Volvo Autonomous Solutions plans to remove safety drivers from its autonomous trucks and begin fully driverless operations on U.S. highways in the first quarter of 2027.
The company detailed its timeline and scaling ambitions at Volvo Group’s recent Capital Markets Day. It aims to have more than 300 autonomous trucks operating by the end of 2027, with industrial scaling beginning in 2028. Revenue from the autonomous business is projected to approach approximately $3 billion within five years.
Aurora Innovation, one of Volvo’s technology partners, confirmed the driverless milestone in a LinkedIn post: “In Q1 2027, we’ll deploy those trucks with nobody behind the wheel in Texas.”
From Safety Drivers to Full Autonomy
Volvo Autonomous Solutions currently operates commercially in Texas with safety drivers aboard. It moves freight daily on routes between Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso, and most recently Dallas to Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma City expansion, launched earlier this year, represents an operational leap: point-to-point delivery directly into customer facilities rather than hub-to-hub transfers.
“We are moving freight there daily together with our customers in a real commercial setup autonomously, still with a safety driver,” said Sasko Cuklev, head of On-Road Solutions at Volvo Autonomous Solutions, in an interview with FreightWaves at ACT Expo. “We are now expanding that to also cover a third lane, which is Dallas to Oklahoma City.”
The Oklahoma City route eliminates the drayage segment that previously required separate first- and last-mile operations from autonomous hubs near highways.
“We are driving the whole way into the customer facility, which of course removes that drayage piece,” Cuklev said. “But it will also require higher operational precision and much deeper integration into the customer.”
Doubling Asset Utilization
In trucking, the economic case for driverless operations centers on asset utilization. Trucks that sit idle during parts of the day can operate around the clock with autonomous technology, unbound by human hours-of-service rules.
“The most important impact? Doubling asset utilization,” Volvo Autonomous Solutions stated in its Capital Markets Day presentation. “This is a change the industry cannot ignore.”
Cuklev noted that realizing those gains requires more than autonomous-capable trucks. The company has built an uptime network with its dealers across operating lanes to ensure high availability.
“One of the big benefits with autonomous is that you should be able to utilize the truck much, much more than a manually driven truck,” Cuklev said. “But in order to do that, you need to have the truck available and high uptime. So that is super important, and sometimes it feels like we don’t talk about that enough.”
