Driverless trucks are coming and unions aren’t happy about it
Will Trump side with driverless trucking startups or the labor movement?
We are five weeks away from the Ride AI summit in Los Angeles on April 2. We’re bringing together industry leaders to discuss what’s working and what comes next for autonomous vehicles. I will be there, and we’ve got a great lineup of speakers, including Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, Toyota Research Institute CEO Gil Pratt, and executives from Waymo, Kodiak, Zoox, and Wayve—with more speakers still to be announced.
For a limited time, Understanding AI readers can click here to get a ticket for the discounted price of $500. You can also click here if you’d like to apply to speak at the conference—we’re especially interested in applications from people with hands-on experience building autonomous vehicle technology.
Robotaxi companies like Waymo get a lot of attention, but economically speaking, trucking is far more important. The trucking industry had revenues of almost $1 trillion in 2023, an order of magnitude larger than the $80 billion consumers spent on taxis and ride hailing apps that year. But so far no one has managed to operate driverless trucks at freeway speeds. The startup Aurora is aiming to be the first.
When I visited Aurora last August, the company was aiming to do its first driverless ride before the end of 2024. In October, Aurora pushed back the deadline to April 2025. The launch date could slip again, of course, but I don’t think the company will let it slip very much. So there’s a good chance that Aurora will have fully driverless semi trucks traveling between Dallas and Houston in the coming months.
Labor unions aren’t happy about this. During the last two legislative sessions, the Teamsters and other labor groups convinced the California legislature to pass bills effectively banning driverless trucks from the state’s highways. Both times the bills were vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom.
But even if Newsom had signed that legislation, it wouldn’t have kept Aurora out of business-friendly states like Texas. So labor unions have also tried to stop driverless trucks at the federal level. One surprising front in this battle: the reflective triangles truckers place on the road to warn other drivers when their rigs are stopped at the side of the highway.
The fight over warning triangles
Federal regulations require truckers to place these triangles within 10 minutes of stopping. By definition, a driverless truck doesn’t have a driver who can perform this task. And so strictly enforcing this rule could effectively ban driverless vehicles from American freeways.
A couple of years ago, Aurora and Waymo (which had a trucking program that has since been mothballed) asked the Biden Administration for an exemption that would allow a driverless truck to warn drivers with bright flashing yellow lights on its side mirrors instead of warning triangles. The companies said their tests showed these lights were just as effective at alerting other drivers.
But just before Biden left office, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rejected the companies’ request. The agency found that Aurora and Waymo had failed to demonstrate how they “would ensure an equivalent or greater level of safety than would be achieved” using flashing lights. Last month Aurora sued, asking the court to grant the exemption request.
To better understand this debate, I read through dozens of comments that interested parties submitted to the FMCSA over the last two years. It quickly became clear this wasn’t just a fight over the relative merits of warning triangles and flashing lights. It was part of a broader fight over the future of trucking automation.
Lining up behind Aurora were a bunch of business interests—including many who had relationships with Aurora. There were supportive comments from the American Trucking Association, the Texas Trucking Association, and other trade groups representing trucking companies that are likely to use Aurora’s technology in the coming years. There were also supportive comments from Aurora partners like PACCAR (makers of Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks), Volvo, and Continental (a “tier 1” parts supplier that will sell Aurora’s technology to truck manufacturers). And there were supportive comments from other driverless truck startups, including Kodiak and Stack AV.
The most prominent opponents of the Aurora exemption requests were labor groups: the Transport Workers Union of America, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO. These groups didn’t just object to the specifics of Aurora’s technical workaround. They were opposed to the concept of trucks not having drivers in them.
“Waymo and Aurora do not wish to have humans onboard their vehicles and therefore cannot meet the existing standard,” the Transport Workers Union wrote. “To be clear, the TWU believes that well-trained, qualified operators are an essential component of safety in our transportation systems.”
“Triangles and road flares are inherently more flexible,” wrote the Amalgamated Transit Union. They “allow a human operator to position them to ensure the safety of oncoming vehicles. Similarly, it is not clear how beacons would provide adequate warning when a [truck] is turned over on its side, is on fire, or is having electrical problems.”
