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,