Gatik driverless trucks make money on fixed routes: narrow autonomy earns trust before general autonomy (The Hustle)

The driverless trucks making money are not the ones crossing continents. They are the ones shuttling between a distribution centre and a supermarket.

The Hustle profiled Gatik this week. By its own account, the company began with a narrow customer problem: retailers and grocers needed a more dependable way to move goods through regional networks between distribution centres and stores. It focused on short, high-frequency, repeatable routes and now says it runs fully driverless trucks, with no driver or safety observer on board, in several parts of North America.

The numbers are Gatik's, relayed by The Hustle, and I would treat them as claims rather than audited fact. It says it has completed more than 85,000 driverless orders, over 99 per cent of them on time, and booked more than US$600 million in contracted revenue. PepsiCo and Loblaw are named as customers, and Walmart was the first major one. The same article cites the National Private Truck Council figure that replacing a driver cost private fleets more than US$12,000 in 2025.

Gatik also says its biggest hurdle is scaling safety across vehicles, routes and customer networks while working with regulators. That seems a fair description of where the real work is.

What interests me is the scope. A fixed route is a bounded problem. It can be mapped, tested and approved one corridor at a time, and the customer's alternative is a cost they already know. General-purpose autonomy has been a year or two away for a long time. A narrow job with a measurable result has a shorter path to being trusted.

I expect that pattern to hold across automation more broadly, including in AI systems inside organisations. The first deployments to earn trust will be the ones that do one defined thing, repeatedly, with a record the business can check. For most executive teams, the useful question is where in the operation that route already exists.

Source: Bill Meincke, "Who's driving this delivery truck? Nobody", The Hustle (8 October 2026), https://lnkd.in/gBb9bmGW

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