A self-driving truck just glided through a spot where even seasoned long-haul drivers ease off and grip the wheel with both hands. Japan’s T2 has taken a leap that felt years away just a couple of seasons ago: its autonomous big rig cleared a highway toll gate — no hands on the wheel, no flip to manual, no safety net. For a passenger car, that’s a yawn. For a 2.5-metre-wide tractor squeezing into a corridor barely three metres across, it’s an engineering exam with almost no margin on either side. Curbs, gear, a gate, and zero room for error. The run used a Level 2 truck, but T2 is already aiming squarely at Level 4 — the moment the cab no longer needs a human in it at all. The tests went down in May 2026 at two points at once: Ayase Smart IC on the Tomei Expressway in Kanagawa, and Nishinomiya-kita IC on the Chugoku Expressway in Hyogo. How did the rig even fit? A combo of pre-mapped, high-precision 3D data and on-board LiDAR. The system matched live sensor reads against the stored map on the fly and held its line within centimetres. On top of that, the truck was taught to read the ETC gate itself — so it could decide on its own whether to push through, instead of nosing into a closed barrier. T2 isn’t just building a truck. It’s building a chain. The hubs in the middle are called “transgates” — terminals where a flesh-and-blood driver climbs in or out. On the highway, the truck runs itself; on the surface streets to a warehouse or customer, a human takes the wheel. Alongside the already-running Transgate Ayase, the company has opened Transgate Nishinomiya-kita next to the matching interchange. The new site sits on Kuramoto Transport’s yards