Introduction
I wrote one of my first articles on LinkedIn on June 18, 2016. The article is about autonomous trucks. In the article, I asked this question: If you don’t need the driver, why do you need the truck? You can read the article here.
I continue to research the autonomous trucking industry, and the more that I do, the more I’m convinced that most people don’t understand that autonomous trucks won’t just make drivers obsolete and unnecessary, autonomous trucks will make brokers, trucking companies, and Class 8 truck manufacturers eventually obsolete.
The transportation industry is asking the wrong question about autonomous trucks. For years, the conversation has fixated on one narrow issue: drivers. Will autonomous trucks replace them? How many jobs will disappear? How much labor cost can be eliminated?
These are important questions, but they miss the bigger picture. Autonomous trucks are not primarily a labor story, they are a business model story. And history shows that business model disruptions are far more profound and destructive than mere technological upgrades. The real transformation will reach far beyond the cab, fundamentally reshaping carriers, brokers, manufacturers, suppliers, and the entire value chain.
Autonomous trucks are rapidly becoming a reality. Rather than navigating complex city streets, the trucking industry relies on a transfer hub model: self-driving trucks handle predictable highway miles, while human drivers manage local, complex maneuvers and loading docks. Within a few short years, every aspect of the freight movement and delivery will be done autonomously.
It is easier to introduce autonomous trucks than autonomous cars. We are about to enter a period of mass acceleration related to the adoption of autonomous trucks. The training wheels are coming off. Significant changes will take place across many different industries. What I outline in this article will gradually and then suddenly become a reality.
Note: A Class 8 truck is any vehicle with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating exceeding 33,000 pounds. Semi-trucks that haul trailers, 18-wheelers, dump trucks, and cement trucks fall into this category. For the purpose of this article, the term Class 8 refers to semi-trucks.
The Flawed Assumption
Many industry executives assume the future will look much like today, only more profitable: swap out drivers for autonomous systems, keep existing fleets and terminals, maintain current operating models, and pocket higher margins. They treat autonomy as a feature, sort of an efficiency upgrade bolted onto the status quo.
This view is dangerously shortsighted. When technology fundamentally alters how value is created and delivered, entire industries are often reorganized. Autonomy does not just remove a cost center; it undermines the very foundations on which many trucking companies were built.
Why Carriers Exist Today, and Why That Model Is Fragile
Traditional carriers (trucking companies) create value through a complex bundle of capabilities built around human drivers: recruiting, training, scheduling, monitoring, and retaining them; managing tractors and trailers; handling dispatch, safety, compliance, and fleet operations. These functions created high barriers to entry in a labor-intensive industry where there is a shortage of labor.
The purpose of a carrier is to do one thing: provide resource teams capable of moving and delivering freight. A resource team is a tractor, trailer, and driver. Some carriers have hundreds of resource teams, other carriers have thousands. The numbers are irrelevant. What’s important to understand is this: resource teams all do the same thing — they haul trailers and deliver freight.
Trucking companies have an extensive infrastructure of terminals where they domicile their trucks, repair trucks and trailers, and its where drivers go to climb into a truck and get it on the road.
Autonomy erodes that foundation. Actually that’s false. Autonomy eliminates that foundation by removing the majority of reasons why trucking companies exist in the first place.
This is the brutal truth. Trucking companies and the majority of their infrastructure exists primarily to support the needs of human drivers, human mechanics, and other humans that perform a myriad of jobs related to moving freight. When the driver is removed, that will eliminate many functions. When Class 8 trucks are no longer necessary, it removes the need for mechanics and other personnel. Over a period of time, autonomy will transform the industry.
The Rise of Capacity Networks Over Fleets
One of the most underappreciated implications of autonomous trucking is the decoupling of transportation capacity from asset ownership. Today, shippers hire carriers who own and operate trucks. Tomorrow, capacity will be accessed through dynamic, always-on autonomous networks where assets are connected, visible, shared, and highly utilized.
In this world, competitive advantage shifts from owning assets to maximizing their utilization across a broader ecosystem. Companies that excel at orchestrating capacity, regardless of who owns the physical equipment, will outperform traditional fleet operators. This mirrors disruptions seen in other sectors, such as how ride-sharing platforms decoupled mobility from vehicle ownership or how cloud computing separated computing power from data center ownership.
What everyone fails to understand is that as more autonomous trucks are being utilized, there will be a need for less trucks to move freight. Autonomous trucks aren’t restricted by a time limit on driving. Autonomous trucks can operate 24/7. I’ve done the math. Autonomous trucks will reduce the need for Class 8 trucks by 40% to 50%. Freight that used to take 10 trucks to haul and deliver will now only require five to six trucks.
