Stopping a safe, automated vehicle would be trivial. Just dress up as a road worker, and hold up a stop sign. Do it above a manhole cover, and you have easy access to the bottom of the vehicle. A remote human supervisor might not even notice what was going on.

This seems like a vulnerability for human-operated vehicles also.

Admittedly it seems just as trivial to mitigate with some more sensors e.g. weight sensors to detect the load being modified while stopped, cameras to detect aberrant movement inside the cab, etc.

Let the arms race begin!

And what would currently happen? Killing the road worker? No, every truck would stop and you could operate in the driver's blind spot. Autonomous vehicles won't have blind spots so that the operator can identify the theft much faster.

I think you have been watching too much ocean's eleven. This would be trivial to fix with a sensor on the bottom.

> Ok, but what if the refugees were lowered by a helicop...

Sensor on the roof. Sensor on the side. Sensor everywhere.

Autonomous trucks will be searched just like non-autonomous ones at borders.

Outside of national borders, smuggling felonious quantities of hard drugs from state to state is already trivial.

Smuggling is trivial currently, but not without risking incarceration or death. Once the contraband can be ferried by an autonomous vehicle without risk to the operator, the incentives will change dramatically.

Has been done between Mexico and California already. Aside from that, many of the drivers aren't really given a choice, so the risk is irrelevant.

Tag the vehicle, follow it, arrest everyone who comes to pick the drugs up.