A $604 million federal court verdict against C.H. Robinson in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Montgomery decision has put every freight broker on notice: the carriers you book can now bankrupt you. That liability shock, layered on a tightening driver market and more than 5,000 trucking-related fatalities a year, has accelerated the case for autonomous Class 8 tractors — and Aurora, Kodiak and a cluster of well-funded rivals are answering with commercial miles, signed fleet contracts and per-mile price points designed to undercut the $1.03-a-mile cost of a human driver.

What changed in 2025?

The regulatory runway widened. In April, California lifted restrictions on driverless-truck testing, opening the door to autonomous runs from the Inland Empire to Fort Worth — a corridor the source article identifies as central to commercial deployment. The U.S. Department of Transportation separately authorized cab-mounted warning beacons in place of the traditional roadside triangles, a rule IMAMS Technology called "the one thing standing in [autonomous trucks'] way from being truly driverless." California congressman Vince Fong has folded a national AV-trucking framework into the Build America 250 Act, the surface transportation bill now moving through Congress.

How far has the technology actually moved?

Aurora entered commercial scaling this year. The company is targeting roughly 200 driverless trucks by year-end and a deal with Roush to upfit about 1,000 tractors annually after that. Aurora's fleet has logged 500,000 driverless miles, running regular Dallas-to-Houston service on I-45 and now expanding into New Mexico and Arizona. Volvo is building the "Aurora Driver" directly into its assembly line and projects $3 billion in annual autonomous revenue within five years. Hirschbach Motor Lines has committed to 500 Aurora-equipped tractors across 2027 and 2028.

"If you're not using our stuff in the next five years, you're not going to be competitive in long-haul," Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said on the company's most recent quarterly call.

Kodiak trails on scale. It has deployed 35 customer-owned vehicles and logged 40,000 hours of paid driverless operations, primarily hauling fracking sand for Atlas Energy Solutions in the Permian Basin. CEO Don Burnette is targeting long-haul driverless launches by the end of this year.

What does it cost per mile?

This is where the commercial case lives or dies. Aurora CFO David Maday disclosed the unit economics:

• Current Transportation-as-a-Service revenue: $2-plus per mile
• Target Driver-as-a-Service subscription: $0.85-plus per mile
• 2025 industry cost to operate a truck: $2.34 per mile
• Driver compensation share: $1.03 per mile

The pitch to carriers: pay $0.85 instead of $1.03 for a driver that never logs hours-of-service violations, never goes on strike and burns less fuel. That is a 17 percent labor saving on the biggest variable cost in the lane.

Goldman Sachs frames the broader crossover: AV cost-per-mile is projected to fall from $8.56 in 2025 to $2.03 in 2030, while traditional truck costs creep from $2.55 to $2.84. Goldman pegs 2028 as the year AV economics beat conventional linehaul.

How big could the fleet get?

Estimates diverge sharply:

• McKinsey: 13 percent of trucks autonomous within a decade — roughly 390,000 units by 2035.
• Goldman Sachs: 25,000 AV trucks in 2030, climbing to 164,000 by 2035 (5.5 percent of the fleet).
• Aurora's own projection: 170,000 autonomous trucks by 2035.

Grayson Brulte, founder of The Road to Autonomy, told the source: "An overwhelming majority of truck OEMs are heavily investing in it. Carriers and shippers are experimenting with it… I'd say it's 18 to 24 months until you start to see this incredible increase in the adoption of autonomous trucking."

What still has to be settled?

The economics assume a clean one-to-one driver swap. They do not. Autonomous trucks still need humans to hook trailers, move them in yards and refuel them. Nobody has priced who pays for that labor, or for the inevitable breakdowns. "We would like to think that [a breakdown is] an infrequent occurrence, but it is not," one industry professional told the source. "Would an AT be able to do that?" And again: who pays?

Liability is the open file. FreightWaves analyst Thomas Wasson warned: "[The companies] haven't really [been] sued yet. How do we know how safe something is? We get sued a bunch of times to get the case law." Insurers, not shippers, will set the price of that uncertainty.

Can the technology outrun the industry's safety baseline?

The autonomous case leans on a comparison that does not hold up under inspection. Commercial aviation posts near-zero onboard fatalities because the FAA runs a $25 billion budget with more than 4,000 safety inspectors. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration operates on less than $1 billion and roughly 350 safety investigators — and 94 percent of interstate motor carriers carry no FMCSA safety rating at all. During the May 2025 International Roadcheck, one in five trucks inspected was placed out of service.

Daimler's own AV program, Torc, may set the pace simply because of scale: Daimler holds 40 percent of the Class 8 tractor market. Brulte believes Daimler's redundant chassis "could become the most important part of autonomous trucking. If Daimler opens that up to everybody, they could have a 90 to 95 percent market share."

The road from 500,000 demonstration miles to a fully autonomous U.S. long-haul fleet runs through lawsuits, insurance re-pricing, FMCSA capacity and a freight cycle that has yet to test either model in a real downturn. Watch the 2028 Goldman crossover date — and the first AV verdict that lands in court.