We keep this blog honest, so here’s the unvarnished truth: driverless trucks have officially left the test-track phase. They are hauling real freight, right now, with no human in the cab.
- Kodiak Robotics closed Q3 2025 running 10 fully driverless trucks 24/7 in the West Texas oil patch for a paying customer.
- Aurora has been running commercial driver-out loads between Dallas and Houston since May.
- Waymo Via, Gatik, Torc, and a few Chinese fleets are all logging driverless miles in carefully chosen corridors.
The technology works — in sunny states, on pre-mapped highways, in good weather, on relatively simple routes. That’s no longer debatable.
What is debatable is whether the rest of the industry — carriers, shippers, regulators, insurers, and most importantly the 3.5 million professional drivers who keep America moving — is ready for what comes next.
The Current Reality (No Hype)
- Real deployments exist, but they’re still measured in dozens of trucks, not thousands.
- Almost every driverless mile today happens in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, or Florida — places with cooperative weather and friendly regulations.
- Snow, ice, construction zones, mountain grades, and dense urban cores remain largely unproven territory.
- Insurance frameworks, nationwide permitting, and cybersecurity standards are still patchwork at best.
In other words, the tech is here. Full national scalability is not.
Safety: Promising, But Not Yet Proven at Scale
The panelists at ACT Research were right about the advantages: 360° sensors never get tired, never text, never fall asleep. Redundant systems and instant fleet-wide software updates are real improvements.
But the public data set is still tiny. We don’t yet know how these systems perform after a million winter miles or in a surprise blizzard on I-80 in Pennsylvania. Until those miles are driven — and transparently reported, “safer than a human” remains a claim, not a fact.
The Business Case Is Still Full of Question Marks
Every carrier in America, including us, is running the same spreadsheets:
- A Level-4-ready truck still costs $150,000–$250,000 more than a conventional sleeper.
- Utilization is geographically locked for the next 2–4 years.
- Insurance carriers haven’t settled on who pays when the computer (not the human) is at fault.
- Shippers love the idea of no 10-hour breaks… until you tell them the surcharge.
Right now the ROI only pencils out on a handful of lanes. Everything else is hope, hype, or PowerPoint.
The Human Cost Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
The industry likes to repeat the comforting line “driverless is not humanless.” We’ve heard the vision: drivers will become “mission managers,” sit in climate-controlled rooms and watch screens, or they’ll all do nice regional day-cab jobs.
Maybe. But we’ve also seen what happens when Wall Street smells a labor-cost reduction of 30–40%. Good intentions get rewritten the moment the quarterly numbers are due.
Where Z Transportation Stands — No Compromise-Free
We’re not Luddites. If autonomous trucks can genuinely make our drivers’ lives better, we’ll use them. But only on our terms:
- Not one loyal Z Transportation driver who wants to stay behind the wheel will lose their job to a robot. Period.
- We will never bid a load cheaper just because we took the human out of the cab and then pocket the difference. Any savings will go to higher driver pay and better equipment.
- We will not participate in a future where professional driving turns into low-wage screen-watching in a cubicle farm. If that’s where this is headed, count us out.
- We will keep running safe, well-paid, over-the-road and regional jobs as long as customers need freight moved and drivers want to drive.
Technology is moving fast. Some of it feels like it’s racing straight toward a cold, dystopian version of trucking where the soul out of the industry that raised us.
At Z Transportation, we refuse to let that happen on our watch.
The trucks without steering wheels are here. Our values aren’t going anywhere.
We’ve got our drivers’ backs — yesterday, today, and no matter what tomorrow’s software update brings.