Volvo Trucks To Lead In Bringing Autonomous Trucks To US Market

Volvo VNL Autonomous Solution on the roads

Volvo AB

I predict a future world where anything that moves could become autonomous. That includes anything with propellers, wheels, legs or arms across industries such as Industrial, mobility, aerospace & defense, mining, and healthcare. In my previous article I predicted this to be a $10 trillion opportunity by 2035. I followed this up with an article on Robotaxis, where the Markets and Markets team projects more than 1.5mn Robotaxis on the road by 2035. So the question is: are cars leading? Will trucks be far behind? Or is there a stronger business case for autonomous trucks?

For much of the past decade, autonomous trucking was defined by ambitious timelines that repeatedly moved out. Early expectations centered on technical progress, but commercial deployment proved harder than many companies first suggested. The question now is less about controlled demonstrations and more about whether autonomous trucks can run safely, reliably and economically in commercial freight operations.

We explored this transition in interviews with Peter Voorhoeve, President of Volvo Trucks North America, and Sasko Cuklev, who leads on‑road solutions at Volvo Autonomous Solutions. Peter set out the broader market context, including the recent freight recession and its impact on fleets and OEMs. Sasko, who has worked on autonomy since 2015, described how expectations and roles around autonomous trucking have evolved as programmes moved from pilots toward commercial operations.

Current Deployment Indicators

There are now tangible signs that autonomous trucking has entered a more concrete stage of deployment. Aurora Innovation has been operating driverless heavy‑duty trucks between Dallas and Houston since 2025, in what is currently the first commercial driverless Class 8 service on U.S. public roads. Volvo Group has put firm milestones behind its own plans, outlining fully driverless operations in Texas in the first quarter of 2027 and more than 300 autonomous trucks on U.S. highways by end of 2027, with industrial scale deployment from 2028 onwards. In parallel, California has lifted its ban on testing and deploying autonomous trucks above 10,001 pounds, joining Texas, Arizona and Michigan. Our research shows that Volvo could take a market leadership position closely along with Daimler in the US market as leading truck OEM.

Sasko emphasizes that the more important change may be organizational rather than technical. Earlier competition often centered on components such as lidar range or test mileage. Today he focuses on how an autonomous freight operation is run day to day: dispatch, service support, customer integration and clear accountability when problems occur. “The technology will be there,” he told us, “but we need to figure out all the other things as well.” Developers who once treated truck manufacturers as secondary now work more closely with them because a driverless truck must be engineered as an integrated system with redundancy in steering, braking and power.

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Structural Drivers and Timing

The commercial case for autonomous trucking is being shaped by labor constraints that have persisted across the U.S. freight market. The American Trucking Associations estimates a current driver shortage near 60,000, alongside a projected need for roughly 1.2 million new drivers over the next decade to cover retirements and industry growth. Turnover at large truckload carriers runs close to 90%, and the driver workforce is ageing with too few younger entrants.

At the same time, expected freight demand remains a major part of the story. Sasko points to forecasts that freight volumes could rise roughly fivefold by 2050, widening the gap between transport demand and available labor if the current driver pipeline does not materially improve. Autonomy is positioned less as a direct substitute for drivers and more as an additional source of capacity on specific routes and corridors. In our discussions, both Peter and Sasko talked about how trucking work is not disappearing but changing shape, with long‑haul highway segments becoming more automated while human drivers remain central to regional and local operations.

Utilization, Economics and Uptime

The most obvious economic argument for autonomous trucking is labor cost. Driver wages account for around a third of a carrier’s operating expenses, making removal of the driver an intuitive starting point for financial modelling. Sasko’s perspective is that this alone does not capture the full business case. A broader argument rests on asset utilization: a human‑driven truck is constrained by hours‑of‑service rules and spends a meaningful share of its time idle, whereas a driverless truck can in principle operate much closer to around the clock.

Volvo’s estimate is that autonomy can roughly double utilization, enabling one truck to do the work of two and exceed 200,000 miles a year. With higher utilization, a single truck can move more freight than today, as it is no longer constrained by human driving limits. Freight that might take four or five days with a single human driver, or require higher labor cost with a team, could move across the country in two days under an autonomous model.

MarketsandMarkets is currently developing a study on autonomous trucking, and our preliminary work puts some numbers behind this shift. The total cost of running a U.S. truck today sits at roughly $2.25 to $2.30 per mile, with the driver accounting for about a third. Removing the driver is only part of the story. Combined with higher utilization and smoother, more fuel‑efficient driving, our modelling suggests an autonomous truck can bring the cost down to the $1.15 to $1.35‑per‑mile range, or roughly $0.07 per ton‑mile against about $0.14 for a diesel tractor.

These are at‑scale figures: today’s real‑world cost is far higher because early fleets are small and hardware is still close to hand‑built, and cost parity is unlikely before the end of this decade as volumes grow and self‑driving hardware falls from well over $100,000 per truck towards a fraction of that. Newer costs such as remote supervision, insurance and risk also remain unsettled and will need operating data before they can be priced with confidence.

Peter reinforces the economic lens by putting uptime at the center of customer priorities. “The most important thing is uptime, because when a vehicle stands still, you’re losing around 2,000 dollars a day,” he told us. To address that, Volvo is increasing software content in its trucks and using data‑driven service contracts and AI‑enabled diagnostics to cut unplanned stops; he cites a 24% reduction in unplanned stops across 16,000 vehicles using the current software platform. The more revealing lens on economics is payback. An autonomous tractor costs more to buy, but it earns a larger margin on every mile because the driver is gone. At all‑in freight rates of around $2.30 to $2.50 per mile, our preliminary analysis suggests a driverless truck can repay its full capital, including the autonomy kit, in the future in the region of 230,000 to 250,000 miles, versus upward of 400,000 miles for a comparable diesel unit that must still carry a driver.

Commercial Models and Market Focus

The technology path is becoming clearer; the business model is still being worked out. Some developers sell the autonomous driving capability to carriers as a subscription or service layer, some integrate it into the truck at the factory, and some run or support transport operations more directly and sell the resulting service to shippers. The Volvo–Aurora relationship illustrates this particularly well. Peter describes autonomous trucking as “the pinnacle of selling services,” since the truck itself is not sold; instead, customers pay per mile for transport in a more asset‑light model. In economic terms, the structural margin on each autonomous mile is what the commercial‑model contest comes down to, and whether that surplus accrues to the carrier or the manufacturer is unlikely to be settled until hardware costs normalize and operators can compare models on live lanes.

Geographically, the United States remains the most likely first market for scaled deployment as per Volvo which we confirm, with Texas at the center because of its regulatory stance, weather conditions and long freight corridors. Early hub‑to‑hub models, where human drivers handle the first and last mile and autonomous systems take the highway segment, are already being supplemented by more direct end‑to‑end routes into customer facilities. Volvo’s Dallas–Oklahoma City lane is one current example. Outside the U.S., Europe has moved more slowly but is becoming more active, while Australia appears attractive because of its long distances. The pace of scaling will depend less on new announcements and more on whether operators can make the model work consistently across specific lanes and customer use cases, with uptime, safety and service economics at the center of that decision. The real test now is not whether autonomous trucks can run without a driver, but whether they can do so consistently, safely and economically on the freight lanes that matter.

With contribution from Shwetha Surender, VP - Automotive Advisory Services at Markets and Markets