{"id":720,"date":"2026-09-08T11:15:44","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milta.pro\/2026\/09\/08\/autonomous-trucks-in-logistics-where-do-things-really-stand-in-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T19:06:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T17:06:58","slug":"autonomous-trucks-in-logistics-where-do-things-really-stand-in-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milta.pro\/en\/autonomous-trucks-in-logistics-where-do-things-really-stand-in-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Autonomous trucks in logistics: where do things really stand in 2026?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trucks are carrying freight today without a driver in the United States. In mines and quarries, some have been working alone for several years. In Europe, level 4 is arriving on open roads, and states are now starting to prepare for cross-border crossings. <\/p>\n<\/div>

But this technology wasn’t born with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence. Its history goes back several decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Autonomous trucks: how did the technology begin?<\/h2><\/div>

A significant part of modern autonomous driving comes from US military research. DARPA<\/a> \u2014 the US Department of Defense’s advanced research agency \u2014 was notably looking to develop vehicles capable of carrying out dangerous missions without exposing military personnel. <\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, the US Congress had set the goal that a third of certain ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015. Logistics convoys, particularly exposed in Iraq, were explicitly among the applications envisioned. <\/p>\n

To accelerate research, DARPA organised a rather radical competition in March 2004<\/a>: fifteen vehicles had to cross 142 miles of desert on their own. None made it to the finish; the best got only as far as 7.5 miles<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

Eighteen months later, five vehicles completed a new 132-mile course. In 2007, the Urban Challenge added traffic, intersections, overtaking and compliance with traffic rules. This time, six vehicles finished the event.<\/p>\n<\/div>

And this is where a direct link with today’s industry appears.<\/p>\n

Chris Urmson<\/a>, technical director of the winning Carnegie Mellon team in 2007, joined Google in 2009 to develop its self-driving car programme \u2014 which would later become Waymo \u2014 then co-founded Aurora in 2017, today one of the most advanced players in American autonomous trucking.<\/p>\n

Don Burnette<\/a> followed a similar path: after six years on Google’s self-driving car project and founding Otto, he started Kodiak in 2018.<\/p>\n

The military competitions therefore didn’t directly ‘invent the autonomous truck’. They created a formidable testing ground and helped train a generation of engineers who went on from robotics to self-driving cars, and then to trucks.<\/p>\n<\/div>

And in Europe?<\/h2><\/div>

The story wasn’t written solely in the United States.<\/p>\n

In Europe, the momentum was first civilian and industrial. The PROMETHEUS<\/a> programme was launched in October 1986 on the initiative of Daimler-Benz as part of the European EUREKA programme, with 14 car manufacturers. <\/p>\n

Its name sums up its ambition: Programme for a European Transport System of Highest Efficiency and Unrivalled Safety. Even then, the goal was to use computing, electronics and communication to make traffic safer and more efficient. <\/p>\n

The two trajectories would eventually converge: US military research, university robotics, civilian self-driving cars and European research on intelligent vehicles gradually fed into the same technological ecosystem.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Mines: the first commercial testing ground for autonomous trucks<\/h2><\/div>

Before the motorway, heavy-vehicle autonomy found a much simpler testing ground: mines.<\/p>\n

Routes there are repetitive, the environment is controlled, and interactions with outside traffic are limited. Komatsu claims<\/a> to have commercialised the first autonomous mining transport system as early as 2008.<\/p>\n

In April 2026, the manufacturer announced its 1,000th autonomous haul truck<\/strong> and more than 11.5 billion tonnes<\/strong> of material hauled by vehicles equipped with its FrontRunner system.<\/p>\n

Volvo<\/a> offers another spectacular example today in Norway. At Br\u00f8nn\u00f8y Kalk, seven autonomous Volvo FH trucks cover around five kilometres between a mine and a crusher, through tunnels and steep gradients. <\/p>\n

