Zombie Trucks!

Josh, Aaron and Dave discuss the new wave of driverless trucks that is already rolling across Texas highways. They promise fewer crashes and safer roads, while raising urgent questions about safety, job loss, and who bears the risk when technology fails. As innovation accelerates, this conversation explores how society, regulators, and the legal system must adapt to protect the people caught in the middle of progress.

 FVF Law is a well-credentialed, overwhelmingly 5-star reviewed personal injury law firm in Austin, TX. FVF strives to be the educational resource for the injured, available to guide those with questions about what comes next. It is FVF’s mission to ensure clients are prioritized and informed throughout the injury claim process, and to secure the best possible outcome. Josh Fogelman and Aaron Von Flatern founded FVF Law to offer a different kind of injury law firm, and a dignified alternative in the marketplace. They hope to show injured Texans that consulting a lawyer after an injury is a natural, and responsible thing to do.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

0:00:00.0: Hey, Aaron.

0:00:00.9: Hey, Josh.

0:00:06.1: Listen, I want you to go with me to a parallel universe.

0:00:08.1: Sounds great.

0:00:10.0: Okay? The year 2026.

0:00:15.7: Oh. That's a good year. Yeah, I'm with you.

0:00:18.0: We haven't gotten there yet.

0:00:19.2: Oh, all right.

0:00:20.4: Just wait. You wait and tell me if it's a good year or not.

0:00:23.4: Okay.

0:00:26.4: Okay? A director decides to write a movie. The movie is about a fractured home in the Midwest, United States of America. Okay? The fractured home has two children. Okay?

0:00:47.3: All right.

0:00:48.0: A big brother and a little brother. Okay?

0:00:48.3: I got it.

0:00:52.0: The little brother is a video game prodigy.

0:00:55.4: Okay.

0:00:58.9: Okay? You with me so far?

0:00:59.8: Yeah, I like it.

0:01:01.1: The big brother and the little brother learn about a competition in California, a world video game championship, so to speak. Okay?

0:01:08.1: Okay. Am I in this? Never mind. Yes, I like it.

0:01:19.0: Okay? Big brother decides to abscond with little brother and get little brother all the way to California to participate and win the video game competition.

0:01:27.7: Okay.

0:01:36.4: Through a series of planes, trains and automobiles, they end up in Reno. They're making their way. They've had some issues, but they've made it this far. And they meet a young woman. She's a runaway.

0:01:43.6: Okay.

0:01:50.8: The young woman joins the mission.

0:01:53.6: All right.

0:01:53.9: All right? The young woman's father is a truck driver.

0:01:56.4: Yeah.

0:02:02.0: He's got a network of truck driver friends.

0:02:03.8: Yes.

0:02:05.5: The children find themselves in trouble.

0:02:08.0: All right. Yeah.

0:02:10.6: The young woman says, "I have an idea. I'm gonna lean on one of my father's truck driver friends, and he's gonna get us to California."

0:02:17.9: Okay.

0:02:25.2: Okay? She goes to call him for help. Only in this parallel universe, the trucks have no drivers. There's no one to get them to California. He doesn't win the video game championship competition. Nobody gets to see where the secrets are hidden in Super Mario Brothers 3. And the world collapses.

0:02:50.4: I think I see where you're going. I think what you're saying is that in the future world where trucks drive themselves, there will no longer be a ragtag bunch of truck drivers at the ready, ready to take young people to weird competitions in California.

0:03:10.7: What do we do?

0:03:11.9: You know, this is a real problem. That's why we brought it on our podcast. It's something we all need to think about.

0:03:18.4: Haven't we seen the Wizard? Do I have to say it? One of the great movies of the 1980s. Fred Savage.

0:03:26.0: I am so glad producer Dave is here.

0:03:27.4: I'm glad, too. Producer...

0:03:28.8: Producer Dave.

0:03:30.2: Dave, can you...

0:03:31.5: I got lost.

0:03:32.3: Producer Dave...

0:03:33.6: We got to Reno.

0:03:34.1: Were you alive in the 80s?

0:03:34.9: No, I wasn't.

0:03:35.8: How did they get to Reno?

0:03:37.1: No, they were already in the... This is why... The story really started to lose chronology for me, because we made it to Reno where we met this girl, but then we still needed to get to California.

0:03:47.4: I mean, Reno almost is California. In fact, if you go around Lake Tahoe, I mean, it's a walk, I guess, to get to Lake Tahoe, but then there's California right there.

0:03:56.7: Listen, I'm not saying that I even told the story right.

0:04:01.5: Also, we started in 2026, but then we weren't there. Like, we're not there yet.

