A fleet of humanless, multi-temperature box trucks has been successfully moving Walmart grocery orders along repeated routes in northwest Arkansas since August. Autonomous trucking company Gatik said this is the first successful middle-mile commercial delivery route globally not to use a safety operator.
The AI-powered trucking company and retailer announced the driverless success on Nov. 8 after a few months of moving customer orders between a Walmart dark store and a neighborhood market in Bentonville, Arkansas.
“As long as we can whitelist one route for unmanned operation and deploy at least three trucks along that route, that site becomes profitable for us,” Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO and co-founder, told FleetOwner shortly after it began the humanless runs with Walmart in Arkansas. “That’s basically our strategy towards scaling disruption.”
Gatik’s driverless operations involve repeated, daily delivery runs, all week on public roads, and unlock some advantages touted by autonomous technology companies: faster ecommerce order fulfillment, asset utilization, and enhanced road safety. After 18 months of testing with a safety driver on board, Gatik and Walmart got permission from the state to remove the safety driver from the cab.
“Through our work with Gatik, we’ve identified that autonomous box trucks offer an efficient, safe, and sustainable solution for transporting goods on repeatable routes between our stores,” said Tom Ward, SVP of last-mile at Walmart U.S. “We’re thrilled to be working with Gatik to achieve this industry-first, driverless milestone in our home state of Arkansas and look forward to continuing to use this technology to serve Walmart customers with speed.”
While most autonomous driving trucking companies focus on the long-haul segment—Class 8 tractors hauling goods along divided highways—Gatik has thought smaller and shorter. In August, the startup announced it raised $85 million in Series B funding, which Narang told FleetOwner his company planned to scale up its fleet of Class 3-6 self-driving box trucks. “Surprisingly, the industry has overlooked this middle-mile segment,” Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO and co-founder, said this summer. “For us, that has been great because we get all the validation that we need from our customers. From Day One, Gatik has been focused on making sure that we’re solving a real pain point and not building technology just for the sake of building technology.”
Narang said his fleet focuses on routes as short as a few miles and as long as 300 miles—on urban, semi-urban, and highway roads. “Typically, we focus on moving goods from a micro-distribution center to a micro-fulfillment center to multiple retail locations that are close to the customer,” he said.
Gatik has focused its growing fleet of AV box trucks on moving groceries for companies such as Walmart. Along with running humanless trucks in Arkansas, Gatik and Walmart partnered to launch battery-electric medium-duty AV trucks in Louisiana. Gatik also is working with Loblaws Inc., Canada’s largest grocer. This summer, it expanded self-driving operations into Texas, working with “multiple Fortune 500 customers” that Narang declined to name.
But he said that his fleet of AV vehicles operates 20 hours per day, moving freight for one customer during the day and for another at night. “The idea is to maximize the weekly utilization, allowing us to increase the margins even further,” the CEO said.
Narang called three-plus months of successful driverless middle-mile deliveries “a revolutionary breakthrough for the autonomous trucking industry. Our deployment in Bentonville is not a one-time demonstration. These are frequent, revenue-generating, daily runs that our trucks are completing safely in a range of conditions on public roads, demonstrating the commercial and technical advantages of fully driverless operations on the middle mile. We’re thrilled to enable Walmart’s customers to reap the benefits.”
In December 2020, Gatik and Walmart became the first companies to get Arkansas State Highway Commission approval to remove the safety driver from autonomous trucks. Gatik undertook a comprehensive stakeholder engagement strategy involving state and local leadership and emergency services as part of its roadmap to removing the safety driver.
Since commencing commercial operations in 2019, Gatik reported a 100% safety record across multiple operational sites in North America: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Ontario. Gatik focuses exclusively on fixed, repeatable delivery routes to maximize safety, using proprietary, commercial-grade autonomous technology purpose-built for B2B short-haul logistics.
By constraining the operational design domain, Gatik has achieved the safe removal of the safety driver much more quickly than other autonomous applications, such as passenger transportation or business-to-customer delivery, the company reported this week. The complex urban route in Bentonville involves safely navigating intersections, traffic lights, and merging on dense urban roads.
