California spent years as the one big state where a driverless Class 8 truck could not legally turn a wheel. That changed on April 28, when the DMV adopted regulations covering vehicles over 10,001 pounds. Three months later the Teamsters asked a judge to throw those regulations out — and while the petition works its way through Alameda County Superior Court, the agency has gone right on issuing permits. The distinction worth holding onto: everything approved so far still has a human being in the seat.
What the DMV actually approved
The April 28 rules do not flip a switch. They lay out a ladder. A company starts by testing with a safety driver behind the wheel, moves to driverless testing only after clearing the mileage requirement, and only then may apply to deploy commercially. For heavy trucks the DMV set the bar an order of magnitude higher than for cars: 500,000 miles at each testing stage, against 50,000 for light-duty vehicles. The package did not appear overnight either — the formal draft went out for comment on April 25, 2025, and a revised version drew a second comment window from December 3 to 18, 2025.
The lawsuit is about arithmetic, not accidents
Teamsters California, which represents more than 250,000 workers across industries, filed a petition for writ of mandate on August 5. The argument is procedural. Under the state's Administrative Procedure Act, a rule expected to cost the California economy more than $50 million a year triggers a Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment — a full economic study with its own public process. The DMV concluded the truck rules would land at roughly $5.8 million and would not cost jobs, and took the streamlined path reserved for minor changes. The union's filing puts the real first-year figure near $288 million in direct costs and another $576 million indirectly, which would have made the assessment mandatory. The petition also warns that the technology could eventually eliminate the jobs of more than 200,000 employed truck drivers in the state.
The legislature tried twice; the governor said no twice
Before the courtroom there was Sacramento. AB 316, which would have required a trained human operator aboard any autonomous truck, was vetoed on September 22, 2023. AB 2286 came back the following year, cleared the Senate 32-3 and the Assembly 70-1, and was vetoed on September 27, 2024. Two near-unanimous votes, two vetoes — which is how the question ended up with the DMV in the first place, and now with a judge.
Meanwhile, the permits kept issuing
Filing a case did not pause the program. By mid-August the first heavy-duty testing permits were live: TechCrunch reported on August 14 that Aurora and Kodiak had them, and Trucking Info counted four holders four days later, adding Gatik and Plus.ai. Every one of those permits is for supervised testing, with a safety driver aboard. As of the end of August no company holds a driverless permit for a truck of this weight class in California, and none holds a deployment permit. Kodiak has said publicly it intends to take the driver out by the end of the year; that is a stated plan, not an approval.
“ Such a critical decision with life-and-death consequences must involve public input and transparency. ”
That is the whole fight in one sentence. The union is not arguing in this filing that the trucks crash; it is arguing that a rule of this size was never put through the study the law requires, and that a $5.8 million estimate is what let the DMV skip it.
The capital is not waiting for the verdict
Separately from the California case — and with no connection to it — Gatik closed a $200 million Series D in late August, led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. The company says it has run about 85,000 fully driverless deliveries and is sitting on a contracted backlog north of $600 million, with Walmart, Kroger and PepsiCo among its customers. Whatever an Alameda County judge decides about California's paperwork, the money backing the middle mile is being written elsewhere.
For a driver running California today, nothing has changed in the mirror: any autonomous truck sharing the lane has a person in it, by rule. What is being decided is the speed of the next step, and on what evidence. A writ petition of this kind can take a year or more, and it can end without touching the technology at all — if the court agrees the process was wrong, the usual remedy is to send the DMV back to redo the study, not to ban the trucks.
What to watch next
The first driverless permit for a vehicle over 10,001 pounds — nobody has one yet, and that is the line that actually matters.
Whether the court reaches the economic-impact question or disposes of the case on procedure.
The DMV's permit-holder lists, which are public and update as companies move between testing stages.
Whether a third bill lands in Sacramento in 2027 after two vetoes — the legislature's votes were not close.
Autonomy news without the hype cycle
We read the permits and the filings so the headline does not get to do your thinking.