The safety driver was removed in 2023. In May 2025, Volvo announced more than 220,000 kilometres<\/strong> covered and one million tonnes of limestone hauled autonomously.<\/p>\n<\/div>

The first lesson is fairly simple: the more predictable the environment, the easier it is to remove the driver.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Level 4 autonomous trucks: what does that actually mean?<\/h2><\/div>

SAE International<\/a>‘s classification distinguishes six levels of automation, from 0 to 5.<\/p>\n<\/div>

To drive, the truck must first be able to ‘see’.<\/p>\n

Cameras visually interpret its surroundings; radars use radio waves to measure distances and speeds, among other things; LiDAR sends out laser pulses to reconstruct the environment in three dimensions.<\/p>\n

To this can be added V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communications between vehicles, and V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communications between the vehicle and road infrastructure. These technologies aren’t sensors: they provide the vehicle with additional information from its connected environment.<\/p>\n<\/div>

But moving from the mine to the motorway makes perception far more difficult.<\/p>\n

The TruckDrive<\/a> research project, published in 2026 by researchers from Torc Robotics and Princeton, looks in particular at the long-range vision essential for heavy trucks. Their tests show that several leading models lose significant performance beyond around 150 metres<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons why the current industry goal generally isn’t ‘a truck that can go anywhere’, but hub-to-hub: automating repetitive links between two logistics platforms, mainly on motorways.<\/p>\n

MAN<\/a> is developing exactly this use case with ATLAS-L4; Scania<\/a> has made it one of its major focus areas; IVECO and PlusAI have been testing two level-4 S-Way trucks since 2026 over about 300 km between Madrid and Zaragoza, still with a safety operator on board.<\/p>\n<\/div>

In the United States: “deploy first, harmonise later”?<\/h2><\/div>

It’s in the United States today that the shift to commercial operation is most visible.<\/p>\n

Aurora began<\/a> regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston in May 2025. As of 30 June 2026, the company reported<\/a> approaching 440,000 miles<\/strong> driven without a driver. <\/p>\n

This is data published by Aurora, but it is indeed commercial freight on public roads, not a prototype on a test track.<\/p>\n

Kodiak<\/a> offers a second example, in a different environment: the Permian oil basin. At the end of June 2026, the company reported 35 driverless trucks<\/strong> owned by its customers, more than 40,000 paid driverless operating hours<\/strong>, and more than 20,000 cumulative loads<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div>

US law developed in parallel.<\/p>\n

As early as 2017, Texas allowe<\/a>d an automated vehicle to operate without a human driver when its autonomous system was engaged, while preventing local authorities from adding their own rules.<\/p>\n

Since May 2026, however, commercial driverless operators have had to obtain authorisation from the TxDMV<\/a> and meet several requirements: insurance, a data recorder, the ability to reach a minimal-risk condition, and a plan for interacting with emergency services.<\/p>\n

At the federal level, the framework is still being built. The NHTSA<\/a> is gradually adapting standards historically designed for vehicles with a steering wheel, pedals and a human driver. <\/p>\n

At the same time, the BUILD America 250 Act<\/a> proposes a first federal framework specific to autonomous commercial vehicles. The bill was approved in May 2026 by the relevant House of Representatives committee, but is not yet an adopted federal law.<\/p>\n<\/div>

The American case therefore looks a lot like “deploy first, harmonise later”: some trucks are already working without a driver while federal law continues to be built around their operation.<\/p>\n<\/div>

In China: the challenge of scaling up<\/h2><\/div>

In China, the dynamic is different. Pony.ai reported<\/a> at the end of 2025 that it was operating around 200 trucks and had passed one billion tonne-kilometres of freight since entering this market in 2018.
\nThis figure doesn’t mean that a billion tonne-kilometres were covered without a driver: it aggregates the activity of its whole fleet.
\nIts fourth generation, developed with SANY and Dongfeng Liuzhou, is designed above all for production at a scale of thousands of units from 2026, with hardware costs announced to be down around 70% compared with the previous generation.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Shanghai<\/a> gives a sense of the ecosystem available for these deployments. In 2025, the Lin-gang zone had 551.7 km<\/strong> of approved roads across 245 routes, with 22 companies and 364 vehicles involved in trials or demonstrations. <\/p>\n