0:04:05.5: Look, we haven't made it.

0:04:06.5: Maybe we're not there yet.

0:04:07.5: The parallel universe.

0:04:09.9: Guys, the Wizard is arguably the greatest movie of the 1980s, and I am deeply, deeply disappointed that neither of y'all have seen it.

0:04:19.8: Smokey and the Bandit probably wouldn't have worked without a ragtag group of truck drivers. There's Convoy, it's either a movie or a song, I'm not sure, but it wouldn't have worked without a group of truck drivers that were wily and crafty. This is something we need in society. But what we don't need is horrific crashes that kill a bunch of people.

0:04:33.3: That's true.

0:04:46.9: Which actually happens with trucks.

0:04:48.9: That's true.

0:04:50.2: Which is why, you know, it's kind of relevant to our law firm. There is now, in the state of Texas, at least five different companies operating driverless trucks. Driverless semi trucks, 80,000-pound-ish vehicles, sort of zombie driving through the night 24 hours a day between Dallas and Houston on I-45 and some on I-35 and some in West Texas in the oil field delivering fracking sand. There's a company called Kodiak, there's one called Bot Auto, and a very interesting one called Aurora that have really pushed the science to an interesting place. I mean, they're doing it. It's not... I mean, it feels like we're in the future, but these are giant moving buildings flying at highway speed and it's okay, I guess. Aurora is backed by FedEx and by Amazon. In fact, I think the main financial stake there is Amazon. And they're using these trucks for middle mile delivery, meaning that it's not the custom... They're not coming to your door. They don't want to freak people out, right?

0:05:29.7: Yet.

0:06:09.0: Yet. They're waiting. They're gonna freak you out later. And I guess the question is, should we be freaked out? Other than the loss of the ragtag group of wily and crafty truck drivers, what else does society stand to lose or gain in this transaction?

0:06:26.9: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's fascinating, right? We are in a fascinating time of technology. No one can deny that. To have an 18-wheeler on the road that doesn't have a driver is just insane and incredible and all the things.

0:06:48.0: Viewers need to picture this. I want you looking at the front of the cab and there's these crazy headlights and a zombie cab, just these two dead-eye windows with no one behind them. And it's gonna be driving.

0:06:54.7: Yeah.

0:07:01.3: Like Terminator situation.

0:07:08.0: You're looking at this and you're thinking, "What is that? Where does the driver go?"

0:07:10.8: It doesn't.

0:07:13.6: There is no driver.

0:07:14.4: It's horrible.

0:07:15.3: It's a storage container with wheels that drives itself and it's insane.

0:07:21.7: The toys are alive.

0:07:22.8: The toys are... Exactly. The toys are alive. Pros and cons, right? I mean, the pros, of course, are if it works, we stand to avoid what might be statistically the most dangerous activity that we do every day. I mean, we're mitigating many, many, many, many catastrophic losses, deaths, and dismemberment, just horrific, horrific injuries that are happening to innocent people across the country. Stand to eliminate that statistic completely or drastically reduce that statistic completely, which is fantastic for society. On the other hand, of course, you are displacing a lot of jobs.

0:08:11.8: Losing jobs. You're freaking out firefighters who are at the scene of... Because they will crash. I mean, you know, it's not like they can't crash. It's not like they can't get lost and get crawfished into some narrow alley where they can only get out by destroying an entire building. That kind of stuff is gonna happen. And so we're having to deal with that, inevitability. And there's sort of a question of, you know, is it safe for the rest of us out there? Do we need to make separate roads for them? What are we gonna do? And what are we gonna do with the people who do inevitably get hurt?

0:08:56.9: Yeah.

0:08:57.4: Because let's just say it's way less, and I want people to hear us loud and clear, like, we're very much in favor of there being less death, dismemberment, destruction. We have seen the worst of the worst. There's things you and I can't unsee.

0:09:10.6: We're users of the road. Our families are users of the road. Our friends are users of the road. Yeah.

0:09:18.1: Yes. So I'm not here saying we ought to not pursue a technology that could make things ultimately a lot safer. If one child lives that would have died, this is great. Let's do it. Let's do it.

0:09:25.0: Absolutely right.

0:09:31.9: But for those people who do get hurt or do die in one of these situations, I'll go back to a podcast we had before about autonomous driving. This is a topic gonna keep coming up.

0:09:43.7: Well, it's advancing, right?

0:09:45.6: Right.

0:09:46.4: I mean, we're starting to see it encroach in more and more and more components of driving in daily life.

