Gatik may not have the trucking industry street cred and name recognition of Peterbilt or Kenworth, but that could soon change in a big way.
The California-based company announced in January that it had become “the first company in North America to deploy fully driverless trucks in commercial operations at scale, with $600 million in contracted revenue and daily deliveries for Fortune 50 retailers with no human driver or safety observer behind the wheel.”
“Autonomous trucking is no longer a promise. It’s a business,” Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik, said in a press release. “Gatik has proved that autonomous trucking is not only possible but commercially viable, and the fierce demand for our solution reflects how quickly this new model will reshape the future of logistics.”
The days of driverless trucks being merely theoretical in nature are not only gone but swiftly so. Over less than a decade of existence, Gatik claims to have deployed autonomous trucks in four states and Ontario, Canada, boasting 60,000 fully driverless orders fulfilled since mid-2025 alone and covering 2,000 hours and 10,000 miles across multiple logistics networks without a single incident.
While such Space Age wizardry generally rolls out on the coasts and makes its way inland, not so this time. The first states to see deployment of the technology include Texas, Arizona, Nebraska and, yes, Arkansas.
None of that is news to Shannon Newton at the Arkansas Trucking Association, of course; as the organization’s president, it is her job to stay up on all things trucking in the Natural State. However, she said it does make for quite the ice breaker in public speaking engagements to tell audiences the future is not only at hand but cruising along in the adjoining lane.
Shannon Newton
“I do think that people in general are surprised when I say that we have full-blown automation on the road in Arkansas today, and we have for, like, four years now,” she said. “I have said this in front of multiple audiences, and I get a similar reaction from all of them.
“People have such a conservative view of it, or they feel like it’s futuristic or someplace else or some other time that when I hit them with, ‘It is here. It is being utilized. It’s on the road. It’s being deployed in a commercial way today, now,’ I get the shock and awe of that.”
Walmart broke the seal on the use of autonomous trucks in 2019 with models that went fully driverless in 2021. Tyson Foods was close behind, and both companies are clients of Gatik. Application of the technology is fairly narrow at present; smaller rigs (think 26- to 30-foot bread trucks) are deployed on set routes from warehouses to individual stores or processing facilities and back, not unlike an oversized Roomba following a preset route.
The rigs navigate traffic and other structures through the use of next-gen sensors, artificial intelligence and other mapping tools. According to a company statement, Gatik’s safety systems have been vetted by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as state agencies and independent third-party audits.
While it may still be jarring for the average motorist to look to their left and see a ghost truck passing them, Newton was quick to challenge the thinking that an autonomous truck is automatically less safe than human drivers.
“Let me challenge you a little bit. How many times do you look over, and you see someone putting mayonnaise on their sandwich or makeup on their face or scrolling or watching a video behind the wheel? That doesn’t faze you?” she said. “I understand where that [attitude] is coming from, but I also think people have the expectation of perfection when the reality is [the technology] doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be better than we are, and we’re not very good at times.
“I think there’s a tendency to judge it as though it must execute flawlessly. Otherwise, it’s a failure, but a normal driver is far from perfect, yet we accept that running 75 miles an hour up and down the interstate all day long.”
On the positive side, the new trucks can run 24 hours a day, never call in sick and can be used to fill delivery gaps that would not equate to the best use of time and resources for live drivers if they could be found, Newton said.
“They’re short routes, very low miles. There’s a lot of downtime on either end of them, and so it’s very inefficient to utilize a person to stand there and man the trailer while they’re waiting on something to come out of cold storage or waiting on the grain to fill,” she said. “Most drivers really don’t want that job, so [companies] have deployed it as an efficiency measure to help move products within their own supply chain in northwest Arkansas.”
The next step in the evolution of autonomous trucks, the ability for full-on big rigs to go coast to coast, remains a monumental lift. Not only are there issues of infrastructure such as charging and fueling, but state laws concerning the technology are all over the map. Arkansas and Texas are more progressive on that spectrum, while California practically bans such rigs outright, and the rest of the states create a hodgepodge of regulation in between.
The situation has pushed would-be players in the autonomous truck market to strain at their leashes, demanding federal lawmakers step in to provide some clarity and consistency across state lines. The Trib reported March 31 that a Pennsylvania-based company, Aurora, was pressuring members of Congress to override state rules with a national regulatory framework via the forthcoming highway, transit and rail reappropriation, due this fall.
“You can’t have a patchwork of legislation, particularly when it comes to interstate trucking,” said Gerardo Interiano, senior vice president of government affairs at Aurora. The company only operates 10 tractor trailers equipped with Aurora’s autonomous driving system at this time, primarily running routes in the nation’s Sun Belt. However, the firm is planning to add another 200 units this year, which explains its urgency in getting uniform regulations from the feds.
Newton never says never when it comes to the advance of technology but said wholesale use of 18-wheelers going coast to coast is not likely to become common overnight, even once the legislative piece is solved.
“When you’re talking about major over-the-road deployment, I don’t know that that’s realistic, or at least, that’s not really part of the conversations that I’ve been engaged in concerning the opportunities and rollout of autonomous vehicles,” she said. “Even on the biggest scale, where the companies have some sort of national footprint, including multiple locations in multiple states, the pipe dream application is that those truckload carriers could use it almost like a relay from one yard to another using autonomous technology and then have it manned for what today we call the final mile, but, in this application, would be the final 50 miles or whatever.
“Even that would require a complete reengineering of the way we think about over-the-road truckload freight transportation in general. Something like road construction or even something as basic as road striping, all of those things present real challenges for the technology. If we can’t stripe the highway appropriately, that’s going to make it increasingly difficult for the technology to utilize that striping to stay in its lane, so I think that we’re a long way away from that even happening.”
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