Lawmakers promised Coloradans the first ballot question in the country on human drivers in autonomous trucks. The question was stripped from the bill, the bill was vetoed, and the November ballot was certified without it. Under a 2017 law, nobody asked your permission for an unoccupied 80,000-pound truck to use the interstate through Denver.
Colorado’s November ballot is now certified. It carries four constitutional amendments and four propositions, covering law enforcement reporting, natural gas, hunting and fishing, judicial discipline, fentanyl penalties, property taxes, and transit funding. The official list from the Secretary of State does not include the question that Colorado Teamsters rallied for all spring: whether a human being must sit in the cab of a driverless commercial truck.
That question nearly made history. House Bill 26-1286, introduced in February, was set to make Colorado the first state to put autonomous vehicle regulation to a statewide vote. By the time the bill reached Governor Jared Polis in May, the referendum had been cut out, replaced with a direct requirement that a licensed truck driver ride inside any self-driving commercial vehicle over 26,001 pounds. Polis vetoed it on May 28, his second veto of a driverless truck bill in two years. Because the legislature had already adjourned, no override was possible. The session ended, the question died, and no citizen initiative qualified for November in its place.
Meanwhile, the trucks themselves needed no permission at all. A 2017 state law opened Colorado roads to autonomous vehicles, and the legal picture for an unoccupied freight truck today is simple to state and unsettling to absorb: nothing in Colorado law forbids it.
The vetoed vote, in order
The Teamsters built the campaign around one promise. “A decision this important can’t be made behind closed doors, with Big Tech companies calling all the shots,” said Dean Modecker, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 455, which represents more than 10,000 Colorado workers, in the union’s March 22 release. The union called it “the first-ever statewide ballot question regarding AV regulations in the nation.”
The legislature agreed the question mattered, then decided it would answer the question itself. Land Line’s Keith Goble reported in May that lawmakers “stripped a provision that would have allowed voters to decide whether to ban autonomous trucks,” a provision that had been “originally added to work around the governor” after his 2025 veto of the nearly identical HB25-112. What survived was a direct mandate, and it passed with lopsided, bipartisan margins before a single veto ended it.
In his veto message, Polis argued that human error causes most crashes and that the bill “would restrict future innovation around autonomous vehicles and traffic safety,” Colorado Newsline reported. It was the same reasoning he gave in 2025, and it carried the day both times. Sponsors had also tried to soften the bill for him: it expired by its own terms on September 1, 2031, exempted the truck-mounted crash cushions CDOT uses to protect road crews, and commissioned a State Patrol safety study due November 1, 2030. None of it changed the outcome.
What the dead bill would have required
The threshold mattered, because it drew the line between delivery vans and the freight that moves up and down I-25. Here is what HB 26-1286 said, per the General Assembly’s summary of the enrolled act:
| HB 26-1286 as passed, before the veto | |
|---|---|
| Scope | Commercial motor vehicles of 26,001 pounds or more driven by an automated driving system |
| Human requirement | A CDL holder must be in the vehicle, monitoring the driving and intervening to stop unsafe or illegal operation |
| Hazardous materials | The licensed driver must be in the driver’s seat |
| Penalties | $1,000 first offense, $2,000 second, doubling for each offense after |
| Exemptions | Light-duty vehicles and truck-mounted attenuators |
| Sunset | Repealed September 1, 2031, after a State Patrol safety review due November 1, 2030 |
about 6,000 lb
the bill’s line
about 40,000 lb
80,000 lb federal max
The Reason Foundation, arguing for a veto, conceded the bill’s practical effect in its own words: HB 26-1286 “would effectively ban driverless commercial trucks.” That framing tells you what Colorado law says today, because a ban only makes sense where the thing is currently allowed. Since the 2017 law documented by Governing and the Denver Post, autonomous vehicles may operate on Colorado roads as long as they obey traffic rules, and local governments are barred from banning them.
The regulatory map has empty squares
Waymo opened fully driverless, paid service in Denver on September 1, the company’s fourteenth city, five days after its first reported Denver crash. Governor Polis welcomed the launch, saying it “expands clean mobility choices for Coloradans.” The same governor had just vetoed the truck bill. Both positions follow one consistent rule in Colorado: companies self-regulate, and the state stays out of the way.