0:09:53.3: Right. What do we do with the families who have been thrust into the position of unwilling test subjects in the lab that our freeways have become? And in my mind, you have to treat them like heroes for society. I mean, their families have sacrificed or will sacrifice for the betterment of the rest of us so that someday some child won't... Some group of children won't die because of the sacrifice of these few in the beginning. And I know the companies may be justifying it that way. I'm saying you have to make them pay. And I don't mean that in a super punitive way. I just think you have to recognize that if our entire society is going to benefit in this extremely meaningful way from these few deaths and injuries, then let's transfer some of that benefit to those heroic people who didn't ask to be a part of this experiment.

0:10:55.8: That seems fair, right?

0:10:59.4: Oh, we're not gonna argue about that? Oh, this is a point-counterpoint. You go. Now you go.

0:11:05.7: Oh, man. No, it's just, it's wild to even consider the concept that all of us are part of this experiment. And you're right, we talked about this before. No, I don't remember signing a consent form.

0:11:21.7: Well, and one thing we should talk about is how this is being regulated. One of the reasons that Texas is... Texas and a few other states like Arizona and some states in the Southeast are leading the entire world, not just the United States, they're leading the entire world in autonomous trucking miles logged because they've created a regulatory environment that's open. And we'll talk about how they've started to kind of constrict that a little bit. But the openness invited it, and then it showed up. And you have to ask yourself what's driving it. It's not profit 10 years from now. It's Q2 profits. It's Q3 profits. It's short-term... There's a short-term need to show a profit. There's a short-term need to show investors, "We have logged 1,000 autonomous miles," or, "We have logged 10,000," so that they can get those investment dollars and then turn that into the reality they want to materialize. While it's materializing, it's scary. Scary because of the way investment dollars drive it. Short-term investment that needs to see something. There's no room for, "I know you need to see something, but it's not safe."

0:12:30.0: And if Texas as a regulatory group doesn't... As a government doesn't come in and say, "Hey, you gotta do that safer," then we're all gonna... We're all kind of on the train track, so to speak. So what has Texas done? So far, they've prohibited cities from passing laws against it. One thing they did kind of in the positive direction is they said to these companies, "You need to have a license to do this, and you need to file a plan with us as to how you are communicating with emergency personnel ahead of time, how they're expected to be trained up on the response to your trucks." Because if a firefighter shows up, there's no driver. You don't even have... Like a doctor would have a patient and say, "Well, what happened?" There's no one to ask. So if the answer is, "Well, a fire started in the battery compartment and I got out," then that would alert your firefighters, "Hey, there's about to be a 5,000-degree fire and we need to respond accordingly." Instead, a firefighter has to infiltrate a locked compartment and then find out the hard way that there's a 5,000-degree fire in there. And so Texas has said to these companies, "All right, you gotta file a plan." Now, I haven't seen any of these plans, and maybe that's a topic for a future podcast. How do you plan?

0:14:07.1: Yeah. I mean, you think about the resources that are going to be necessary to train accident reconstructionists to download and interpret computer data regarding autonomous driving. Yeah, I mean, it certainly creates a lot of work.

0:14:32.7: Might be good for us from an evidentiary standpoint insofar as if in the deep future, when you've got maybe all of the trucks running as robots, and each truck is equipped with 40 different cameras at different points of the truck, and then an accident happens nearby, it's like a surveillance state. We've always got camera of almost every...

0:14:58.9: Yeah.

0:14:59.8: We've always got video of almost every crash. And that could be a good thing from an evidence standpoint, could be a very bad thing from a privacy standpoint. I don't know that people expect privacy anymore.

0:15:08.4: I don't think so so much anymore. Right? The narrow view, it's eroding.

0:15:10.7: Right.

0:15:13.1: You know, one of the interesting things about this, if you just kind of take a step back, is if you read the books from Joe Jamail and you kind of understand and pay attention to the history of what plaintiffs lawyers have meant for the United States of America, right? We're constantly under attack from insurance companies and big trucking companies that are trying to get the laws changed in a way that makes it really, really hard, if not impossible, for people who are harmed by their carelessness or the carelessness of their drivers to get compensated, to erode rights, tort reform, all this stuff is happening. Plaintiffs lawyers have historically led the charge in making the world safer. And the way they do that is they make it prohibitively expensive to be unsafe. Right? Three-wheelers no longer exist because they were dangerous, and Joe Jamail made it prohibitively expensive for them to be manufactured when they continued to have to pay out, the manufacturers had to continue to pay out on paralysis and death cases when they inevitably rolled over and hurt someone. And you kind of wonder... I don't know how much wondering you really have to do, whether or not the trucking companies like Amazon and the big logistics companies and the oilfield companies are looking at what Texans are doing and the voices they're using to send a message to these folks who are abusing, oftentimes abusing trucking laws and regulations in order to keep their drivers on the road dangerously and illegally.

