Autonomous long-haul trucking is no longer just a bold idea — it’s becoming a reality. And the timing couldn’t be better. With e-commerce and retail customers expecting faster, more reliable deliveries — and a growing shortage of freight drivers — autonomous middle-mile solutions are emerging as a crucial part of the supply chain.

Few people understand this impact more than Paul Lam, Chief Strategy Officer of Bot Auto, a company bringing driverless freight operations to market at scale. 

Read on as Paul explains why autonomy is arriving at exactly the right moment, walks us through Bot Auto’s first driver-out operations, and shares the conversations brands and logistics leaders should be having as autonomous trucking enters the scene. 

For those who aren’t familiar, can you give us a rundown of Bot Auto?

Paul: Bot Auto is an L4 autonomous-driving trucking company offering Transportation as a Service (TaaS) to third-party logistics providers, brokers, and shippers. Our product is simple: If you have goods to haul, you load up a trailer, we hook it at your site, and we move it to its destination. We provide our partners with end-to-end freight movement. Like other long-haul carriers we charge by the mile, but everything behind the wheel at Bot Auto is automated. 

Why does the industry need autonomous trucking?

Paul: America runs on trucks and has for 100 years. Today, we’re talking about $1 trillion of freight being moved every single year. But if you look at the latest numbers from the American Trucking Association, the industry is short some 60,000 drivers. On top of that, some 95% of fleets are smaller operations that own under ten trucks. The industry is the foundation of the American economy, but it’s a segmented market with a shrinking workforce and rising demand. 

Autonomous trucking fills this unmanned gap, especially on what I call ‘difficult place, difficult time, difficult distance’ routes, like leaving Miami for Los Angeles at 2 a.m. No one really wants that job, but the economy still needs the load to move.

How will autonomous middle-mile freight change the delivery experience for retailers and e-commerce brands?

Paul: Logistics is a network of complex systems. If we improve the middle mile, making it cheaper, faster and more reliable, it’ll have a trickle-down effect on the entire supply chain. Retail and e-commerce brands are going to feel the positive impacts of this. 

Let’s say you’re shipping a pallet of coffee from San Diego to Houston. When you track it, you’ll see it actually passes through Memphis, a major transloading hub. With autonomous trucking, you’ll be able to run a smaller load right to its destination without this detour. It’s like a distributed version of railway or air freight, but more compact, more frequent, easier to use, and less costly. 

Ultimately, e-commerce and retail brands looking for faster, more reliable deliveries still rely on the last mile. But here at Bot Auto, we’re making bulk, longer-haul transportation more efficient, so brands have more options and reap all the benefits of autonomous trucking. 

What other benefits can brands realize with autonomous trucking? 

Paul: If you’re a retailer or an e-commerce brand, you likely want your goods to arrive early in the morning, before your warehouses, distribution centers, or storefronts even open. But with the driver shortage, that’s often not possible. Most drivers prefer daytime routes so they can  sleep at night or be home with their families. As a customer, that means you end up rearranging operations around driver availability, like opening sorting centers at night to receive freight.

Our autonomous trucks actually prefer driving at night when there’s less traffic and better fuel efficiency. With autonomous trucks, brands can have more control of their supply chain. 

Frankly, if you were at the Department of Transportation, you’d probably be asking: Why aren’t we moving more freight at night when roads are clear? Everybody benefits from this capability. It means less congestion on the road and more efficient deliveries for brands and their customers. 

What do you think success will look like in 3-5 years for the industry? Is there anything that will feel “normal” that today still feels experimental?

Paul: The easy answer is we’ll see a meaningful share of freight, maybe in the single- or low-double digits moving autonomously. That means it becomes completely normal for a supply chain manager to book capacity and expect one out of every 30 routes to be hauled autonomously. We’re not talking about full market saturation, but a commercially viable and dependable scale, similar to what we’ve seen with Waymo. People are now comfortable hopping into a Waymo today even if it’s not everywhere. That’s what you’ll see with Bot Auto. 

We can also look to aviation for automation that now feels normal. When you fly, you don’t expect the pilot to have their hands on the controls the entire time. Planes are on autopilot at cruising altitudes and no one freaks out when the captain comes out for the loo or a snack. Passengers trust the process. That’s what the middle mile should become in trucking. 

Humans will still handle takeoff and landing — or the first and last mile — but it should become increasingly more normal for the long-haul to be driven autonomously.