safety advocates worried about potential shortcomings in the technology. It’s being driven by the labor unions. You can probably guess why already. (California Globe)

A bill to require driverless trucks to have a driver in the vehicle was reintroduced in the Assembly on Thursday, less than 5 months after Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the almost identical AB 316.

Assembly Bill 2286, authored by Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), would require a manufacturer of an autonomous vehicle to report to the department a collision on a public road that involved one of its autonomous vehicles with a gross vehicle weight of 10,001 pounds or more that is operating under a testing permit that resulted in damage of property, bodily injury, or death within 10 days of the collision. In addition, the bill would require a manufacturer of an autonomous vehicle to annually submit to the department specified information regarding the deactivation of the autonomous mode for its autonomous vehicles with a gross vehicle weight of 10,001 pounds or more that were operating under a testing permit that authorized the vehicle to operate on public roads.

You can get a good hint about the actual motives behind AB 2286 from some of the very specific technical restrictions involved. It would ban the operation of an autonomous vehicle with a gross vehicle weight of 10,001 pounds or more on public roads “for testing purposes, transporting goods, or transporting passengers without a human safety operator physically present” at the time of operation.

As you could likely guess, smaller vehicles aren’t much of a concern to the authors. They are restricting larger trucks used for transporting goods or passengers, forcing them to include a “safety operator.” And this doesn’t have much to do with “safety,” either, because if one of those things goes haywire, there’s probably not much that the “operator” will be able to do about it, particularly at high speed.

To be sure, there have been incidents of autonomous vehicles getting in accidents, so safety is a concern, particularly for driverless taxis. But why are the Teamsters pushing this legislation so hard? Wouldn’t a truckload of goods going off the road be safer if there was no human onboard to be injured or killed? The concern of the labor unions (if it wasn’t already obvious) is addressed in the linked report when they describe, ” TheTeamsters’ concern of keeping union drivers employed by being safety drivers in the AV trucks.”

If the lightbulb hadn’t already gone off over your head, there it is. The unions don’t like driverless trucks because they could eliminate union jobs for drivers. So they want the legislature to force the shipping company to employ union “safety operators.” In other words, they will make them pay drivers who don’t have to drive.

Wasn’t one of the purposes of having autonomous vehicles to reduce labor costs and downstream costs to consumers?  They would also, at least in theory, cut down on the number of drivers killed in accidents each year. But that doesn’t matter to the labor unions. They don’t want their slice of the pie diminished and they donate a lot of money to the campaigns of the Democrats who write these laws. 

Newsom’s motives in all of this weren’t much more noble. He vetoed the law last year because he was heavily lobbied by the Silicon Valley tech giants who are developing all of this autonomous technology. Will he go to the mat for them again this time? We shall see. But the one thing that nobody involved in this “safety operator” debate actually seems to give a hoot about is safety.