More than 100 autonomous container trucks will be operating at US intermodal rail terminals by 2027, with fleet numbers climbing beyond 600 by the end of the decade, under a partnership between Venti Technologies and a leading North American Class I railroad.

The deal, announced recently, marks the first full-production deployment of autonomous container trucks at a large US intermodal facility, according to Venti. Operations will begin at two of the busiest intermodal facilities in the country, where trucks customised with Venti's precision-navigation technology — software, sensors and components — will be loaded, moved and unloaded in live rail yards, with no driver on board.

For the unnamed Class I railroad, the commercial logic is straightforward: driverless terminal tractors cut labour costs in yard operations and reduce the safety exposure that comes with high-frequency container moves in congested facilities. For shippers and intermodal customers, the significance lies in throughput consistency. Automated hostling removes a variable that terminals have struggled with since the pandemic-era labour squeeze — the availability of qualified yard drivers — and promises tighter, more predictable handoffs between rail arrival and gate.

Venti arrives at the US rail deal with operational credibility. Its AI-powered autonomous vehicles have now travelled more than 500,000 miles across all applications and moved more than 340,000 containers, the company says. The bulk of that container volume was handled at PSA's Pasir Panjang terminal in Singapore, where Venti's vehicles have been shifting boxes in a production environment at one of the world's largest container ports.

The company has not disclosed how many terminal tractors at Pasir Panjang carry its technology, but US media have reported the fleet at "more than 24" machines. Even at that scale, the Singapore operation has served as the proving ground for the jump to the US rail network — a move from a single-port deployment to a multi-site programme across a continent-spanning intermodal system.

The trajectory matters for the wider freight sector. Terminal automation has concentrated heavily on cranes and gate systems, while horizontal transport — the movement of containers between quay, stack and rail ramp — has remained stubbornly labour-dependent in North America. A 600-plus fleet of autonomous tractors operating across Class I intermodal facilities by 2030 would represent one of the largest deployments of driverless horizontal transport in the US supply chain, and a template other railroads and port operators are likely to watch closely.

For forwarders and BCOs, the immediate effects will be invisible — the trucks operate inside the terminal fence, not on public roads. The longer-term consequence is capacity discipline at inland hubs: if automated hostling reduces dwell between rail discharge and gate-out, intermodal corridors gain reliability without new physical infrastructure, strengthening rail's competitive position against over-the-road trucking on cost-sensitive lanes.

Neither party has disclosed financial terms, nor the identity of the second launch facility. Venti says the rollout begins at the two busiest sites, with full operational production from the start — no pilot phase, no safety-driver transition period — a claim that the first months of loading, moving and unloading driverless will test under live terminal conditions.

With deployment targets rising from 100 trucks in 2027 to more than 600 by 2030, Venti and its railroad partner have staked out an aggressive scale-up curve that, if met, would make autonomous horizontal transport a standard feature of US intermodal operations rather than an experiment.