By admin 
The labor union representing truck drivers sued California on Wednesday over new rules that allow the testing and eventual deployment of heavy-duty driverless trucks on the state’s roads and highways.
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The California Teamsters’ petition, filed in Alameda Superior Court, says driverless trucks pose a danger to the public and threaten the jobs of 200,000 drivers. They state, it says in the suit, failed to fully consider the public safety and economic impacts of allowing them to operate.
“Every day brings new evidence that … robotaxis are putting public safety at risk,” Teamsters California co-chair Peter Finn said in a news release. “Those dangers scale up exponentially when you consider trucks that are up to 16 times heavier and moving at highway speeds.”
The lawsuit was filed in response to rules announced in April by the California Department of Motor Vehicles that establish permitting criteria for the commercial use of driverless vehicles, including heavy-duty trucks weighing more than 10,001 pounds.
The regulations require manufacturers to complete 50,000 miles of testing for light-duty trucks and 500,000 miles of testing for heavy-duty trucks, such as tractor-trailers. The rules also expand oversight of all autonomous vehicles, including establishing a procedure for law enforcement agencies to issues citations to the companies that own them if the vehicles break traffic laws.
But the union claims the regulations were established hastily, favoring the autonomous vehicle industry over highly skilled drivers.
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“The DMV rushed to promulgate these rules under the guise of amending existing light-duty autonomous testing regulations — which had already covered smaller autonomous vehicles like robotaxis or Waymos — in order to serve corporate interests, with little regard for the health, safety, or economic stability of everyday Californians and California businesses,” the lawsuit says.
The state treated its regulations as if they were minor amendments to existing rules governing autonomous taxis and certain self-driving cars, when they were not, said Julie Gutman Dickinson, a Los Angeles-based attorney who is leading the case.
“The DMV abused its discretion,” Gutman Dickinson said. “It irresponsibly, carelessly and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the impact of the autonomous vehicle regulations.”
The action, filed in the form of a petition for a writ of mandate, asks the court to order the DMV to rescind the regulations and conduct a study known as a standardized regulatory impact assessment before developing new rules expanding the use of driverless vehicles in the state.
It also asks the court to declare the new rules to be unclear and require the DMV to share the data it used to develop them.
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A DMV spokesperson said the agency could not comment on pending litigation.