Who’s Driving These Chips?

Nobody, that’s who. PepsiCo’s fleet of 35 autonomous trucks, now motoring along public roads in the South and West, are transporting loads of Doritos and Frito-Lay chips, along with other products, to stores, storage facilities and other locations (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).

The real deal: PepsiCo’s fleet of trucks is truly autonomous, thanks to sensors and computers made by autonomous-trucking firm Gatik.

• PepsiCo is keeping up with the industry leaders in driverless passenger vehicles, like Waymo. An impressive feat, as those cars are much lighter than freight-hauling trucks.

How it works: “The truck has multiple cameras mounted at the front and back, as well as radar and lidar equipment that help determine what’s on the road.”

• The cab has a steering wheel and even air conditioning, with three large screens streaming the footage from the cameras and other equipment.
• But these accommodations for a human observer won’t necessarily be included in future generations of trucks—not even the cab. Air conditioning will be a must, however, to keep the electronics cool.

A clean record: As part of its partnership with Gatik, which began in 2022, PepsiCo ran the trucks with safety drivers for several years. Fully autonomous operations began last year—with no accidents so far, according to the company.

The benefits: The trucks are extremely reliable, a PepsiCo executive told the Journal, and excel at repetitive, predictable journeys.

• In fact, “The on-time arrival performance from driverless trucks reached 99%, after factoring out uncontrollable variables like weather and traffic.”

Human involvement: “PepsiCo anticipates retraining and redeploying some drivers to other types of work, including managing the new equipment, synchronizing the movement of people who go to the stores or handling the unloading themselves. But ultimately, the company expects to hire fewer drivers.”