I thought that automated trucking was by far the best possible fit for self-driving vehicles. Dealing with the enormous amount of insanity that consumers experience day to day: predominantly residential, stray children/pets/cross walkers, aberrant weather, construction, etc feels insurmountable without actual intelligence.
In contrast, a professional trucking company could have far more reliable interstate-only medium-haul routes. Truck could operate only when conditions are favorable, otherwise human would take that day's route. Auto-Truck would drive from one hub point to another and park itself until a human was available to complete the delivery to the real endpoint. Not sure how well the systems deal with night, but you could even prioritize Auto-Truck to run after hours when there is less traffic and potential complications.
I've never driven a truck, but I get the impression that even simple interstate driving still has lots of possibilities for most of the issues you mentioned but also the vehicle is the size and weight of a small building. I was surprised to learn for instance that you can fill a standard truck up so full of potatoes that it can come in over the legal weight limit and then subject the driver to a fine (I also note that in the US, the driver is subject to the fine, but in Europe it's the company that owns the truck who is liable which really sums up a lot of labor issues pretty nicely).
I suspect that for simple, regular routes, a train is going to be really effective already. Trucks are used because they are much more versatile.
In regards to violations holding the striver instead of the company liable, I see it exactly the opposite way you do. It empowers individual workers to refuse to create a dangerous situation. If the company is the one liable, the worker can wash their hands of the situation and happily make a dangerous situation on the road. The company won’t care and can treat it as a cost of doing business/lean on insurance risk pooling because things almost never go wrong making the risk cheap. If no individual is responsible, the only people who lose are the worker and other road users.
I would think having an amount of weight that could easily crush a car behind you traveling at highway speeds would create lots of incentive for the driver to play by the rules - it's actually one of the more dangerous jobs out there for that reason. Companies can buy more trucks and drivers though.
I used to think that too but if you're interested take a look at this debate between two experts in the field, they're both skeptical of trucking being first to go fully autonomous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbnS6tWiw88
Professional trucking companies tend to be small/medium are getting squeezed pretty hard by the larger businesses on either end. Any logistics company with a large enough fleet is probably investigating this themselves.
In contrast, a professional trucking company could have far more reliable interstate-only medium-haul routes. Truck could operate only when conditions are favorable, otherwise human would take that day's route. Auto-Truck would drive from one hub point to another and park itself until a human was available to complete the delivery to the real endpoint. Not sure how well the systems deal with night, but you could even prioritize Auto-Truck to run after hours when there is less traffic and potential complications.