Brokers: From Matchmakers to Software Platforms?
Brokers also face disruption. Many assume autonomy will strengthen their role as intermediaries matching loads with trucks. But real-time visibility, automated pricing, dispatching, compliance, and settlement will turn these human-driven functions into software processes.
The majority of brokers will go out of business. Period. End of story. Why do brokers exist? To find a resource team to move freight. Brokers may require a full resource team (tractor, trailer, driver) or a partial resource team, tractor and driver only. This entire process will be automated.
Autonomy removes the need for brokers almost completely. Not immediately. Not overnight. But it will happen. Brokers will disappear.
Truck Manufacturers and the Redefinition of “Truck”
Class 8 truck manufacturers largely view autonomy as a product enhancement: take today’s human-centric truck, add self-driving technology, and keep selling. This may work in a transitional phase, but it underestimates the longer-term risk.
Traditional trucks were designed around human operators, complete with cabs, sleepers, climate controls, and ergonomic features. Purpose-built autonomous vehicles, like Volvo’s Vera concept, point to a different future: robotic power units optimized solely for moving trailers without legacy human accommodations. When the industry shifts toward these specialized designs, the implications for manufacturers and their supply chains will be seismic.
The brutal truth is this. When a power unit that looks like Vera or another design, becomes the default power unit for pulling trailers to deliver freight, the power unit will become a commodity. There will be no need for the power unit to do anything but pull trailers. The power unit will become another version of a terminal tractor used to shuttle trailers at warehouses, distribution centers and ports.
Based on discussions with executives at the leading Class 8 truck manufacturers, I can state with no hesitation that they want nothing to do with autonomous trucks. Zero. Executives at Class 8 manufacturers (Volvo, PACCAR Peterbilt & Kenworth, and others) are doing everything within their power to “entice” Kodiak, Aurora, Waabi, and other autonomous trucking companies, to use their Class 8 trucks for their autonomous truck needs instead of creating an alternative power unit.
I asked a senior executive from a truck manufacturer to answer the question: If you don’t need the driver, why do you need the truck?
He answered the question this way:
“Because we will go out of business if we’re no longer able to manufacture and generate demand for our $240,000 Class 8 trucks. Brittain, we read everything you write. What you’re advocating, a small truck or power unit capable of pulling and delivering trailers that looks nothing like the trucks we make, will decimate our industry. You want to jump to the end state immediately. We want to keep the current state going for as long as we can.”
Class 8 truck manufacturers want to keep manufacturing the same type of tractors they’ve always made, but they’re adding “autonomous capabilities.” Manufacturers are also pushing for their older models to be converted to autonomy because that keeps those trucks on the road longer.
It won’t matter. Sooner rather than later, the industry will change. A new type of power unit will be used to pull trailers and deliver freight. The vehicle won’t be introduced by Class 8 manufacturers, it will be introduced by a company that wants to accelerate innovation vs maintaining the status quo.
The Company Most Likely to Build the Future
If autonomous transportation ultimately shifts away from traditional driver-centric Class 8 trucks and toward autonomous power units, an important question emerges:
Who is best positioned to build them? Most people immediately think of the major Class 8 manufacturers. That’s a mistake.
The future vehicle will not be an autonomous truck. It may be an autonomous trailer-moving platform. And if that is the future, one company deserves far more attention than it currently receives:
For decades, Kalmar Ottawa has been the world’s leading manufacturer of terminal tractors operating at ports, intermodal facilities, distribution centers, warehouses, and industrial sites.
Unlike traditional truck manufacturers, Kalmar’s business has never been centered on transporting drivers. Its business has been centered on moving trailers. That distinction is important.
Kalmar’s terminal tractors are designed to do one thing as efficiently as possible: move trailers. This is where Kalmar possesses a significant strategic advantage. The company already understands:
- Trailer movement
- Yard operations
- Intermodal logistics
- Fleet management
- Automated workflows
In many ways, Kalmar is already operating closer to the future transportation model than much of the traditional truck manufacturing industry.
The company’s experience with autonomous yard tractors and terminal automation provides an additional advantage. It provides Kalmar with an opportunity to design a platform specifically optimized for:
- Autonomous operation
- Trailer interchangeability
- Continuous utilization
- Lower maintenance
- Reduced complexity
- Software integration
The market opportunity could be substantial. Instead of focusing exclusively on terminal tractors, Kalmar could expand into a new category:
Autonomous Freight Movement Platforms.