0:17:15.0: And the jurors are sending a message, and they're making them pay for what they did. And at some point, you have a pivot point where the technology exists to just remove that variable. And the amount of money that it must cost to develop this technology has to be extraordinary, and you can only consider that safety and mitigating those losses is more valuable in the long term than the costs it takes to be involved in the development of this technology and the use of this technology now.

0:17:52.2: It's a really good point.

0:17:53.1: It's kind of another one of these circumstances where you might be asking yourself, is this because of people like us?

0:18:00.4: Yes. I think the answer is yes.

0:18:02.6: It has to be.

0:18:03.3: Texas leads the country in big verdicts for big truck cases. And that has hit a nerve. And the companies have looked at it and said, "The model we have for delivering freight in Texas currently is to subcontract to subcontractors who then subcontract to sub-sub-sub-subcontractors who have minimal training, minimal experience, who oftentimes are not from Texas, maybe not from the United States, who show up and are put behind a wheel in a sort of, frankly, criminal enterprise." It's a way to just milk money out of these big carriers like Amazon that have too much product to move and not any way to do it. And so I know when I drive next to trucks, I'm terrified. And getting on the right side of them on the highway is an adrenaline-producing event for me, moving to the right side. And so, yeah, they're responding and saying... I mean, the jury has responded and said, "If you keep doing this, we're going to keep punishing you with these huge verdicts." And then the trucking company is saying, "Well, for just one of those verdicts, for just one of those verdicts, we can take that money, put it into autonomous program and develop trucks that almost never crash."

0:18:48.5: Yeah.

0:19:33.8: And sure enough, that will pay for itself over time. And maybe that's something that lawyers like us need to embrace and say, "This is a good thing."

0:19:43.8: Yeah. Well, anytime you have a reduction in danger on the road, it's absolutely a good thing.

0:19:50.1: How did we... Aaron, you mentioned, you used the phrase "the laboratory that our roads have become," kind of implying that it's an experimental process with these autonomous vehicles. And I'm just curious, for the average viewer, how did we get here? Because for the inevitable moment when a family sustains a catastrophic loss from an autonomous vehicle, there's going to be a moment where they might say, "I didn't want this." Like, if you would have asked me, "Are you comfortable with sharing the road with autonomous vehicles?" I would have said no. And now I'm paying the price for that. This wasn't... This didn't seem to be something where it's like we all voted on whether or not there are going to be driverless vehicles on the roads with me and my loved ones, and yet it's kind of being forced upon us.

0:20:39.3: That's right.

0:20:50.4: And so when you talk about how are we going to honor and try to make whole those few, hopefully, that do experience the cons of a driverless society in some capacity, how do we help people understand that ideally this is better for everybody and this is the singular moment or the very rare moment where we're going to have tension and friction where it goes wrong? Because we didn't all just say, like, "This is all worth it for us." And so that's kind of... I'm curious, like, how do we get here?

0:21:34.1: So it's one thing to say that this is a good thing. It's another thing to say that this is a good process that we've used to arrive at this thing. There is no democracy here. There's an ask forgiveness, not permission culture in the tech industry. Faith in tech is something that's been creeping up since the '80s. Once it became clear that computers were doing things better than humans, there was a... Automatically, there was a kind of divide. And a bunch of humans said, "I trust these things. I want more of it." And a bunch of humans said, "I don't trust these things. I want less of it." But inexorably, technology moved us forward and it will continue to do so on our roads, whether we like it or not. And so to me, it would be... It would be kind of academic to say, "Well, how could we have done this differently?" It doesn't matter. We're here. And here we are, and I know for sure, like you said, there will be families who are affected negatively who will say, "I never signed up for this." And they should... I think, we think in terms of compensatory and punitive. There's this third category to me, which is like, how do you honor heroes? They've basically been forced to do this. They didn't ask for this. Their sacrifice benefits the rest of us because someone had to die for this technology to work. And once it works, it's saving... Over the next hundred years, it'll save thousands of people and kids, people that, like... There is no way to measure human life against human life. But there is a heroic quality to them dying this way if that happens. And I think you have to respond in a huge way with a whole bunch of the money that otherwise would have been awarded in a regular trucking accident in Texas and say, "This is that times 10." And so I don't really know if that will actually translate to juries

0:23:41.8: One thing that juries can respond to, though, is the fact that an autonomous vehicle gone rogue is a particularly terrifying thing. It is a loose missile. And we've always talked about there's just a very small category of things that can hurt you that evoke a visceral response from people. Gunshots, shark attacks, plane crashes. And this one I would put in there, having a zombie vehicle coming at you at 80 miles an hour, weighing 50 to 80,000 pounds, bearing down on you with nowhere to run and an inevitability to it that's like the shark in Jaws. That's what we're facing here. So I think juries can respond to that, even if they don't buy into my third category that I was kind of advert...

