[Stay on top of transportation news: Get TTNews in your inbox.] Autonomous Trucks Are Here, But When Will They Scale? Developers Outline Transition From Early Pilots to Broader Commercialization of Virtual Driver Technology Managing Editor, Features and Multimedia Key Takeaways: - Autonomous truck developers say technical barriers are largely resolved, shifting attention to scaling, manufacturing capacity and fleet operations. - Executives predict driverless trucks will enter broader commercial use this year or next, with expansion dependent on customer value and supply. - Companies including Aurora, PlusAI, Torc and Kodiak are expanding routes, partnerships and testing ahead of full commercialization. LAS VEGAS — Autonomous trucking is shifting from early pilot programs toward full-scale commercial launches generally targeted for this year or next. But how quickly might driverless trucks spread across the nation’s highways once the technology becomes more widely available? Leaders from five of the most prominent developers of autonomous driving technology for commercial vehicles shared their views on that question during a May 5 panel discussion at ACT Expo 2026. Ossa Fisher, president of Aurora Innovation, said all the technical barriers to deploying autonomous trucks have been overcome. “It is no longer a question of if. It is no longer question of when. It is really a question of how quickly and how broadly we scale to become the autonomous backbone of American transportation,” she said. Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, said the bottleneck in the “early innings” of commercial deployment will not be interest on the part of fleet operators, but the initial supply of trucks equipped for autonomous driving. “The limiting factor right now is not customer adoption,” she said. “It’s really building those trucks at scale.” From left, PlusAI’s David Liu, Kodiak’s Don Burnette, Torc’s Peter Vaughan Schmidt, Aurora’s Ossa Fisher and Waabi’s Raquel Urtasun