“PepsiCo is operating a fleet of 35 driverless trucks in Arizona.” It is “the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads,” notes The Doomslayer.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A 26,000-pound box truck loaded with Doritos and Frito-Lay chips rolls out of a distribution center, bound for a Walmart store about 4 miles away. It looks like any other truck, but there is no one at the wheel.
This is one of the 35 driverless trucks PepsiCo is running on Arizona roads, marking it as the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads. They are traversing busy highways and local streets as they transport PepsiCo products between bottling plants, storage facilities and stores like Walmart and Dollar General.
At least nine autonomous-truck companies are operating in Southern and South-Central states, especially Texas, but many still have human monitors at the wheel, or are being used only in limited tests. PepsiCo’s operation, using trucks outfitted with sensors and computers from an autonomous-truck company called Gatik, is a step beyond, on par with the technical hurdles being cleared by much smaller, lighter driverless passenger taxis from Waymo, Tesla and other companies.
Self-driving trucks are already being used safely to supply oil and gas wells in Texas.
Self-driving cars are generally safer than human-driven cars. “Driverless Waymo vehicles have driven 170 million miles through December 2025 without a human driver in the car. Compared to the average human driver over the same distance, Waymo driverless cars experienced 83% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 82% fewer injury-causing crashes, and 92% fewer serious injury or worse crashes.”
Amazon is planning to produce up to 10,000 robotaxis per year in a California plant.
Waymo self-driving taxis now transport thousands of passengers every day in American cities.
“Uber and Baidu are teaming up to bring autonomous taxis to the world. Baidu’s robotaxis” had already logged more than 11 million rides in China by 2025, reported The Doomslayer.
