Who’s on the Hook

Insurance and Liability in the Driverless Trucking Transition

August 2026

Why this brief exists

The Freight Culture Standard’s Price of Blood series has spent eight briefs documenting what happens when a jury looks at a human driver, a carrier, and a $750,000 federal insurance minimum unchanged since 1985. The median nuclear verdict against a trucking company now sits at $51 million. The minimum covers under 1.5 percent of it.

That series assumed a driver on the other side of the lawsuit. Driverless trucking removes that assumption entirely.

This brief picks up where Price of Blood left off. It asks what happens to that same courtroom dynamic when there’s no driver to depose, no hours of service log to subpoena, and the defendant is a technology company instead of a carrier. Every claim below is sourced to a primary document: a jury verdict, a company’s own Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, a federal agency’s own crash reporting rule, or an insurance placement announced by name.

The precedent everyone is citing

On August 1, 2025, a Miami federal jury delivered the first verdict to hold Tesla liable for a fatal crash tied to its Autopilot driver-assist system. The case, Benavides v. Tesla, involved a 2019 crash in Key Largo, Florida. The driver, George McGee, had dropped his phone and was reaching for it when his Model S ran a stop sign at 62 miles an hour and struck two people standing beside a parked car, killing 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon.

The jury split the blame: 67 percent to McGee, 33 percent to Tesla. McGee wasn’t a co-defendant, so his share never gets collected. Tesla’s share was $42.6 million in compensatory damages. On top of that, the jury assessed $200 million in punitive damages against Tesla alone, regardless of the 33 percent fault split. Total Tesla exposure: roughly $243 million. A federal judge upheld the verdict in February 2026. Tesla is appealing.

Here’s the detail that matters for trucking. A law firm analysis of the verdict pointed out that $200 million looks nuclear until you measure it against Tesla’s roughly $1 trillion market value, where it works out to about two ten-thousandths of one percent. The same firm noted the obvious follow-on: that math doesn’t hold for a mid-size autonomous trucking company. And in a truly driverless truck, there’s no McGee. No human left to absorb two-thirds of the fault. The technology takes all of it.

Source: Benavides v. Tesla, Inc., U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Case No. 1:21-cv-21940. Jury verdict entered August 1, 2025, upheld February 20, 2026. Hanson Bridgett LLP, “Tesla’s ‘Nuclear’ Verdict: Potential Impacts on Autonomous Truck Technology,” August 14, 2025.

A field that already culled itself

Before you can ask who pays a judgment, you have to ask whether the company will still exist to pay it. The autonomous trucking field has already thinned out considerably.

TuSimple raised over a billion dollars, went public at an $8.5 billion valuation, then delisted from Nasdaq, exited the United States (US) market entirely, and rebranded to CreateAI to make AI-generated animation. Embark Technology delisted and went private after running out of capital. Waymo shut down its trucking unit, called Via, in 2023 to focus on robotaxis.

What’s left running commercial driverless freight today: Aurora, Kodiak, Waabi, Gatik, and Bot Auto. Pricing insurance risk on this sector isn’t just pricing crash probability. It’s pricing counterparty risk on companies with a documented, recent history of not surviving long enough to pay out a judgment.

Kodiak’s own numbers, filed with the SEC in October 2025, show what that risk looks like inside a company still standing. Net losses ran $56.9 million in 2023, $69.5 million in 2024, and $241.9 million in just the first six months of 2025. Kodiak’s sole customer with driverless vehicles in its fleet, as of that filing, was Atlas Energy Solutions. One customer.

Source: TechCrunch, “Investors rebel as TuSimple pivots from self-driving trucks to AI gaming,” September 13, 2024. FreightWaves, “TuSimple lays off 150 more employees as it winds down US operations,” December 5, 2023. Kodiak AI, Inc., Form S-1, filed with the SEC October 10, 2025.

Two federal bills, pulling opposite directions

Congress has two competing bills in play right now, and they answer the “who’s on the hook” question in opposite ways.

The SELF DRIVE Act of 2026, short for the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution Act, states plainly that complying with the new federal safety standard for automated driving systems (ADS) does not exempt a company from common-law liability. A crash victim could still sue, even if the company followed every federal rule to the letter.

The Uniform Vehicle Safety Standards Act of 2026 does close to the reverse. It would prohibit common-law liability claims against a manufacturer for failing to build a vehicle safer than the applicable federal standard requires.

Neither has passed. The Uniform Law Commission’s own model legislation on automated vehicle liability, meanwhile, sits essentially inactive: no related versions, no related acts, nothing recent.

Underneath the federal fight, states are setting their own numbers. California now holds a manufacturer or operator liable for traffic violations committed by its autonomous vehicles, effective July 2026. Kentucky and California have both set $5 million as the minimum liability insurance requirement for autonomous vehicles. That’s the same number the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act proposes as the new federal floor for human-driven trucking, a number Congress hasn’t passed yet. Autonomous vehicle regulation is starting at the ceiling human-driven trucking reform is still fighting to reach.

