99% on‑time, zero accidents reported in PepsiCo’s Gatik autonomous short‑haul runs

PepsiCo and Gatik have moved autonomous freight past the pilot stage and into daily commercial use inside a major consumer-goods network. The companies said on June 8 that Gatik is already operating driverless trucks for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona and Arkansas as part of a multi-year partnership covering PepsiCo’s North America food and beverage supply chain. Gatik CEO Gautam Narang said the system is running with a 99% on-time record, and the company has reported no public-road accidents since driver-out operations began in June 2025. 1/ The key claim here is not just that the trucks are autonomous. It is that PepsiCo and Gatik say they are already making live deliveries every day across three states, on highways and surface streets, without a human driver or in-cab safety observer. PepsiCo called the June 8 agreement the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date. (pepsico.com) 2/ The operating model is narrow by design. PepsiCo said the partnership is focused on its regional transportation networks, where products move daily from site to site in high-frequency, time-sensitive lanes. FreightWaves reported those routes currently serve about 250 retail locations for PepsiCo, including Walmart and Dollar General stores. (pepsico.com) 3/ That matters because these are not open-ended longhaul runs. Gatik is concentrating on middle-mile and short-haul freight, where routes repeat, pickup and drop-off points are known, and dispatch conditions are more controlled than over-the-road trucking. The company says its trucks are designed for end-to-end deliveries across highways and surface streets and can handle dynamic route changes across hundreds of pickup and drop-off points. (pepsico.com) 4/ The headline metrics are the ones drawing attention. Narang told FreightWaves the company maintains a 99% on-time track record, and Truck News reported Gatik says it had completed 60,000 driverless orders without an incident as of January. The social post circulating this week tracks those same claims into PepsiCo’s deployment and frames them as evidence that autonomous short-haul freight can meet service expectations in live retail networks. (pepsico.com) 5/ The human role has not disappeared. FreightWaves reported Gatik uses remote supervisors who make high-level go/no-go decisions but do not teleoperate trucks on public roads, and one person can oversee multiple vehicles at a time. The social briefing tied to this story says humans still handle unloading and on-site exception management, which is consistent with the way PepsiCo and Gatik describe the system as strengthening service and adding capacity inside existing operations rather than replacing every task around a delivery. (freightwaves.com) 6/ PepsiCo has described the value in operational terms, not futuristic ones. Jim Farrell, PepsiCo’s senior vice president of supply chain, said the company wants a supply chain that is “safe, reliable, and built for the future,” and said Gatik’s system can help “strengthen service, add capacity, and move products more consistently.” Gatik says that flexibility lets PepsiCo add or remove stops and respond to shifts in demand or activity across distribution centers. (pepsico.com) 7/ The broader industry context is that Gatik has been positioning itself as one of the first autonomous freight firms with scaled commercial revenue rather than pilot programs. Reuters reported on January 27 that Gatik had secured $600 million in contracted revenue and deployed fully driverless trucks for commercial operations, while Bloomberg reported the same day that the company had brought in more than $600 million in contracted revenue. (pepsico.com) 8/ What private fleets should watch is not just whether the truck can drive itself. The more practical question is whether the lane is repetitive enough, the delivery promise is measurable enough, and the human handoff around unloading, dock work and exceptions is defined well enough to keep service stable. PepsiCo and Gatik say they are already scaling that model across Texas, Arizona and Arkansas under the multi-year agreement announced June 8. (pepsico.com) (money.usnews.com)