Here is who is responsible for autonomous vehicles in Colorado, layer by layer, based on reporting and state documents:
Sets the law
Sets the law
No authority
Barred
Reporting only
After the crash
The gaps show up in concrete places. A Denver Police Department spokesperson told the Denver Post plainly: “If there’s no driver, there currently isn’t a mechanism within state law for issuing a citation.” The department’s July training bulletin, obtained by BusinessDen, instructs officers responding to a crash with a self-driving vehicle to leave the driver information section of their report blank and check a separate box marking the vehicle as autonomous. Interior camera footage, the bulletin says, is deleted after 24 hours unless officers obtain a search warrant.
The crash that previewed the problem
On Thursday, August 27, an unoccupied Waymo stopped in a travel lane on West 8th Avenue near Denver Health. Waymo says the car had stopped to yield to a pedestrian when a third vehicle rear-ended the car behind it, pushing that car into the robotaxi. Reported injuries were minor, and police told Westword the Waymo was not at fault. But the mechanics of the scene previewed exactly what a crash with an unoccupied freight truck would look like under current Colorado law.
There was no driver to talk to, no insurance card exchanged at the window, and no one at the scene with a duty to narrate what the vehicle was doing in the seconds before impact. The best evidence of what happened, the sensor logs, camera feeds, and software decision records, sat inside a vehicle whose operator controls the data. For the first Denver crash, this is a story with a modest ending. Scale the same scene up to a loaded semi and the questions stop being modest.
Public sentiment is not waiting for the legislature either. A Colorado Polling Institute survey of 400 likely Denver voters, conducted August 11 through 15 and reported by Axios Denver, found that 58% of Denver voters who had never ridden in an autonomous taxi said they were unlikely to, against 32% who said they likely would. The Teamsters cite polling of their own showing broad opposition to sharing roads with fully driverless vehicles. For now, that skepticism has no mechanism attached to it, no agency to petition, no ballot box to use. The only working mechanism is a lawsuit, and only after something goes wrong.
If an unoccupied truck hits you, the claim still exists
Colorado negligence law does not disappear because software was driving. An injured person’s claim after a crash with a driverless commercial truck runs through familiar channels, with two structural differences that favor whoever holds the data.
The first structural difference is evidence. In an ordinary truck crash, you can depose the driver: what he saw, when he braked, whether he was fatigued. With no driver, the equivalent testimony lives in electronic records held by the company whose product is on trial. The party that caused the crash controls the record of the crash, and deletion policies measured in hours or days are a real feature of these systems, as the Denver police bulletin confirms for robotaxis. Early, written preservation demands change who controls that record.
The second difference is the roster of defendants. A trucking company, a truck manufacturer, a sensor supplier, and a software developer can all carry responsibility for one collision, and each will point at the others. That fight decides which insurer pays, and insurers with corporate claims departments do not resolve it quickly for an unrepresented claimant. What does not change: the deadline, the comparative fault rule, and the fact that the absence of a driver is itself a theory of liability rather than a defense.
What happens next
The Teamsters say the fight is not finished, and their national campaign spans ten states, from California to Washington. In Colorado, the realistic routes back to a vote are a citizen initiative, which would need to collect signatures for a future ballot, or another bill in the 2027 session, where Polis will be gone. He is term-limited and cannot run for reelection in November. His successor inherits both the veto strategy and the empty regulatory map.
Until then, the status quo is the 2017 statute. Driverless freight trucks are lawful on every Colorado interstate, I-25 included, the moment a company decides to run them. No agency reviews their safety case. No state database collects their crashes. No voter has ever been asked. If the question ever reaches a ballot, it will arrive years after the first trucks are already sharing the road with you, and the only Colorado institution currently set up to answer the hard questions is the civil court system, one crash at a time.
- If you drive I-25 regularly: know that the regulatory map above is the real one. Nobody is screening the trucks, and nobody is collecting their crash data at the state level.
- If you are hit by an autonomous vehicle: photograph everything at the scene, collect witness names the same day, and get medical attention even for minor symptoms. The evidence inside the vehicle has a short life.
- If you want the vote back: the November 2026 ballot is certified without it. Watch the 2027 legislative session and any signature drives filed with the Secretary of State.