Source: SELF DRIVE Act of 2026, H.R. 7390, 119th Congress. Uniform Law Commission, Automated Operation of Vehicles Act, committee page (uniformlaws.org). ArentFox Schiff, “Autonomous Vehicles: Driverless Does Not Mean Liability-Less,” February 26, 2026.

The exemption nobody’s tested in court yet

Federal rule requires a driver to physically place warning triangles on the road when a truck stops on the shoulder. A driverless truck has no driver to do that.

Aurora sued the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in January 2025 after the agency denied its request for an exemption, arguing the century-old triangle rule was outdated and unsupported by data. FMCSA granted the exemption in October 2025, after Aurora took the fight to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Nobody’s tested what that exemption means in a courtroom yet. If a driverless truck sits disabled on a shoulder without a triangle, using a beacon system instead, and gets hit in exactly the scenario the original rule existed to prevent, does the federal exemption help Aurora’s defense or does it become Exhibit A for a plaintiff’s attorney arguing the company chose innovation over a known safety measure? That question is open.

Source: Aurora Innovation, Inc. v. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, filed January 2025. CDLLife, “Aurora granted exemption from reflective triangles for autonomous trucks in wake of lawsuit against FMCSA,” October 14, 2025.

What’s happened so far

The closest real-world precedent for a driverless vehicle causing injury didn’t happen in trucking. It happened in San Francisco, and it produced three separate financial consequences from a single incident, not one.

On October 2, 2023, a hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian, throwing her into the path of a Cruise robotaxi. The Cruise vehicle didn’t detect her underneath it and dragged her 20 feet while attempting to pull over. Three things followed. Fortune first reported, and the Washington Post independently confirmed, a victim settlement between $8 million and $12 million, though Cruise itself has never officially confirmed the figure. California’s Public Utilities Commission separately fined Cruise $75,000 for withholding details of the crash. And in November 2024, the Department of Justice hit Cruise with a $500,000 criminal fine under a deferred prosecution agreement for filing a false report to federal safety regulators to obstruct the investigation. Cruise recalled its entire national fleet.

Waymo runs the largest robotaxi fleet in the country and has published zero settlement figures. Every resolution stays confidential.

No lawsuit tied to an actual driverless truck crash turned up across four separate searches run over several weeks in 2026. That’s a real gap in the public record, not proof nothing has happened. The field is adding trucks every quarter.

The federal government’s own crash count exists, at least. NHTSA’s Standing General Order has logged 1,493 unique crashes involving automated driving systems between July 2021 and June 2025. But under the rules in effect since June 2025, a company can redact the crash narrative itself, the actual account of what happened, as confidential business information. The count exists. The story behind the count often doesn’t.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Northern District of California, press release, “Cruise Admits to Submitting a False Report to Influence a Federal Investigation,” November 15, 2024. California Public Utilities Commission, Settlement Agreement, Rulemaking 12-12-011, filed January 2024. Fortune, “GM-owned Cruise reached a more than $8M settlement with the pedestrian who was dragged by one of its robo taxis,” May 14, 2024. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Standing General Order 2021-01 crash data, third amendment, effective June 16, 2025.

Who’s underwriting this

In November 2025, Bot Auto announced a full insurance program for its driverless freight fleet. Marsh, the global insurance broker, placed the policy through McGriff, a Marsh & McLennan Agency company, with an unnamed A-rated carrier underwriting the risk. The program covers auto liability, property, general liability, cargo, and inland marine protection, plus a standalone cyber policy.

No major national insurer’s name is publicly attached to a specific driverless trucking company. What’s filled the gap instead is a specialty layer. Koop Insurance built its own underwriting platform specifically for autonomous vehicles, because, in the words of one of its own executives, “the insurance industry cannot get the data that would allow them to build the insurance product around the autonomous vehicle risk.”

Kodiak’s own SEC filing says the same thing in its own words: “Once we scale our commercial operations, we may be required to obtain specialized insurance, which may not be available to the capacity or on the terms that we require to achieve the economics we expect.” That’s the company’s own sworn risk disclosure, not an outside analyst’s guess.

Kodiak’s filing goes further. It flags a risk that connects directly back to the Cruise incident: “the actions of a single market participant may be imputed to the autonomous industry as a whole,” and it’s possible that “suppliers, insurers, regulators, and others may refuse or cease to interact with or conduct business with the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole, including Kodiak.” One bad crash, at a competitor Kodiak has nothing to do with, could cost every AV trucking company its insurability.

A JB Hunt executive put the actual liability mechanism on the record. Josh Hankins, senior vice president at JB Hunt, said the technology provider may assume liability when its driverless system is fully engaged, and named Kodiak’s system specifically as an example. A major carrier is confirming, by name, that liability shifts contractually to the developer when the system is running the truck.

