Who Pays When Self-Driving Trucks Fail? The Industry’s Liability Dilemma

Why AV manufacturers and trucking fleets may be stuck in a liability standoff

The liability bottleneck: concerns over industry hesitancy

In May 2025, FleetOwner highlighted a growing roadblock in the rollout of autonomous semi-trucks: liability exposure. System developers and manufacturers want to limit their risk in the event of crashes, while trucking fleets—who will ultimately operate these trucks on public roads—are wary of absorbing the brunt of responsibility for systems they didn’t design. This mismatch in risk appetite could slow, or even stall, adoption.

Why it matters now

• Aurora just launched fully driverless Class 8 trucks between Dallas and Houston.
• Waabi and Volvo struck a partnership earlier this year to integrate Waabi’s autonomous system into Volvo trucks.

These announcements prove that the technology is moving forward fast. But liability questions haven’t caught up—and no one wants to be the first to shoulder unlimited exposure in court.

The risk imbalance

Trucking fleets operate on razor-thin margins. Even one catastrophic crash involving an AV system could bankrupt a mid-size carrier. On the other side, technology vendors often try to limit liability through contracts, warranties, and indemnity clauses. That may work for small-scale pilots, but when thousands of autonomous trucks are on the road, insurers, regulators, and courts will demand clarity.

Legal gray zones

Who is ultimately at fault when an autonomous semi-truck fails? Possibilities include:

• The manufacturer for defective design or inadequate testing.
• The software developer for algorithmic errors or failures in machine learning.
• The fleet operator for maintenance lapses or misuse of the system.
• The human “fallback driver”—if one is still present—if they didn’t act quickly enough.

Courts don’t yet have consistent answers. And that uncertainty itself is a chilling factor.

Insurance complications

Traditional commercial trucking insurance is designed around human error. If AV liability shifts upstream to manufacturers or software vendors, the insurance market will need to evolve—potentially requiring new hybrid products that cover shared responsibility. Until those products exist, insurers may overprice coverage or decline to write policies altogether.

The policy gap

Without clear federal standards or a liability framework, states may create a patchwork of rules. Some may tilt toward fleet liability, others toward manufacturers, creating compliance headaches for interstate trucking.

Possible solutions

• Shared liability models: Splitting responsibility between fleets and tech vendors, backed by joint insurance pools.
• Federal safe harbors: Limiting liability if companies meet certain testing and reporting standards.
• Contract innovation: Smarter agreements between fleets and vendors that assign risk based on who controls which part of the system.

The takeaway

Technology isn’t the only barrier to autonomous trucking—it may not even be the biggest one. Until the liability bottleneck is solved, industry hesitancy will continue. In the meantime, real deployments may stay confined to limited corridors like Dallas–Houston, where risk is easier to manage.