I believe the logical progression would be straightforward for Kalmar.
Phase 1: Dominate Autonomous Yard Operations
Continue expanding autonomous terminal tractor deployments across:
- Ports
- Distribution centers
- Intermodal facilities
- Manufacturing campuses
Build the industry’s largest installed base of autonomous trailer-moving assets.
Phase 2: Extend Into Middle-Mile Transportation
Develop a road-capable autonomous power unit optimized for:
- Dedicated lanes
- Hub-to-hub routes
- Distribution center transfers
- Port-to-warehouse movements
- Repetitive freight corridors
Focus on environments where predictability, utilization, and automation create the greatest economic advantage.
Phase 3: Integrate With Transportation Orchestration Platforms
The future transportation ecosystem is unlikely to be controlled by vehicle manufacturers alone. The real value may reside in orchestration.
Kalmar should partner with transportation orchestration platforms capable of coordinating:
- Trailer pools
- Autonomous power units
- Warehouse robotics
- Last-mile delivery fleets
- Inventory movements
Platforms such as Nash represent an example of how autonomous assets could be coordinated across an entire movement ecosystem.
Phase 4: Transition From Manufacturing to Capacity
The most disruptive opportunity may not be selling vehicles. It may be selling movement. Historically, truck manufacturers generated revenue by selling equipment. In the future, autonomous power-unit fleets could be deployed under a Transportation-as-a-Service model. Customers would purchase capacity. Not trucks. Movement. Not machinery. This would fundamentally alter the economics of transportation.
The transportation industry often assumes the future will be built by today’s truck manufacturers. History suggests otherwise. Disruptive transitions are frequently led by companies that understand the emerging operating model better than the incumbent product.
LinkedIn members who read my posts and articles know that I frequently refer to “Thucydides Trap” from a business perspective. Class 8 manufacturers are established powers. Kalmar Ottawa is a rising power threatening to displace the established powers. If transportation evolves toward autonomous trailer movement coordinated by software, Kalmar will be uniquely positioned to play a much larger role than most industry observers currently recognize.
The future transportation platform will not be an autonomous truck that resembles the Class 8 semi-trucks we see today. It will be an autonomous power unit. It will be a workhorse designed to do one thing: pull trailers and deliver freight. And in my opinion, few companies are better positioned to build it than Kalmar Ottawa.
The Hidden Casualty: The Supplier Ecosystem
Thousands of suppliers depend on today’s human-operated trucks. They produce seats, sleepers, HVAC systems, steering components, interior electronics, and driver safety equipment. A shift to streamlined, purpose-built autonomous vehicles will render entire product categories obsolete, creating structural disruption across the supplier base. Autonomy is not just a driver issue or a truck issue; it is an ecosystem issue.
Safety, Trust, and Transparency as Transformative Benefits
Beyond economics, the greatest societal win may be trust and safety. The current freight system grapples with cargo theft, double brokering, ghost carriers, insurance fraud, and unsafe operators that cost the industry billions in risk management.
Autonomous systems enable continuous verification, monitoring, and auditing of assets. While risks won’t vanish entirely, they will decline sharply. Fewer fatalities and injuries would deliver enormous public benefits, making the transportation ecosystem safer, more transparent, and more efficient at the same time.
The Inventory Shock Nobody Is Talking About
While the autonomous trucking conversation fixates on highways and vehicles, the most profound impact will strike balance sheets first.
For decades, supply chains have been engineered around the limitations of human-driven transportation: variable transit times, driver shortages, capacity constraints, and unpredictable delays. The result has been massive safety stock of inventory held as a costly hedge against uncertainty.
Autonomy inverts this equation. Connected, reliable, and intelligently orchestrated networks deliver unprecedented velocity: assets move more frequently, idle time collapses, freight flows continuously, and networks become far more responsive.
This shift reverses the traditional power dynamic. Historically, inventory dictated transportation decisions. In the autonomous future, superior transportation capability will dictate inventory strategy.
Consider retailers with networks of regional distribution centers. Today, they position inventory closer to demand because lead times are unreliable and capacity is uncertain. With faster, more predictable autonomous movement and continuous optimization, companies can slash safety stock levels while maintaining or improving service levels.
The financial leverage is enormous. Every dollar of inventory removed releases working capital for higher-return uses. The benefits extend well beyond lower transportation costs to reduced carrying costs, storage, handling, obsolescence, markdown risk, and overall working capital requirements. In many supply chains, these inventory savings could ultimately dwarf direct freight savings.
