Those autonomous trucks have completed 60,000 fully driverless orders without incident, logging more than 2,000 hours of operation and completing over 10,000 miles on public roads, the release said.
They have operated day and night, on highways and surface streets, in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, the Phoenix metro area of Arizona and the northwest part of Arkansas, according to the release.
The 26- and 30-foot trucks move ambient, refrigerated and frozen goods between distribution centers and stores for Fortune 50 retailers and consumer packaged goods companies, the release said.
They are controlled by Gatik Driver, the company’s autonomous system that uses artificial intelligence and purpose-built hardware designed for driverless performance in commercial operations, per the release.
“Autonomous trucking is no longer a promise. It’s a business,” Gatik CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang said in the release. “With more than $600 million in contracted revenue, Gatik has proved that autonomous trucking is not only possible but commercially viable, and the fierce demand for our solution reflects how quickly this new model will reshape the future of logistics.”
Gatik was founded in 2017 by veterans of the autonomous technology industry to develop an “autonomous delivery as a service” solution that encompasses autonomous trucks, telematics and a dispatching solution, Narang told PYMNTS in September 2021.
“We handle everything from obviously the driving piece to the telematics piece, making sure that our customers have insight over their operations,” Narang said. “All those needs are taken care of by our solution. So, it’s not just the technology piece we are building that we’re providing, it’s the full service.”
Walmart announced in November 2021 that Gatik’s autonomous trucks had been moving customer orders daily without a safety driver on a route in Bentonville, Arkansas, and that this was the first such middle-mile delivery anywhere in the world.
Kroger said in March 2023 that it would use Gatik’s autonomous trucks to deliver goods to retail locations in Dallas and that the companies had formed a multiyear commercial collaboration to transport goods within the grocer’s Dallas distribution network.
Gatik announced in August 2024 that it secured a strategic investment from global logistics firm Nippon Express Holdings to accelerate the deployment of autonomous technology across North America.