Autonomous trucking is entering a new phase.
For years, much of the industry conversation centered on whether Level 4 autonomous trucks could safely and reliably operate on public roads. Today, the discussion is increasingly shifting to what comes next: how to move from initial commercial deployments to scale.
At IAA Transportation 2026, PlusAI COO and Co-Founder Shawn Kerrigan joined leaders from Bosch, Kodiak and Volvo Autonomous Solutions to discuss where the industry stands today, what it will take to industrialize autonomous trucking, and how the path may differ across global markets.
From launch to scale
Across the industry, many of the core building blocks for commercial deployment are coming together, from autonomous driving software and sensors to vehicle platforms designed with the redundancy required for driverless operation.
The bigger shift ahead is moving beyond initial deployments.
“What will be really exciting is as we go from that launch phase to the scale phase,” Shawn said. “We believe that at that point, we will move from the deployment of tens or hundreds to potentially thousands of autonomous trucks.”
That transition would change the engineering and business challenge. Deploying autonomous trucks at meaningful scale requires technology that can be manufactured, integrated and supported as part of a production vehicle, rather than treated as a standalone technology system.
That is central to PlusAI’s approach.
“We work with OEMs as our customer. We are a technology supplier to our OEM partners,” Shawn said. “Part of our core approach is to work through OEMs to have factory-built trucks,” which we believe we would be able to launch and develop at scale.
PlusAI works with global commercial vehicle manufacturers including TRATON GROUP, IVECO and Hyundai Motor Company to develop factory-integrated autonomous trucks.
Supporting different trucks without starting over
Scaling also requires autonomous driving technology that can work across different truck platforms, vehicle configurations and markets.
From U.S. day cabs and sleepers to European cab-over trucks, autonomous systems need to account for differences in vehicle dynamics, actuation and hardware while maintaining a consistent underlying software architecture.
“It doesn’t require redoing everything,” Shawn said. “From a software perspective, we’ve designed our system to work across all different types of vehicles.”
PlusAI has developed its technology across U.S. and European truck platforms, as well as both right-hand and left-hand driving environments. But supporting multiple vehicle configurations still requires careful engineering and validation.
“There is still additional work that needs to be done every time you have a new set of actuation to integrate and deal with, or new vehicle dynamics to prove out,” Shawn said. “All that comes back to time that goes into proving out the safety case on that configuration.”
Greater standardization of autonomy-enabled vehicle platforms could help reduce that complexity as the industry works to move toward higher volumes.
“We think it’s critically important to support a wide variety of configurations, but there’s of course value to having slightly less complexity to each of those different permutations,” Shawn added.
Building globally, adapting locally
The discussion also turned to whether autonomous trucking will ultimately converge around a small number of global technology platforms or develop differently across regions.
For PlusAI, global development has been part of the technology strategy from the beginning.
“We’re a global Level 4 technology developer for heavy trucks focused on public-road operation,” Shawn said. “We operate not just in the U.S. but also in Europe, and have developed experience in Australia and Japan as well, because we think having that global experience, that diverse experience, is part of building a globally robust driving solution that you can apply everywhere.”
That does not mean every market looks the same. A highway in Texas presents different operating conditions from a German Autobahn. Vehicle speeds, traffic behavior, road geometry and regulations can all affect how an autonomous system needs to perceive and respond to its environment. Shawn noted that the differences “[tie] into the safety case for how you design your rear perception, how you design how the autonomous system is going to operate.”
At the same time, experience across markets can strengthen the underlying AI system.
“That’s why we think it’s important to gather the driving data here in the U.S., Australia, Japan, and build a global data set,” Shawn said.
The company’s AI models are trained on over 7 million miles of real-world driving data. The goal is a core autonomous driving technology that could generalize to operate vehicles anywhere while potentially being validated for the specific requirements of each market and vehicle platform.
A growing role for better sensing
Another area continuing to advance quickly is vehicle sensing.
Today’s autonomous trucks typically combine cameras, radar and lidar to provide complementary views of the driving environment. New generations of these technologies, including advances in imaging radar, can further improve perception performance.
“We’re very excited about all the innovation that’s taking place in terms of sensing,” Shawn said.
That relationship between hardware and software is especially important in a safety-critical system. Shawn noted that better sensing and better hardware could potentially make it easier to prove the safety of the software.
The opportunity for autonomous trucking in Europe
With IAA Transportation taking place in Europe, the panel also spent considerable time discussing when Level 4 autonomous trucks could reach commercial scale in the region.
For PlusAI, Europe has long been an important part of its global development strategy. The company has operated in the region for years, including autonomous trucking programs in Germany and Sweden.
“We are big believers in autonomy in Europe. That’s why we opened an office in Munich many years ago,” Shawn said.
The underlying market need is clear. European freight operators face pressure to improve transportation efficiency while navigating persistent driver shortages and increasing demand for safer, more productive logistics.
The regulatory path, however, differs significantly from the U.S. “Clearly the market is here,” Shawn said, adding that “all across Europe, I think there’s this really strong pull for this technology.” We believe that it’s going to take time and regulatory support to get deployed at scale.
That distinction between deployment and scale came up repeatedly throughout the discussion. In the U.S., autonomous trucks can already operate commercially under different state frameworks. As deployment grows, greater regulatory consistency could make it easier to expand across routes and jurisdictions.
“There’s nothing blocking launch,” Shawn said. “But really to get to large scale, we could see some benefit from regulatory consistency across different areas.”
The next phase of autonomous trucking
The discussion at IAA reflected how far autonomous trucking has moved.
The question is increasingly less about whether the technology is possible and more about how it could be turned into a product that can operate reliably across fleets, truck platforms and global markets. That means bringing together autonomous driving software, production-ready vehicles, increasingly capable sensing and compute, fleet operations, safety validation and regulatory frameworks.
For PlusAI, the path to scale starts with building a virtual driver designed from the beginning to work with global OEMs and across global markets.
The launch phase is arriving. The work now is building for what we believe will come after it.