Yet most companies are unprepared. Legacy inventory planning systems rely on historical lead-time data that assumes relatively stable transportation constraints. Autonomous orchestration makes lead times dynamic and optimizable that turns transportation from a fixed constraint into a strategic, tunable variable.
The first major friction point will not be on the road, but in inventory planning and replenishment systems. Many organizations are preparing for autonomous trucks. Far fewer are preparing for autonomous inventory.
The long-term winners will not simply move freight faster. They will redesign entire supply chains around velocity. The ultimate promise of autonomy is not just lower transportation costs, it is a supply chain that operates at speeds and responsiveness levels that traditional planning models were never designed to support. In this new era, velocity itself becomes a powerful competitive advantage, with inventory as the first and most visible place that advantage materializes.
I’ve stated many times that the purpose of a supply chain is to do one thing: enable growth.
I strongly advise CEOs to contact Donald Hicks, CEO of Optilogic and Ganesh Ramakrishna, CEO and Founder of Lyric. The biggest impact of AI on an enterprise is the acceleration of velocity. This will require supply chains and logistics networks to execute at speeds never before achieved. Don and Ganesh are resources you should leverage.
I’ve written articles and designed methodologies related to this topic. You can find the articles here.
The Emergence of Transportation Orchestration
The most exciting and potentially most disruptive shift ahead is the rise of Transportation Orchestration: the intelligent, real-time coordination of movement across an entire connected ecosystem of autonomous assets, rather than the siloed management of individual modes, fleets, or carriers.
Today’s supply chains are fragmented by mode (truckload, LTL, parcel, intermodal) and ownership. Orchestration breaks these barriers. It treats transportation as a unified, dynamic flow: optimizing routes, assets, and timing holistically to move goods from Point A to Point B with maximum efficiency, minimal idle time, and unprecedented responsiveness.
This includes a broad spectrum of assets working in concert:
- Shared trailer pools
- Autonomous power units operating 24/7 on dedicated corridors
- Autonomous vans and repurposed passenger vehicles for flexible urban or regional hauls
- Warehouse and yard robots for seamless handoffs
- Drones and delivery robots for last-mile fulfillment
In an orchestrated network, AI-driven platforms continuously evaluate thousands of variables—demand signals, traffic, weather, asset availability, and cost to assign the optimal mover at the optimal time. Empty miles drop dramatically, utilization soars, and the network becomes far more resilient to disruptions.
The implications are profound. Competitive advantage will increasingly belong to those who excel at orchestration, not those who own the most physical assets. This mirrors broader trends in supply chain management, where end-to-end orchestration platforms are already delivering real-time synchronization across planning, execution, and fulfillment.
Nash as a Case Study
Companies like Nash, led by Mahmoud Ghulman, illustrate this emerging model. Unlike traditional logistics tech firms focused on specific modes (truckload, LTL, parcel, etc.), Nash’s orchestration platform is mode-agnostic. It treats movement performed by a human driver, a robot, a drone, or an autonomous truck with equal focus on efficiency. As autonomy scales, platforms capable of seamlessly coordinating diverse assets will capture disproportionate value; certainly much more than the owners of any single asset type be it brokers, carriers, or trailer pools.
I believe Nash will partner with or be acquired by Palantir Technologies, Alphabet Inc., Anthropic, or OpenAI. The companies I listed understand that their value increases when they can migrate from intelligence to execution. Intelligence without execution is meaningless.
Note: Nash is only an example. There are other companies I could have mentioned, but I believe Nash has the most capabilities out of any company on the market.
Software Becomes the Most Valuable Asset
For over a century, value in transportation was tied to physical assets: trucks, trailers, terminals, and warehouses. Autonomy, combined with connectivity and standardization, flips the equation. When assets become commoditized and always available, the critical differentiator becomes who decides which asset performs the work, and how efficiently the network is orchestrated.
In this future, software platforms that control orchestration will emerge as the most valuable companies in transportation.
The Question Every Executive Should Be Asking
Most transportation leaders are asking: “How do we deploy autonomous trucks within our current model?”
A far more important question is: “What happens if autonomous transportation fundamentally changes who captures value in the ecosystem?” If value migrates from asset ownership to network orchestration, the winners of tomorrow will look nothing like the winners of today.
Why LTL Will Be Less Disrupted Than Truckload
There is one important exception to the argument that autonomous trucks will severely disrupt the existing transportation model: less-than-truckload.
LTL will absolutely be impacted by autonomy, but it is unlikely to be disrupted in the same way as full truckload.