Source: PR Newswire, “Bot Auto Achieves Insurance Milestone, Paving the Way for Commercial Driverless Freight Operations,” November 12, 2025. Kodiak AI, Inc., Form S-1, filed with the SEC October 10, 2025. Equipment Finance News, “Kodiak AI, Paccar weigh in on liability, insurance questions looming over autonomous trucking,” November 19, 2025.

The insurance industry’s own advocacy arm

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety was founded in 1989 by executives of major property and casualty insurance companies. It’s still an alliance of insurers, consumer groups, and public health organizations today.

Its president, Cathy Chase, has testified before Congress on autonomous vehicles and trucks specifically in February 2022 and again in February 2025, and testified before the District of Columbia’s Council in July 2026. The core problem she’s raised each time hasn’t changed: no full set of federal performance standards, no adequate consumer information, no effective industry accountability.

Advocates sits in direct, institutionalized opposition to the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, the AV sector’s own lobbying arm. Insurers and developers, formalized as two competing coalitions, arguing this exact question in Washington right now.

Source: Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, “About Advocates” (saferoads.org). Catherine Chase, Statement to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “The Road Ahead for Automated Vehicles,” February 2, 2022.

The line item nobody’s pricing yet

Deloitte’s own financial services analysis estimates that advances in self-driving technology could eliminate the need for roughly 380,000 long-haul truck driver jobs within five years. That alone, Deloitte projects, could mean a loss of around $3 billion in workers’ compensation premiums.

Removing the driver doesn’t just shift liability toward the manufacturer. It structurally shrinks an entire insurance line that was built around driver injury risk, while creating new, largely unpriced categories at the same time: remote operators, safety monitors, and maintenance staff working on systems nobody’s insured at this scale before.

Source: Deloitte, “FSI Autonomous Vehicle Insurance Predictions” (deloitte.com).

Where this leaves the question

Every mechanism built to answer who’s on the hook is either untested, actively contested, opaque by design, or too new to have a settled answer. Aurora’s FMCSA exemption has never faced a courtroom. Congress has two bills that flatly disagree with each other. Waymo’s settlements stay sealed and NHTSA lets the crash narrative itself get redacted. Even the insurance industry’s own advocacy arm, founded by the people whose job is pricing this exact risk, is on record saying nobody’s built the accountability structure yet.

The $5 million state minimums assume a world where a $243 million verdict doesn’t happen to a company that size. Price of Blood already documented what a $51 million median verdict does to a $750,000 policy in human-driven trucking. Nothing in the driverless transition suggests that math gets easier. It just changes who’s sitting at the defendant’s table.

Sources

• Benavides v. Tesla, Inc., U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Case No. 1:21-cv-21940, jury verdict August 1, 2025, upheld February 20, 2026.

• Hanson Bridgett LLP, “Tesla’s ‘Nuclear’ Verdict: Potential Impacts on Autonomous Truck Technology,” August 14, 2025.

• TechCrunch, “Investors rebel as TuSimple pivots from self-driving trucks to AI gaming,” September 13, 2024.

• FreightWaves, “TuSimple lays off 150 more employees as it winds down US operations,” December 5, 2023.

• Kodiak AI, Inc., Form S-1, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, October 10, 2025.

• SELF DRIVE Act of 2026, H.R. 7390, 119th Congress.

• Uniform Law Commission, Automated Operation of Vehicles Act, committee page, uniformlaws.org.

• ArentFox Schiff, “Autonomous Vehicles: Driverless Does Not Mean Liability-Less,” February 26, 2026.

• Aurora Innovation, Inc. v. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, filed January 2025.

• CDLLife, “Aurora granted exemption from reflective triangles for autonomous trucks in wake of lawsuit against FMCSA,” October 14, 2025.

• U.S. Department of Justice, Northern District of California, “Cruise Admits to Submitting a False Report to Influence a Federal Investigation,” November 15, 2024.

• California Public Utilities Commission, Settlement Agreement, Rulemaking 12-12-011, filed January 2024.

• Fortune, “GM-owned Cruise reached a more than $8M settlement with the pedestrian who was dragged by one of its robo taxis,” May 14, 2024.

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Standing General Order 2021-01 crash data, third amendment, effective June 16, 2025.

• PR Newswire, “Bot Auto Achieves Insurance Milestone, Paving the Way for Commercial Driverless Freight Operations,” November 12, 2025.

• Equipment Finance News, “Kodiak AI, Paccar weigh in on liability, insurance questions looming over autonomous trucking,” November 19, 2025.

• Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, “About Advocates,” saferoads.org.

• Catherine Chase, Statement to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “The Road Ahead for Automated Vehicles,” February 2, 2022.

• Deloitte, “FSI Autonomous Vehicle Insurance Predictions,” deloitte.com.

• Freight Culture Standard, Price of Blood series, Brief 2: “Nuclear,” July 2026.

• Freight Culture Standard, Price of Blood series, Brief 8: “What Adequate Coverage Actually Requires.”