Robotic Vehicles Deliver Junk Food To Humans

IsuzuNPR

Robotic box trucks are transporting ultraprocessed food from distribution centers to Walmart and Dollar General stores. Unlike China’s crash-prone robot delivery vehicles, America’s version has managed zero accidents after a year of driverless journeys.

“PepsiCo has 41 trucks on the road in Arizona, Texas and Arkansas, bringing the technology into the mainstream,” Wall Street Journal said.

The industrial food manufacturer is “the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads. They are traversing busy highways and local streets as they transport PepsiCo products between bottling plants, storage facilities and stores like Walmart and Dollar General.”

While the industrial food the company manufactures is intended for human consumption, humans may not be intended to deliver that food in the near future.

If the trend continues and expands into other industries, a future where consuming manufactured food may be the only work humans can do.

The robot trucks that are currently driving on U.S. public roads are built by Japanese vehicle manufacturer Isuzu, augmented with robotic technology from American company Gatik.

“The truck has multiple cameras mounted at the front and back, as well as radar and lidar equipment that help determine what’s on the road. Inside the cab, there remains a steering wheel and air conditioning, as well as three iPad-sized screens showing the footage from the external cameras and the computer-vision system, similar to the autopilot displays in Tesla’s cars. In my brief test run, the steering wheel rotated itself as the truck made careful turns. It never went over the speed limit,” Wall Street Journal said.

While the current trucks were initially manufactured with a human in mind, future trucks may do away with human controls all together as part of the new post-human world order.

“Current trucks in production don’t include the tablets, and future generations of driverless trucks won’t technically require a steering wheel or even the cab. They will, however, continue to have an air-conditioning system to cool the onboard computers, said Gatik co-founder and Chief Engineer Apeksha Kumavat, who sat next to me during the test run in Phoenix’s midday heat,” WSJ said.

Multiple companies are advancing systems which remove humans from the equation.

“Gatik said PepsiCo has one of the largest fleets of its autonomous trucks in the U.S., but it declined to name its other American clients. More than 20 of its trucks are currently ferrying goods in the Toronto area for Loblaw, Canada’s largest retailer, Gatik said. The autonomous-truck company said it has secured $600 million in revenue for multiyear contracts,” WSJ said.

While post-human technology is often seen as dystopian when deployed in the West, when China deploys technology to replace its humans it is seen as “living in the future.” Despite the hypocrisy, the U.S. remains far ahead of China when it comes to this technology.

“PepsiCo has been working directly with Gatik since 2022 to perfect the technology. They operated with a safety driver in each truck for a few years, and started driverless runs in June 2025. The trucks have had no accidents on public roads so far, PepsiCo said,” WSJ reported.

China is home to a vast fleet of robotic delivery vehicles, however their sophistication and safety record falls far behind what the U.S. has deployed. This technological divide is also seen with robotic passenger carrying vehicles, where China’s best effort fails to come close to what U.S. companies like Tesla are able to create.


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