In brief: Another milestone has been reached in our rapid and often worrying shift toward a Futurama-like world. PepsiCo has become the first major US consumer-goods company to boast a full-scale deployment of autonomous trucks on public roads, with 35 self-driving vehicles delivering goods in Arizona, five in Texas, and one in Arkansas.
The trucks are moving PepsiCo products including Doritos, Cheetos, other Frito-Lay snacks, and drinks such as Gatorade. The routes run between bottling plants, storage facilities, and stores, including Walmart and Dollar General.
It's not a small pilot with someone in the driver's seat ready to grab the wheel, either: these are driverless runs in live commercial networks.
"These operations that we're running today are real," said Jim Farrell, senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo's North American beverages division, told The Wall Street Journal. "They are running in multiple markets in a live network, not like some experimental test environment."
The vehicles themselves are medium- and heavy-duty box trucks built by Isuzu Motors and fitted with autonomous-driving systems from Gatik. They use cameras, radar, and lidar to monitor the road, and while the current trucks still have a steering wheel and cab, Gatik has said future generations would not technically need either.
PepsiCo began working with Gatik in 2022, initially running the trucks with safety drivers. Fully driverless deliveries started in June 2025, and the company says the vehicles have had no accidents on public roads so far. It also claims a 99% on-time arrival rate once uncontrollable factors such as weather and traffic are excluded.
The trucks are best suited to short, repetitive routes where the software can learn the same roads over and over. One example is a 14-mile route between a Gatorade bottling plant and a storage facility.
Store deliveries are more complicated, especially when docks are blocked or traffic is heavy, but PepsiCo employees are still present to unload the vehicles when they arrive.
"Many of our routes that we're operating are very repeatable and so, as the truck gets more history going through, it can become more sophisticated and it learns as it goes," Farrell said.
As with all examples of automation being pushed to new levels, there are concerns about the trucks' impact on human jobs. PepsiCo employs thousands of US drivers, and the Teamsters have been lobbying several states to require a trained human operator inside any autonomous vehicle used for commercial deliveries.
PepsiCo says some drivers could be retrained for roles managing the equipment, coordinating store-side workers, or unloading goods. But the company also acknowledges that driverless trucks could let it grow without hiring as many people in the future, particularly during busy holiday periods, which certainly sounds ominous.
There are still no federal laws specifically governing autonomous trucks, leaving much of the rollout to state-level rules.
Arizona has been one of the most welcoming states for autonomous vehicles, allowing operators to self-certify driverless deployments. It's a system that's helped accelerate the rollout of autonomous delivery trucks, including those now putting bags of Doritos on store shelves without anyone behind the wheel.
PepsiCo deploys fleet of driverless trucks to deliver Doritos and drinks in three states
