Overview
- PepsiCo and autonomous‑truck company Gatik have put 35 driverless Isuzu box trucks into service mainly in Arizona with additional vehicles in Texas and Arkansas to move Frito‑Lay goods to warehouses and retailers including Walmart and Dollar General.
- Company officials say the fleet has recorded a 99% on‑time arrival rate when excluding weather and traffic and reports zero accidents so far on public roads.
- The trucks keep a conventional cab with a steering wheel and are fitted with cameras, radar and lidar so they can learn corridor‑specific patterns on short, repeatable routes that have few intermediate stops.
- Labor groups led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are lobbying states to require trained human operators, and PepsiCo says some workers will be retrained even as the technology reduces long‑term hiring needs.
- Gatik is scaling commercially with roughly $600 million in multiyear contract revenue and other deployments such as more than 20 trucks for Loblaw in Toronto, showing the industry preference for automating predictable short‑haul logistics.