Commerce shows no sign of slowing down. The need to move goods from warehouses to consumers has pushed the trucking industry toward one of its biggest changes in a generation. Driverless trucks are no longer a future idea. They’re hauling freight on public roads right now, and the timeline has shortened dramatically from what most people expected just a few years ago.

At Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp, our Virginia Beach truck accident attorneys have been closely watching this shift. Trucking companies have strong financial incentives to adopt automation, and the ongoing driver shortage adds pressure to move faster. A skilled truck accident attorney must understand how this technology works, because liability questions in a driverless crash look very different from those in a standard trucking case. When something goes wrong with one of these vehicles, the people hurt deserve a legal team that knows where to look.

The concern for many drivers, families, and safety advocates is straightforward. Massive trucks operating without a person behind the wheel can cause real harm when the technology fails, and the legal system is still catching up to the engineering.

The New Age of Automation Has Already Arrived

A few years back, the conventional wisdom was that we wouldn’t see self-driving trucks on the highway for at least another decade. That prediction missed badly. Aurora Innovation pulled its safety drivers out of the cab and began running fully driverless freight between Dallas and Houston on I-45 in May 2025. Other companies are doing similar work right now. Kodiak Robotics, Gatik, and Waabi all have Level 4 trucks moving cargo on real roads in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and across the border into Canada.

Crash numbers tell part of the story. NHTSA reporting shows over 5,200 autonomous vehicle incidents in the United States through late 2025. Most of those involve robotaxis and passenger cars rather than freight trucks, but the pattern carries over. Put more autonomous vehicles on public roads, and you get more crashes. Simple as that.

Federal rules haven’t caught up yet. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration plans to issue a proposed rule in May 2026 to begin laying out a national framework for autonomous truck operations. For now, states make most of the calls, and what’s legal in one state may not be legal in another. That patchwork creates headaches for everyone, from the companies running these trucks to the families dealing with the aftermath of a crash.

Open Questions That Still Don’t Have Clear Answers

Regulators are still wrestling with some basic problems:

• Who pays when an autonomous truck causes a serious crash: the manufacturer, the software developer, the trucking company, or some combination?
• How should current hours-of-service rules be rewritten for trucks with no human driver?
• What inspection protocols apply when there’s no person in the cab to perform pre-trip checks?
• How are warning devices placed around a stopped driverless truck, something a federal regulation still technically requires a human to do?

That last question isn’t hypothetical. In late 2024, the FMCSA initially denied a request from Aurora and Waymo to use cab-mounted flashing beacons instead of traditional warning triangles. Aurora later received permission through the Department of Transportation in 2025, but the legal back-and-forth shows how much of this regulatory ground is still being negotiated.

Why Liability in a Driverless Truck Crash Is So Complicated

A standard truck accident already involves multiple potentially responsible parties. The driver, the trucking company, the cargo loader, the maintenance shop, and sometimes the parts manufacturer can all share blame. Strip out the human driver, and the analysis gets more complex, not simpler.

In a driverless truck crash, fault could rest with the software company that designed the autonomous driving system, the sensor manufacturer, the company operating the truck, or the entity responsible for the mapping data the truck uses to navigate. Sometimes, a remote human operator monitoring the truck may share responsibility. Identifying every party that contributed to a crash requires pulling data from the truck’s onboard systems, the dispatch records, the maintenance logs, and often the software update history. Evidence can disappear quickly if no one moves fast.

A Hampton Roads Firm With Real Trucking Experience

For more than four decades, Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp has represented people injured in serious truck crashes throughout Virginia and North Carolina.

If you have been injured in a truck accident, contact one of our experienced Virginia Beach truck accident attorneys to find out what legal recourse you may have against the party or parties responsible for the crash. Truck accident claims can be more complex than other types of vehicle accidents because there are often multiple at-fault parties that are responsible for the financial damages victims may be entitled to.

If you or someone you love was hurt in a Virginia Beach truck accident, the team at Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp is ready to help you understand your options. Contact us at 833-997-1774 for a free consultation. Our firm has offices in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Norfolk, and Chesapeake, and we’re proud to serve injured people across the region.