If it were up to the Teamsters, they would have us all in Flintstone cars. Teamsters California filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) with the goal of overturning the decision to allow autonomous heavy-duty trucks on the state’s roads. The suit argues that self-driving trucks threaten more than 200,000 trucking jobs and asks the court to stop them from taking effect. Earlier this year, the DMV updated its autonomous vehicle regulation to permit testing and eventual commercial operation of trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds. The Teamsters claim the agency used an abbreviated rulemaking process reserved for minor changes and failed to conduct a full economic impact study. They further allege the DMV wrongly concluded the rules would eliminate zero jobs. This lawsuit is a clear example of rent seeking. Rather than competing on the merits in the free market, the union is attempting to use the courts to protect the status quo. The Teamsters have also argued that autonomous trucks pose an even greater safety risk than smaller self-driving cars. However, human error remains a leading cause of truck crashes. Current examples of autonomous vehicles also demonstrate that they are much safer. For example, Waymo cars had 88% fewer property-damage claims and 92% fewer bodily-injury claims when compared to human-driven vehicles. The data make sense. Human drivers can get drunk, drowsy, and/or distracted, putting them at greater risk of an accident. By contrast, an autonomous vehicle does not face those impediments, making it safer. Furthermore, the longer autonomous trucks are deployed, the better they become at processing more data and responding more effectively. In the same way that the more a human drives the better a driver they become, autonomous vehicles operate under the same framework. Blocking this progress will make autonomous vehicles worse