It’s coming. In fact, it’s already being pushed for in California.

Driverless trucks have been operating for some time in Texas and other States across the south, moving the middle mile—the travel from warehouse/depot to warehouse/depot. Human drivers handle the first and last mile, loading and hooking up/unhooking and parking and unloading freight trailers at the start and destination sites. Especially at the destination, since driverless trucks still can’t back up (that’s skill that’s much harder to teach a computer to do).

With this empirically demonstrated capability and safety as backdrop, California enacted state regulations that removed a ban on driverless trucks weighing 10,001 pounds or more, and allowed testing and deployment of such vehicles through a permit process. Naturally, unions don’t like that, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in California sued the State’s DMV over those regulations. The Teamsters’ plaint:

The deployment of Self-Driving Trucks, authorized by the regulatory changes, has the potential to eventually wipe out the jobs of more than 200,000 employee semi-truck drivers working across California[.]

The union doesn’t care that there is no intrinsic right for anyone to drive a truck for a company or for himself. Hiring, or not, truck drivers is strictly a business decision as companies seek to hold down the cost of their delivery operations, and as customer companies seek to hold down costs of getting deliveries. Driverless trucks are cheaper to operate than driver-ed trucks: as recently as 2025, roughly 44% of the cost of operating a truck was in driver wages and benefits. Robots don’t have much need for those.

Peter Finn, the Teamsters’ Vice President At-Large, added that communities want to see investments in people and middle-class jobs against the broader backdrop of artificial-intelligence growth. Again, this is a business decision, not an inherent right to any particular job in the pursuit of those investments.

If the union succeeds in scotching those California regulations, its next move will be to push for literal featherbedding: a human in the driverless tractor pulling those freight trailers, even though they’re not needed for any reason other than fueling union coffers. And artificially elevating costs to trucking companies, companies receiving truckers’ deliveries, and us American consumers as the end buyer of the trucked goods.