0:24:47.1: Well, I mean, it also kind of taps into this concept that we hold on to so dearly in Texas and hope that we can continue holding onto it, of the nature of intangible losses. Right? So we talked a lot about the types of damages that you can recover, and you're right. Something like you're talking about doesn't really fit into the compensatory damage model, and it doesn't necessarily fit into the punitive damage model unless there are facts to justify really egregious conduct. But part of what we love about Texas law is it allows the opportunity to tell the story of the client as the hero. And at present, it doesn't really put too many limiters on what you can ask the jury for for the intangible losses. And so the concept of "bonus damages" like you're talking about here, while there might not be a blank for it on the jury charge, there's certainly the opportunity that you have to advocate for something akin to those bonus damages when you're giving your closing argument to the jury as long as you stay within the rules. But that is appropriate messaging. The concept of the person who was killed and the family that survived them, they're heroes in this fight.

0:26:27.3: Yeah, I can give you... As an advocate, I can give you a rational basis for the number I'm asking for.

0:26:30.3: Yeah.

0:26:33.4: And the fact that they're heroes could be a reason for you to say yes to them.

0:26:35.7: Absolutely.

0:26:38.0: Not necessarily the basis for them, but a reason for you to say yes, I'm gonna go with your number that you've already rationally justified.

0:26:41.2: Yeah.

0:26:44.4: So.

0:26:47.5: So I just want to make sure I... I want to make sure I understand kind of this whole conversation just in terms of my own perspective of it. So what I'm hearing is there's a chance that these companies that are creating driverless trucks are gonna say, "Well, because long term our goal is to save millions of lives, the few lives that are lost or affected, that's worth it." And so, let us keep doing this thing. It's just the nature of what is gonna happen in innovation, and the cost-benefit analysis long term is worth it. Keep letting us do this." And what we're saying, or we all are saying, is actually those initial losses need to actually be valued at a really high rate so that we understand the significance of what it means long term. And not for them to be overlooked as necessary for the greater good, but more of, no, these people who didn't sign up for this, who are experiencing kind of the consequences of getting all of the things figured out, they need to be recognized as the heroes that they are because they're paying the price for the millions of others, ideally, who don't pay the price for this technology as it's new and as it's being implemented.

0:28:10.9: Yeah, they're paying the price for what is undeniably a benefit to others.

0:28:15.4: Yeah, right.

0:28:17.0: And the fact that those others have benefited loosely translates to profit to the company, because that's their whole point, is if we can create value, people will pay us. I mean, that's how all corporations are supposed to work. And so the idea is we don't really know how much they're gonna profit off this technology, but assuming they profit significantly as an industry, then as a people, we should transfer a lot of the benefit that to them looks like profit, to us looks like saved lives, to those people who do get hurt. And that doesn't quite fit into the model of compensatory and punitive. So for the viewers or listeners who are wondering about that, compensatory replaces what you've lost, so like paying the medical bill, paying your lost earnings, paying you an amount equivalent to the fair trade value of your pain and suffering or your impairment or your disfigurement. That's all compensatory. Punitive is a company has done something evil and we want to punish them for it, and here's an amount just for that. What I'm arguing for is this third category that's like these heroic damages that don't even say the company did anything wrong. It's just a recognition. It's almost like quantum meruit if you're a law school nerd. It's like an unjust enrichment of society that needs to be transferred back to somebody who's been unjustly harmed in this transaction.

0:29:43.0: Right. They were a part of the... They were signed up to be in the experiment that they didn't sign up for, experienced the consequence of the experiment going wrong.

0:29:53.5: And they should be honored for that.

0:30:00.3: And they should be honored for that because they didn't sign up for it and they paid the price unwillingly for all of us to live longer and stay alive in the future because of the technology.

0:30:07.0: We may need to turn to the country of Mexico, actually. They have moral damages there, which is an interesting concept. We don't have that here. So it'd be interesting to see how this... I mean, we obviously are talking about robo trucks, but this has some huge societal implications.

0:30:23.2: Well, it's just we're witnessing a revolution in technology and it's just wild to see it happening here on our roads in Texas. Thanks for your insight on that, Aaron.

0:30:39.4: Thanks for reminding me that a ragtag group of truckers can accomplish anything when they put their minds to it.

0:30:44.1: Go home and watch The Wizard.