Driverless trucks, which may or may not be the future state of long-haul heavy-duty trucking, likely won’t need electronic logging devices. Nor will hours-of-service regulations apply to them. But the reality is more nuanced…

According to AV 3.0 guidance from the Department of Transportation in 2019, federal regulations covering autonomous vehicles “will no longer assume that the CMV driver is always human or that a human is necessarily present onboard a commercial vehicle during its operation.”

So, human-specific rules such as drug testing, hours of service, commercial driver’s licenses or physical qualification requirements would not apply.

The developers of autonomous software want to see this guidance become federal law. They’ve spent billions in research and development to prepare for robot-driven trucks…

Driverless trucks expect to operate in a hub-to-hub model. Human drivers would drive a load to the originating hub. They would be met at the destination hub by other human drivers.