The reason is simple: LTL is not just trucking. LTL is a network.
Truckload is primarily a point-to-point model. A shipper tenders a load, a tractor pulls a trailer from origin to destination, and the transaction ends. This is exactly the type of movement that autonomous power units, trailer pools, and orchestration software can attack most aggressively.
LTL is different.
LTL carriers consolidate freight from multiple shippers, move it through a terminal network, break it down, re-sort it, linehaul it, and deliver it through a local pickup-and-delivery system. The value is not merely the tractor. The value is the network design, density, terminal footprint, freight handling process, pricing discipline, service reliability, and ability to aggregate fragmented demand.
That matters.
Autonomous trucks reduce the need for drivers. They do not eliminate the need for consolidation.
A manufacturer shipping three pallets to Chicago does not need a full truck. A distributor shipping six pallets to Atlanta does not need a dedicated trailer. A retailer replenishing multiple stores with smaller orders does not want to pay for underutilized truckload capacity.
LTL exists because it solves a real economic problem: it allows companies to move freight that is too large for parcel but too small for truckload without paying for an entire trailer. That logic does not disappear because the tractor becomes autonomous.
In fact, autonomy may strengthen the best LTL carriers.
Most LTL linehaul tractors already operate differently than long-haul TL sleeper tractors. Many LTL tractors are day cabs, used for regional linehaul, city pickup and delivery, and terminal-to-terminal movement. They are not built around sleeper cabs or long-haul driver lifestyles in the same way as TL equipment.
That makes LTL a more natural candidate for phased autonomy.
Autonomous technology can first be applied to:
- Terminal-to-terminal linehaul
- Repetitive regional lanes
- Nighttime hub movements
- Yard moves
- Trailer repositioning
- Dock-to-dock transfers
This is very different from automating irregular long-haul truckload routes across thousands of origin-destination pairs.
LTL networks are more structured. They have known terminals. Known lanes. Known schedules. Known freight flows. Known service windows.
That structure makes autonomy easier to deploy incrementally. However, this does not mean LTL is immune. The LTL industry will still be forced to change.
Autonomy will put pressure on carriers to rethink:
- Linehaul planning
- Terminal density
- Driver utilization
- Trailer pools
- Dock automation
- Yard automation
- Dynamic pricing
- Network sharing
- Real-time freight visibility
The best LTL carriers will become more automated, more data-driven, and more network-oriented. The weakest carriers may struggle.
But unlike truckload, LTL carriers have a defensible reason to exist. Their value is not simply matching a tractor and driver to a trailer. Their value is consolidating thousands of shipments into an efficient shared freight network.
That is much harder to replace.
The more likely outcome is that autonomy separates winners from losers inside LTL.
Strong LTL carriers with dense networks, high service reliability, modern terminals, strong pricing discipline, and advanced technology will become more valuable. Weak carriers with poor density, inefficient terminals, outdated systems, and inconsistent service will be exposed.
The future of LTL may also become more collaborative.
Research into hyperconnected LTL networks and Physical Internet models points toward a future where carriers share terminals, routes, and capacity more dynamically to improve utilization, reduce cost, and increase service velocity. In other words, LTL may evolve toward a more open, orchestrated network model rather than disappearing.
This is where orchestration still matters.
A platform such as Nash could eventually play a role in coordinating autonomous assets across TL, LTL, last mile, yard operations, warehouse robotics, and trailer pools. But LTL will not be eliminated as easily as traditional truckload brokerage or asset-based TL operations because LTL performs a consolidation function that remains economically valuable.
The distinction is important.
Truckload is vulnerable because autonomy attacks the core unit of value: the tractor-driver-trailer move. LTL is more resilient because its core unit of value is the network.
Autonomous trucks will change LTL. They may improve it. They may consolidate it. They may force greater automation and network sharing. But they are unlikely to make LTL irrelevant in the same way they could make large portions of the traditional truckload model obsolete.
The future of truckload may be transportation orchestration. The future of LTL may be autonomous network consolidation.
That is a very different outcome.
Final Thought
Autonomous trucks will reduce the need for drivers. That outcome, while significant, may prove to be the least interesting part of the story. The deeper transformation lies in whether autonomy dismantles the current industry structure itself.
If it does, as I believe it will, the victors will not be the companies with the largest fleets, the most experienced drivers, or the biggest manufacturing footprints. They will be the companies that master the orchestration of movement at scale.
Transportation will not simply become more efficient or autonomous. It will become an entirely different industry.
I used ChatGPT to create this image to reinforce my point of view on this topic.