Driverless Trucks Are Already Delivering to Walmart. Can Your Operation Afford to Wait?

By Ashley Prince | June 16, 2026

PepsiCo has gone all-in on driverless trucks. The food and beverage giant has been testing autonomous trucks via its partnership with Gatik since 2022, finally removing human backup drivers from the cabs on public roads last summer. 

This month, PepsiCo and Gatik announced a multi-year strategic partnership to expand the operation to approximately 250 retail locations across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. The autonomous trucks will deliver to retailers like Walmart and Dollar General with no driver or observer in the cab. It is the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment on record.

“Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable, and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience and scale we need to strengthen service, add capacity and move products more consistently for our customers.”

PepsiCo and Gatik have proven that the technology can work, providing a use case for other supply chain managers considering an investment in autonomous. From an economic standpoint, the available data suggests the business case may be catching up to the technology.

The Economics of Hiring Humans

In today’s labor market, the median age of a truck driver is 57. The American Trucking Associations projects the industry will need to recruit 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade to replace retiring workers and meet freight demand. That kind of effort comes with a high price tag.

In addition to an aging workforce, the trucking industry has grappled with sky high turnover rates for decades. Annual turnover at large truckload carriers continues to run above 90%.

Research from the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute puts the average cost of replacing a driver at $8,234 per departure, with some carriers reporting costs above $20,000. That number accounts for recruiting, screening, onboarding, and idle equipment. At a 90% turnover rate, a 50-truck operation could spend more than $370,000 a year just on replacing drivers.

Driver wages remain the single largest variable expense in trucking operations, and wages have been climbing alongside labor constraints. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2024 median wage for box truck drivers at $44,140 up from $37,050 in 2020. That’s a 19% increase in four years.

According to ATRI’s 2025 Operational Costs of Trucking report, rising driver wages helped push non-fuel operating costs to the highest level ever recorded in 2024. 

The FMCSA’s Final Rule on non-domiciled CDLs, which took effect in March, adds even more pressure to fleets facing high turnover and rising costs. The rule eliminates CDL eligibility for most Employment Authorization Document holders, including DACA recipients, asylum seekers, and refugees. It is facing legal challenges, but its effect on the eligible driver pool is already adding to continued uncertainty for carriers.

The Financial Impact of Autonomous Trucks

Gatik’s autonomous model addresses rising labor costs directly. The company uses what it calls Remote Supervisors. These operators make high-level decisions, but they do not remotely drive the vehicles on public roads. The model allows one supervisor to oversee multiple trucks at a time, creating a more efficient workflow. 

Gatik has indicated that operations can become profitable when one supervisor is monitoring as few as two trucks, cutting the labor cost per route roughly in half before any additional scale.

McKinsey’s analysis of autonomous trucking economics projects that fully driverless operations on optimized corridors can reduce cost per mile by approximately 42%, driven primarily by eliminating driver wages. Autonomous trucks also aren’t subject to Hours of Service limits that cap human drivers at 11 hours per day, expanding utilization on time-sensitive lanes.

While the economics of autonomous seem promising, autonomous trucks are not yet widely accessible. Manufacturers are making a concerted effort to change that. A production facility being developed by Gatik, Isuzu, and Nvidia in South Carolina is expected to begin mass-producing Level 4 autonomous trucks in the second half of 2027.

The timing here matters, too. The convergence of retiring drivers and autonomous technology could create a dynamic where humans are being replaced when they naturally leave the workforce, not displaced from the cab in the middle of their careers. 

For PepsiCo’s part, the company framed the deployment as capacity expansion rather than headcount reduction, targeting lanes that have been chronically difficult to staff. 

Which Routes Work for Autonomous Trucks? 

The Gatik-PepsiCo model works because the routes are structured. Fixed distribution center-to-store runs between known locations allow the system to optimize continuously. These routes do not require repositioning or broker negotiation, and stop sequences are set in stone.

That predictability is a key part of making autonomous work in today’s environment. It also means that long-haul fleets may need to wait a little longer to introduce autonomous into their workflows. Unlike middle-mile regional distribution runs, over-the-road trucking involves open-ended routing, variable stops, and the unpredictability of the highway network.

Volume and frequency matter too. The more times a route runs, the more data the system accumulates, and the better it performs. DC-to-store delivery for a high-volume consumer goods shipper like PepsiCo is close to an ideal use case.

The equipment also needs to match the route. The medium-duty Isuzu box trucks Gatik operates back directly into docks without trailer hookup or unhooking, removing a point of friction at both ends of the delivery. 

Shippers running routes that are compatible with the current interaction of autonomous technology should start paying closer attention to their needs, their competitors, and their state legislators. 

Gatik can currently operate in 29 states with favorable autonomous vehicle frameworks, which covers most major regional distribution corridors. Shippers evaluating specific lanes should confirm state-level operating authority before modeling autonomous freight into their networks.

For operations running high-frequency, fixed-route regional distribution, autonomous middle-mile freight is more realistic than ever.