Autonomous heavy trucks there already handle container transfers between a logistics hub, the Donghai Bridge, and Yangshan Port.<\/p>\n

The national framework is also taking shape. On 4 August 2026, China published<\/a> its first mandatory national safety standard for level 3 and 4 autonomous systems in passenger and freight vehicles. It is due to come into force on 1 July 2027.<\/p>\n<\/div>

In Europe: the border challenge<\/h2><\/div>

Europe hasn’t been legally inactive.<\/p>\n

In 2021, Germany created a framework<\/a> allowing level 4 vehicles to operate regularly on public roads in predetermined zones, with no driver physically present but with external technical supervision. The law explicitly cites hub-to-hub links between distribution centres among the possible uses. <\/p>\n

In 2022, the European Union took a further step with Regulation 2022\/1426<\/a>, which sets common technical type-approval requirements for certain fully automated vehicles. The regulation specifically recognises hub-to-hub operation on a predefined route. <\/p>\n

But it simultaneously leaves Member States the right to regulate the movement and operational safety of these vehicles on their roads.<\/p>\n<\/div>

That’s the whole European paradox: harmonising vehicle type-approval doesn’t yet mean fully harmonising its right to operate.<\/p>\n

In March 2025, the Commission acknowledged<\/a> that testing and commercial operating conditions are less favourable in the EU than in the United States and China.<\/p>\n

A trial on open roads often still requires exemptions from national rules, and therefore multiple authorisations when a route crosses several states.<\/p>\n

One European project already makes the problem concretely measurable: MODI<\/a>, launched in 2022 on the Rotterdam\u2013Oslo corridor.<\/p>\n

It covers the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and studies not only driving itself, but also border crossings, ports, terminal access, charging, loading, and the transfer between public roads and closed areas.<\/p>\n

On 25 September 2025, a project demonstration reached an important milestone: an autonomous freight vehicle with no driver on board crossed the Sweden\u2013Norway border on the E18, with freight documents transmitted digitally to customs.<\/p>\n<\/div>

This demonstration also shows precisely why cross-border operation remains complex: regulation, customs, communication, infrastructure and vehicle systems all have to keep working together on both sides of the border.<\/p>\n

In 2026, Europe is therefore beginning to tackle the problem collectively.<\/p>\n

On 8 June, 18 Member States signed<\/a> a joint declaration of intent to develop large cross-border testbeds for autonomous vehicles and, in particular, to align their authorisation procedures.<\/p>\n

The Commission had announced it wanted to establish at least three large cross-border testbeds. At this stage, it has not yet published three definitive geographic corridors that could be cited as such. <\/p>\n

Two weeks later, on 24 June 2026, another piece fell into place at the international level. UNECE<\/a> \u2014 the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe \u2014 hosts WP.29, the World Forum responsible for harmonising vehicle technical regulations. It adopted the first global regulatory framework<\/a> allowing fully autonomous driving systems. <\/p>\n

This creates a common international technical foundation, but obviously doesn’t give a truck an automatic right to operate without a driver in every country.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Autonomous trucks in the Benelux: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on the front line<\/h2><\/div>

Belgium has already served as a testing ground.<\/p>\n

On 16 September 2025, Einride ran<\/a> the first fully autonomous heavy truck on a Belgian public road at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges during a demonstration.<\/p>\n

The vehicle is level 4 and doesn’t even have a cab. Radar, LiDAR and cameras give it 360\u00b0 vision, while a control tower allows the operations to be supervised remotely.<\/p>\n<\/div>

A few months later, on 23 February 2026, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg officially launched<\/a> enhanced cooperation on autonomous road transport.<\/p>\n<\/div>