'I didn't realize our laws are so lacking': New Mexico lawmakers hear that autonomous trucks can test with five days' notice and no permit

New Mexico lawmakers are confronting how little their state asks of companies that want to test autonomous trucks on its roads: five days' advance notice, and nothing else, according to CDLLife on Oct. 26, reporting Source New Mexico. A group of public safety advocates urged lawmakers to implement stricter requirements at a meeting of the interim Transportation Infrastructure Revenue Subcommittee held on Friday, Oct. 23 — and the legislators' own reactions suggested the current rules came as news to some of them.

The most specific testimony came from the driver's seat. Daniel Cook, a business agent with Teamsters Local 492 in Albuquerque, told the committee that he spent years driving commercial vehicles in Alaska with autonomous technology intended to keep the driver safe, and highlighted its faults. Cook said the trucks would "read a speed limit sign and it would slam on the brakes," or make other mistakes like incorrectly identifying a median as a stationary object and stopping the truck unsafely. "These systems do affect the way we drive currently and they are not ready to go at this point," Cook said.

The regulatory gap the advocates described is easy to state because there is so little to describe. Currently, New Mexico only requires companies to notify the state five days in advance if they wish to test autonomous trucks. The vehicle must be in compliance with all other state traffic laws, but no other requirements or barriers exist — no permit, no state authorization process, no approval step at which the state can ask what is being tested, where, or under what conditions.

Six states have taken the other approach. Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Arkansas have implemented self-driving vehicle regulations that require companies to obtain permits and gain state authorization before taking self-driving vehicles out on public roads. That list matters geographically: two of the permit states, Arizona and Texas, border New Mexico directly — which means a company can operate under a permit system on one side of the state line and under a notice-only system on the other, on the same load, on the same day.

The lawmakers quoted did not defend the status quo. "I didn't realize our laws are so lacking," said Rep. Joy Garratt in response to the presentation. Rep. Rod Montoya paired acceptance of the technology with rejection of the state's current role in it: "There is a need over time for this, but the idea of us being the guinea pigs is not something I'm looking forward to. There is a real risk here. We need to put some guardrails."

Nothing in the hearing changed the law — an interim subcommittee hears testimony between sessions; it does not enact requirements — and the reporting records no bill text, no named sponsor for a specific proposal and no timeline. What changed is the political starting position: advocates have put the five-day-notice rule on the record, working drivers have described the technology's current failure modes in concrete terms, and legislators from the committee have said on the record that the state should not be a testing ground without guardrails. Any permit requirement would come through a future bill, measured against the six-state model the advocates presented.

The practical takeaway for drivers running New Mexico today is that the five-day-notice rule is still the whole rule: autonomous test trucks can be on I-10, I-40 and I-25 next to you with no permit and no state authorization beyond a notification the public never sees. Cook's examples are the operational ones to remember — a system that brake-checks on a misread speed limit sign or stops for a median it mistakes for an obstacle behaves, from the following driver's seat, like a truck making a sudden unplanned stop. Leave the extra following distance, and if you are asked to drive with, escort or work around test vehicles, ask the carrier what notification was filed and what the system's known faults are. The guardrail debate is now open in Santa Fe; until it produces a law, the road rules in New Mexico are the ones the advocates just described.