Tech & AI Oct 18, 2026 · 7 min read

Daimler puts a date on driverless trucks, and a price model

Daimler Truck says its first driverless route starts within about 10 weeks. Daimler Truck expects to take the driver out of the truck on its first route by the end of 2026, with commercial scale around 2028, FreightWaves reported on 17 October. In our view the date matters less than the price model: the virtual driver will be billed per mile, as software. Aurora reported nearly 440,000 driverless miles through June. Kodiak had 35 trucks with no one in the cab. For forwarders, that points to autonomous capacity on Texas lanes, priced per mile. Our call: Daimler’s first driverless run happens no later than 31 March 2027.

Daimler’s driverless deadline is ten weeks away. The per-mile price is the bigger story.
Daimler Truck expects to take the driver out of the truck on its first route by the end of 2026. That is roughly 10 weeks from today. FreightWaves reported it on Saturday 17 October, from a fireside chat at the new Charlotte headquarters of Daimler Truck Financial Services. CFO Eva Scherer set out the plan. In the article’s words, Daimler expects to “get the driver out on its first route by the end of this year” and is “targeting commercialization at scale toward 2028”.
The article paraphrases Scherer rather than quoting her. It gives no truck counts, mileage targets or costs. So treat the date as a company target, not a promise.
Our view: the date is not the story. Daimler is not first. Aurora and Kodiak are already running trucks with no one on board. What Daimler adds is the business model a mainstream truck maker plans to sell. That model is what will set the cost of autonomous truck capacity for ordinary carriers, and so for the forwarders and shippers who buy from them.

What Daimler actually said

The platform is an autonomy-ready Freightliner Cascadia. That means the truck has redundant braking and steering, a second system that takes over if the first fails. The “virtual driver”, the software and sensors that do the driving, comes from Torc Robotics. Torc is Daimler’s autonomous-driving subsidiary.
FreightWaves describes a split purchase. A buyer buys or finances the truck and chassis as usual. Then “the virtual driver comes as a per-mile software-as-a-service layer on top.” Software-as-a-service means you pay a running fee to use the software instead of owning it. Here the fee is charged per mile.
The design is also meant to be modular. FreightWaves reports that the redundant chassis could in principle run with other virtual-driver providers, not only Torc. Daimler’s finance arm says it will finance whatever shape the autonomous model takes. Scherer also described a shift in how the software learns. It is moving away from copying human drivers and towards reinforcement learning, where the system learns by trial and reward. The aim is trucks that can handle routes they have not seen before.
The rollout will be gradual, on what the article calls “defined lanes”, with safety as the gate. No lane is named.

Where the others stand

Daimler starts behind. Here is how the main US players looked at their last public updates.
Aurora is the furthest along on long-haul. In February, Supply Chain 24/7 reported that it was tripling its driverless network to 10 routes across Texas and the Southwest. The longest is a roughly 1,000-mile run between Fort Worth and Phoenix, which takes about 15 hours. The article notes that federal hours-of-service rules, which cap how long a human may drive, would stop a single driver making that run without a break. CEO Chris Urmson put the case simply: “if autonomy can work around the clock, it will be key to growing our customers’ businesses.”
By its Q2 results, summarised by MarketBeat on 29 July, Aurora reported “nearly 440,000 driverless miles through the end of June”. It said it was “fully allocated to exit 2026 with 200 driverless trucks in operation”. Revenue is still small. Q2 brought in $2 million, and Aurora kept its 2026 forecast of $14 million to $16 million. It also said the year-end fleet should represent an approximately $80 million revenue run rate. Its customers include Charger Logistics and Value Truck on Dallas–Laredo and Fort Worth–Phoenix. Volvo Autonomous Solutions also runs commercial freight on Aurora’s system for DSV, the forwarder.
Kodiak has gone a different way. It already runs driverless trucks in the Permian Basin oilfield. Heavy Duty Trucking reported on 8 September that “35 trucks were running with no humans in the cab” at the end of the second quarter. Founder and CEO Don Burnette said: “We expect to complete the safety case before year’s end and launch driverless long-haul service.” In July, FreightWaves reported that Kodiak’s partner Atlas, which hauls frac sand in the Permian, plans to grow its driverless fleet from 28 trucks to 100 by mid-2027. The two expect that fleet on public roads in early 2027.
Torc’s own timeline has held steady for years. In November 2023, Transport Topics reported a 2027 market launch target, with Laredo to Dallas, about 400 miles, as the first lane where the safety driver comes out. In July 2024, Trucking Dive reported Torc’s plan to remove drivers on public roads in late 2026 in Texas, starting on a major lane along Interstate 35. Scherer’s end-of-2026 date is consistent with that. Daimler has not moved its goalposts, which counts in its favour.

