PHOENIX — 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 delivery truck, but there is no one at the wheel.
The truck is one of 35 driverless vehicles PepsiCo is running on Arizona roads, marking the first time a major U.S. consumer-goods company has disclosed the large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads, the company said. The trucks traverse busy highways and local streets transporting PepsiCo products between bottling plants, storage facilities and stores including Walmart and Dollar General.
At least nine autonomous-truck companies are operating in Southern and South-Central states, particularly Texas, but many still have human monitors at the wheel or are being used only in limited tests, according to the company. PepsiCo’s operation, using trucks outfitted with sensors and computers from Gatik, represents a step beyond those tests, on par with technical hurdles being cleared by driverless passenger taxis from Waymo, Tesla and other companies.
“These operations that we’re running today are real,” Jim Farrell, senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo’s North American beverages division, told The Wall Street Journal. “They are running in multiple markets in a live network, not like some experimental test environment.”
PepsiCo has an additional five trucks on the road in Texas and one in Arkansas, the company said. The medium-duty and heavy-duty box trucks are manufactured by Isuzu Motors in collaboration with Gatik.
The trucks are equipped with multiple cameras mounted at the front and back, as well as radar and lidar equipment that help determine what is on the road. Inside the cab, a steering wheel and air conditioning remain, along with three iPad-sized screens showing footage from external cameras and the computer-vision system. Current trucks in production do not include the tablets, and future generations of driverless trucks will not technically require a steering wheel or even the cab, according to Gatik co-founder and Chief Engineer Apeksha Kumavat. They will continue to have an air-conditioning system to cool the onboard computers, Kumavat said.
Gatik said PepsiCo has one of the largest fleets of its autonomous trucks in the U.S. but declined to name its other American clients. More than 20 of its trucks are ferrying goods in the Toronto area for Loblaw, Canada’s largest retailer, Gatik said. The autonomous-truck company said it has secured $600 million in revenue for multiyear contracts.
PepsiCo has been working with Gatik since 2022 to perfect the technology. They operated with a safety driver in each truck for a few years and started driverless runs in June 2025. The trucks have had no accidents on public roads so far, PepsiCo said.
At a Frito-Lay warehouse in Phoenix, workers load Cheetos and Doritos onto Gatik trucks daily, bound for dozens of locations. When the trucks make deliveries to stores, PepsiCo employees meet the trucks and unload them. Many of the company’s delivery drivers have always been sales representatives, and not having to travel with the truck allows them more time to interact with store owners to pitch promotions, the company said.
Farrell said the driverless trucks are more reliable than human drivers. The on-time arrival performance from driverless trucks reached 99%, after factoring out uncontrollable variables like weather and traffic.
“The promise of autonomous driving will hold around on-time pickup and on-time delivery,” Gautam Narang, chief executive and co-founder of Gatik, told the Journal. “There’s predictability that you can introduce by having these systems.”
Humans can call in sick or hit service limits that cap how many hours a day they can be behind the wheel, Farrell noted. The number of truck drivers has been constrained in recent months by new federal rules enforcing English-language proficiency and narrowing the pool of immigrants eligible for non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses, according to the Journal.
The driverless trucks perform best when they shuttle back and forth in repetitive trips — for instance, a 14-mile trip between a Gatorade bottling plant and storage facility, Farrell said. That route has fewer variables compared with routes that have more pickups and deliveries. When the driverless trucks deliver to stores, they may face more issues such as congestion or occupied docks.
“Many of our routes that we’re operating are very repeatable and so, as the truck gets more history going through, it can become more sophisticated and it learns as it goes,” Farrell said.
PepsiCo employs thousands of drivers in the U.S., some represented by unions that have strongly opposed the rollout of autonomous trucks. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has lobbied several states to require a trained human operator in any autonomous vehicle used to deliver commercial goods.
PepsiCo anticipates retraining and redeploying some drivers to other types of work, including managing the new equipment, synchronizing the movement of people who go to the stores, or handling unloading themselves. But ultimately, the company expects to hire fewer drivers.
“One of the things that we can do is be able to grow the business without having to add as many employees,” Farrell said. During holidays when stores get busier and shelves need to be replenished more frequently, the autonomous trucks can be deployed in place of drivers who may not be readily available, Farrell said.
Shippers and trucking companies looking to operate autonomous truck fleets are governed by state regulations. There are currently no federal laws regulating autonomous vehicles, though operators are asked to voluntarily submit safety evaluations to regulators, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and some state transportation departments.
The Arizona Department of Transportation is widely seen as having a more welcoming regulatory environment for autonomous trucking companies than other states. Autonomous-vehicle companies are required to follow a self-certification process to operate without a driver, said Bill Lamoreaux, a spokesman from the department. “ADOT’s top priority is safety,” Lamoreaux said.
MSI previously reported that autonomous truck technology is ready but regulation lags, according to the FedEx Freight CEO. Read that article.