Los Angeles – California regulators have published a new proposal to allow the test of autonomous heavy duty trucks on public roads.
The State Motorized Vehicle Department announced the regulations proposed on Friday to allow the test of autonomous vehicles of more than 10,001 pounds, opening the door for companies to test autonomous driving technology with autonomous commercial semi-ramions previously prohibited on the road.
Regulators say that autonomous heavy duty trucks are already being tested in other states, including Texas, Arizona and Arkansas. California is the only state with regulations that explicitly prohibit them.
The regulations are subject to a period of public comments that end in June.
They will probably face labor unions that represent the hundreds of thousands of state commercial truck drivers, who are concerned about the safety and loss of truck driving work to automation in the future.
The California Legislature approved a bill In 2023, demand that human drivers aboard autonomous trucks, but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, who said that additional regulation was unnecessarily because the existing laws that govern self -sufficient vehicles were enough.
The proposed regulations will also improve the data reports requirements for manufacturers, such as informing instances in which cars stop in the middle of an active road for any reason and must be recovered. They will give the State Motorized Vehicle Department more authority to apply “incremental application measures” against companies instead of completely suspending their test permits.
