McLane Company, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that distributes food to restaurants and retailers, ran a three-year pilot with Aurora Innovation that wrapped in 2023 after logging more than 280,000 autonomous miles and 1,400 loads with a 100% on-time delivery record. The pilot has since converted to fully driverless commercial runs between Dallas and Houston. By any measure, that’s a real product, not a demo. It’s also a hybrid product, and the hybrid part rarely makes the headline. Aurora’s trucks haul the middle-mile distance between McLane’s distribution centers. Human drivers still handle the local deliveries on each end. Strip away the press release language and the actual claim is narrower than “driverless trucking”: a truck can now drive itself across Texas highways without anyone in the cab, and a person still has to get the freight the rest of the way. That gap between the highway and everything around it defines where autonomous trucking actually stands. The highway portion is scaling fast, with real mileage, real customers, and real regulatory momentum behind it. The portion on either side of the highway, loading the truck and getting cargo to its final destination, has barely moved. Treating those as one story is why “driverless” coverage keeps overpromising, and untangling them is the only way to read the technology’s timeline accurately. The Highway Side Is Scaling Quickly Aurora currently runs roughly 109 trucks and plans to reach 200 by the end of 2026, with thousands projected within five years. A second route, built with Volvo Autonomous Solutions, now connects Dallas directly to customer facilities in Oklahoma City. That route runs on Volvo VNL Autonomous trucks paired with the Aurora Driver system, operating under supervised autonomy five days a week while the partnership works through what the companies describe as the final validation phase before