It's a little harder because you can lock it with a pretty significant lock, it's generally moving, and it has a ton of location and camera data. If the police are notified of your exact position when you start the robbery it's probably hard to get enough stuff to make it actually worth the risk. The hard part isn't getting the truck to stop (which is trivially easy now), it's actually getting stuff and getting away with it.

Police aren't going to follow every automated truck on the road. And a balance has to be found or PDs will ignore shipping companies. Too many false alarms; they stop responding.

So by the time a truck is stopped, realizes a robbery is in progress, contacts command, who assesses if it's a real event, who contact local police, who send a cruiser to check investigate. They thiefs could have gotten away with quite a lot.

Btw, a grand theft rarely rises to immediate action. City PD have bigger concerns, most of the Midwest is sparsely populated. That leaves the bored suburb PD who'll be in the most responsive.

What is it that you think the current person involved's course of action? Are you suggesting that the person in a truck regularly defends its load from piracy today?

2 aspects

1) If drivers are at such danger that they do more than contact police then the liability would require they have trained security with them.

2) Drivers themselves are a major security vulnerability, how susceptible is a driver to being paid off by a "pirate". [and there was a recent article in Outside about how healthy nuts go through a lot of truck theft]

A driver calls 911 and is immediately routed to the local PD. Do remember a robbery (a person) has a higher priority than theft (just property)

These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo. That's worth a fair amount of risk and effort even if you lose 80% of it on the black market that's still better than most robberies.

Sure, but you could also just rob people NOW.

Just go on an open stretch of road in the country side with a firearm and open fire through the truck windows. A truck driver isn't going to be able to defend themselves.

You might argue that this doesn't happen because criminals are afraid of getting caught by the police and sent to jail.

But, if anything, the risks would be even greater for a self driving truck that has dozens of always on cameras recording, GPS tracking, and an emergency police call system.

> These trucks often have 1,000,000+$ worth of cargo.

That's true, but the problem is which one? Most of them are dry vans that you don't know what's inside, and/or not worth the risk. My loaded trailer was once opened and they didn't touch the merchandise. The only loss was the lock.

Most Fedex trucks already have $100k+ worth of cargo and only one person driving it. Doesn't mean it's easy to rob. Going through 80,000lb of shipments to find those that are worth enough is very time consuming and the truck will be hard to hide while you're doing it.

Much harder than a manned one. You can secure unmanned trucks better than manned trucks. Truckers need to be able to open the truck which is a weakness currently. With autonomous vehicles you don't have that. Camera data allows you to see theft earlier (currently it sometimes happens while the trucker is sleeping in the front) and directly report it to the police. The video also provides evidence and helps the police identifying the exact vehicle and location.

I would compare it to banks. ATMs are still a target of theft but it's much harder to crack them compared to robbing a bank where tellers have access to cash. The same will be true for trucks. There will be some thefts that are more sophisticated (and successful) but the overall rate will go down.