California's first heavy self-driving truck permits are already in court — over the review, not the technology

California ended its de facto ban on heavy self-driving trucks this spring, and Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI are now testing on California roads for the first time. The state Department of Motor Vehicles approved new rules on April 28 that lifted the prior restriction on driverless vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds, opening a permitting path for the heaviest autonomous trucks. Aurora and Kodiak are the first recipients, according to TechCrunch, and Kodiak has already started running a small fleet of test trucks around its Mountain View office.

Both companies must keep a human safety operator behind the wheel. Trucks cannot operate on roads with a posted speed limit of 25 mph or below, except on a direct route between origins and destinations. The DMV also required companies to meet safety, insurance, registration, and safety-driver qualification standards before issuing the permits.

Both companies had spent the last two years building commercial track records in Texas because of the home-state ban. Aurora launched a self-driving truck service on the Dallas-to-Houston route in May 2025 and has since added Fort Worth–El Paso, El Paso–Phoenix, Fort Worth–Phoenix, and Laredo–Dallas. Kodiak started commercial driverless operations in an off-road site in West Texas's Permian Basin in January 2025 and has since expanded to on-highway runs including Dallas-to-Houston. The new California permits let both companies work in their home state for the first time.

The Teamsters' California chapter sued the DMV last week in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging that the agency wrote the new rules without the economic-impact study and public safety review that state law requires before allowing autonomous heavy vehicles on public roads. The complaint frames the dispute as procedural: the union argues the DMV bypassed the kind of cost-benefit and safety analysis the legislature contemplated, not that the technology itself is the problem.

That procedural framing matters because it defines what the court is being asked to decide. The Teamsters are not asking a judge to rule on whether robot trucks can drive safely. They are asking whether the DMV had to publish an economic-impact study and consider safety risks to motorists before opening the road. If the court agrees, the permits could be paused while the state runs the review the lawsuit says it skipped. If the court disagrees, the regulatory pipeline for commercial autonomous trucking in California stays open.

The 10,000-pound threshold is what defines the new category. Autonomous vehicle testing in California has been legal for years for lighter vehicles and for heavy trucks with safety drivers, but driverless operation on a public road above that weight was effectively off the table until April. The new rules create a tier for the heaviest class, with a permit process the DMV can iterate. Texas had no comparable barrier, which is why both companies built their commercial track records there.

The next milestones to watch are the Alameda County response to the Teamsters' complaint and any DMV rulemaking that loosens the operator or speed conditions. Until then, "testing" stays distinct from "service" in California, and the regulatory fight is what determines which one comes first.