Nearly everything Americans buy spends some time on a truck. The cost of moving those goods helps shape prices, trade, and where businesses choose to operate. Self-driving trucks could scramble that system. A new study estimates that autonomous trucking could cut freight costs across the United States by roughly 35 percent. But the benefits would not spread evenly. Some states and industries could gain far more than others, while shifting traffic could reshape which highways carry the heaviest loads. Taking the driver out of the cab, researchers suggest, could ultimately help redraw the economic map of the United States. Everything in the study runs on that 35 percent. Trucking costs so much largely because of the person in the cab, including wages, benefits, and federal limits on how long a driver can legally stay behind the wheel. Autonomous trucks erase that limit. A human driver has to sleep, and federal rules cap the workday. A machine does not. It can run through the night and stick to the most direct route. Those extra hours are where much of the projected savings comes from. The study’s lead author, Taejun Mo, a graduate student in agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), built the estimate on two decades of federal freight records. The data tracked what every state shipped to every other state between 1997 and 2017. The effect goes deeper than a simple discount on shipping. “Self-driving technology has great potential to rewrite the economic geography of the U.S., which in and of itself will create new winners and losers,” Mo said. From those records, the team measured how sharply trade between two states responds to changes in shipping costs. Then they turned the dial down. A separate analysis of driverless truck operations landed in a similar