The ATU added that “commercial motor vehicles are complicated pieces of machinery. The vehicles face adverse situations and challenges that, without a human on board, the autonomous [vehicle] is ill-equipped to handle.”
Only a handful of genuinely independent groups—those that weren’t financially tied either to trucking companies or truckers—submitted comments. The Fraternal Order of Police sided with Aurora—though it didn’t explain its position in much detail. The Institute for Safer Trucking, a non-profit organization supported by many people who lost loved ones to trucking crashes, also supported Aurora’s request.
“Warning triangles, though well-intentioned, have several limitations,” the group wrote. “They can be toppled by other road users, blown over by wind, or fail due to various reasons.”
The IST pointed out that the warning triangle rule puts human truck drivers in danger because it “necessitates that drivers walk in the often narrow and hazardous space between their vehicle and traffic. This can expose truck drivers to significant risk, especially in conditions of poor visibility or adverse weather.”
On the other side was a comment from the “Truck Safety Coalition, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH), Parents Against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T.), and our volunteers, who are the family and friends of truck crash victims.”
Like the labor unions, these groups made clear that their beef wasn’t just with warning lights—it was with the concept of driverless trucks. They warned that granting Aurora’s exemption request would “short-circuit” efforts by federal regulators to “issue informed rules, regulations, guidance, reporting and performance testing necessary to consider the potential safe deployment of driverless trucks in interstate commerce.”
The groups asked federal regulators to require companies like Aurora to keep a human driver behind the wheel for longer so that the companies could do more testing and gather more safety data.
A fundamental issue here is that there’s no formal regulatory system for driverless trucks. A pharmaceutical company needs a license from the FDA before it can sell a new drug. An airplane manufacturer needs approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before it can sell a new model of airplane. But there’s no process like this for driverless vehicles.
And so Aurora’s request for an exemption from an obscure rule about warning triangles became a venue for a broader argument about whether driverless trucks are ready for public roads.
Aurora says it can launch without an exemption
Although Aurora is suing to have the FMCSA’s December ruling overturned, the company says it will launch in April whether or not it has an exemption.
I asked Aurora CTO Sterling Anderson about this in a December interview on the Ride AI podcast. He said that even without an exemption, Aurora could legally launch in April if it had a way to “rescue the trucks within 10 minutes.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ve got an escort,” Anderson told me. “That means you’ve got a stream of trucks that are just doing commercial loads, and you’ll have somebody who will be available that will be on site within 10 minutes.”
A key part of Aurora’s strategy is to focus on a few routes—which Aurora calls “lanes”—to start. Aurora’s first lane will run between a depot north of Houston and second depot south of Dallas. Concentrating service in this way could mean that a small number of people can be on call to place backup triangles for a large number of trucks all driving the same route.
Still, I’m not sure I buy Anderson’s answer. The distance between Aurora’s Houston and Dallas depots is about 200 miles. To have someone able to reach any point within 10 minutes, Aurora would need to station people once every 10 miles. On a 200-mile route, that would mean 20 people.
That might not be a big deal a few years from now when Aurora has hundreds or thousands of trucks traveling this route every day. But Aurora has said it’s only going to deploy 10 trucks to start and have “tens of trucks” by the end of 2025. At that scale, placing 20 people along the Houston to Dallas route is going to be a major expense.
The bottom line is that the warning triangle rule is going to significantly increase the cost of running a driverless truck fleet. Ultimately, it may be up to the Trump Administration whether to help Aurora out by waiving it.
Traditionally, you’d expect a Republican administration to take a more business-friendly stance than a Democratic one. But Donald Trump has made significant inroads with blue collar workers, which might change the political calculus here. The Teamsters have traditionally supported Democrats, but it made the decision not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. So I could imagine the Trump administration trying to curry favor with unions and their blue-collar members by rejecting Aurora’s requests.
Join me at the Ride AI conference in Los Angeles on April 2. For a limited time, Understanding AI readers can click here to purchase a ticket for $500.
Assuming the truck must have a data link to its base, it could be equipped with a UAV that could be launched and operated remotely to place triangles or flares as needed, more rapidly and safely than a driver could. A possible alternative might be an array of mortar tubes that could project folded warning devices in a predetermined pattern, with the devices unfolding on impact. Just two instant ideas; surely a good engineering study would quickly come up with better.
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