Who is Blocking Automated Vehicles?

A Quantitative Analysis

Jonathan Slotkin recently uncovered that AAJ, a trial lawyer trade association, is a major opponent of AVs, supporting laws to restrict AVs and opposing AV deployment.

Alex Tabarrok writes:

The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers.

…

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability.

But are trial lawyers the worst offenders? I did a quantitative search of lobbying filings, bill endorsements, and other major actions (such as city approvals for AVs) to find out.

The result is that there is one institution worse than trade associations of lawyers or insurers. It’s exactly who you would expect: labor unions.

Based on number of organizations engaging on a bill or action, labor unions are 78% of the opposition, while trade associations like the AAJ are 10%.

The gap shrinks slightly when narrowing down to formal lobbying alone.

The for-profit companies involved are Statefarm and Nationwide, two insurance firms. The two additional non-profits are the Transportation Choices Coalition and California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, which both appear to represent trade association-like interests.

Combined, they’ve supported anti-EV measures in 20 states so far.

When comparing total dollars spent, labor unions are back to almost 70% of the money spent against AVs.

To calculate the money spent against AVs, I multiplied each organizations’ lobbying spend, disclosed in their LD-2 filings by the proportion of bills they engaged in that involved AVs. Obviously, this is an imperfect metric, as organizations do not necessarily split their money evenly between bills they engage with, and some major actions or organizations lack financial disclosures altogether.

Here is the full data table:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o-2_y0hBZhR72AsGTFBTzIECQu8GEXupRGDS5bZ2-sk/edit?gid=0#gid=0