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