Gavin Newsom dragged to court in self-driving truck battle that could change state forever

Gov. Gavin Newsom created an “existential threat” for 200,000 workers after his administration improperly rolled out regulations for self-driving trucks, a powerful labor union claimed in a new lawsuit with huge implications for California workers and Silicon Valley.

The California Teamsters union is suing the Department of Motor Vehicles, other state agencies and their leaders for adopting new rules on autonomous trucks, Politico reported.

The Golden State was the only one to ban large self-driving vehicles as powerful labor interests were concerned over the number of human truck drivers that would be displaced. But earlier this year, the DMV adopted new regulations that would undo that prohibition.

That pissed off the Teamsters, which represents transportation workers, who view the rules as “an existential threat” to hundreds of thousands of union jobs, their lawsuit said.

“The DMV irresponsibly, carelessly, and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the true economic and human costs of the amended Autonomous Vehicle regulations,” Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney for the Teamsters, told Politico.

“The only way to protect the public’s right to properly scrutinize regulations that will transform transportation in California is for the Court to order the DMV to immediately rescind the illegally enacted regulations.”

The DMV and other state agencies declined to comment.

The lawsuit alleges the DMV did not do a required economic study on the rules’ impacts and that economic costs were severely underestimated. The Teamsters claimed the DMV said that no jobs will be erased by autonomous vehicles, when the union estimates 200,000-plus jobs will be affected.

Newsom has been in the middle of the war between unions and self-driving vehicles before. He vetoed twice state legislation supported by labor unions that would have restricted self-driving trucks.

In his most recent veto statement in 2024, the governor expressed confidence that DMV regulations would set the right balance between worker protections and tech innovation.

Unions had blasted Newsom for his vetoes.

“We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits,” the California Labor Federation said after the first veto in 2023. “We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.”

Outside of job losses, self-driving cars have in recent months taken up headlines for traffic problems they have caused.

For example, on the Fourth of July, numerous Waymo vehicles sat idle on San Francisco streets during heavy traffic and severely exacerbated congestion related to a fireworks show near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Earlier in May, two rogue Waymo cars trapped a California driver in her car for an hour, forcing her to call police for help.

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