Why the per-mile model matters more than the date

Aurora’s revenue so far comes from what it calls Transportation-as-a-Service. In plain terms, customers pay it for driverless hauls on its network. Daimler is pitching something closer to how trucks are sold today. A carrier buys the truck, then rents the driver by the mile.
We think that matters for three reasons.
First, it puts autonomy inside the existing truck-buying cycle. A fleet that already buys Cascadias can add driverless capacity without signing up to a new kind of supplier. Daimler Truck Financial Services, which hosted the panel, says it will finance whatever form the model takes.
Second, a per-mile software fee is easy to compare with a per-mile driver cost. Carriers will run that comparison lane by lane. Back in 2023, Torc CEO Peter Vaughan Schmidt told Transport Topics: “If you buy an autonomous truck, the payback time will be less than a year.” That was a sales pitch, not a result. No price has been published, so no one can yet test it.
Third, the modular chassis lowers the risk of betting on one software provider. If one virtual driver stalls, the truck is not stranded.

What it means for forwarders and shippers

Autonomous capacity will not arrive as a new type of carrier on your routing guide. It will come through the trucking companies you already use, buried in their cost per mile.
Expect it on long, straight, dry-weather interstate lanes first. Texas and the Southwest are where the named lanes are: Dallas–Houston, Dallas–Laredo, Fort Worth–El Paso and Fort Worth–Phoenix. For cross-border freight moving up from Laredo, this is the lane to watch. Torc named it as its first unmanned route back in 2023.
The model is also hub-to-hub, not door-to-door. When Torc set out its plan in 2023, Transport Topics reported that the trucks would run on highways between hubs. Those hubs would be existing terminals or warehouses near the interstate. A “hub operator” would handle inspections and refuelling, and a “mission manager” would dispatch and monitor the trucks remotely. For a forwarder, that means a driverless move is really three legs. A human-driven truck takes the load to the hub, the driverless truck does the long middle, and another human-driven truck takes it from the far hub to the door. Every extra handoff is a place where a load can wait. Build that into transit promises before selling a driverless lane to a customer.
The near-term effect on rates will be small. Aurora’s 200 trucks by year-end are a rounding error in US truckload. Even so, two things are worth tracking now.
One is transit time. A truck that does not need a rest break can cover Fort Worth to Phoenix in about 15 hours. If those runs become reliable, expect faster day-definite offers on those lanes. Shippers who depend on them may start asking for it.
The other is fuel. At the same panel, Kevin Bangston, president and CEO of Daimler Truck Financial Services USA, estimated that carriers pass roughly 70 percent of diesel cost to shippers through fuel surcharges. They absorb the other 30 percent or so. Driverless trucks do not change that split. But the business case is pitched on running more hours, so fuel stays a large part of the cost. Do not assume autonomous lanes will come with lower fuel surcharges.
For contracts signed in 2027 and 2028 on Texas and Sun Belt lanes, it is reasonable to ask carriers whether any of the capacity will be driverless. Ask how that changes their cost per mile, and whether any saving is shared.

Our prediction

We expect Daimler and Torc to announce their first driverless run, with no one in the cab, by 31 March 2027. That is at most one quarter later than the year-end target. We expect it on a Texas stretch of Interstate 35, most likely the Dallas–Laredo corridor Torc has long named.
We also expect Daimler not to publish a per-mile price for the virtual driver before the end of 2027. Until it does, the “scale toward 2028” target is a direction, not a cost a forwarder can plan around.

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