The self-driving truck could destroy the value of the truck itself

Everyone is looking at autonomous trucking and asking which company will put the most driverless trucks on the road.

I think there is a stranger question.

What happens to the value of the truck when the driver stops being the bottleneck?

Right now, a truck is an expensive asset that spends a lot of time doing absolutely nothing.

The truck waits for a driver.

The driver has hours-of-service limits.

The driver needs breaks.

The truck gets parked overnight.

Then the truck sits in a yard again.

Autonomy attacks that entire system.

Aurora is already running commercial driverless trucks and says it expects more than 200 by the end of 2026.

Kodiak has more than 35 customer-owned driverless trucks and says it is moving toward driverless long-haul service.

So the technology is moving beyond the demo stage.

And that creates a weird economic problem.

If a $150,000–$200,000 truck can suddenly operate dramatically more hours, you don’t necessarily need as many trucks to move the same amount of freight.

The truck becomes more productive.

Which means the economic value starts moving somewhere else.

Into the software.

Into the autonomy stack.

Into fleet management.

Into whoever controls the system that keeps the truck moving.

That is where this gets really interesting.

A trucking company traditionally makes money by owning trucks and moving freight.

But if autonomy turns each truck into a much more productive machine, the scarce resource may stop being the truck.

It becomes the autonomy system.

And software can be sold across thousands of trucks.

That’s a completely different business model.

Look at the valuations.

Aurora is around $13 billion.

Kodiak is around $700 million.

Yet neither company is generating anything close to the revenue you would normally associate with those valuations.

Investors are paying for what happens after autonomous trucks become normal.

And if that happens, the winner may not simply be whoever has the most trucks.

It could be whoever gets its software onto the most trucks.

That also explains why the OEM relationships matter so much.

You don’t want to manufacture every truck yourself.

You want your autonomy system sitting inside somebody else’s truck.

Let somebody else buy the steel.

Let somebody else maintain the engine.

Let somebody else finance the fleet.

You collect money because your software makes that truck useful for more hours.

That’s a much more scalable business.

And there is an even stranger second-order effect.

If autonomous trucks become dramatically more productive, the trucking industry could eventually need fewer physical trucks per mile of freight.

That would put pressure on truck manufacturers and fleets even while autonomy companies grow.

So the autonomous trucking revolution could create winners and losers inside the same truck.

The truck manufacturer wants to sell another truck.

The fleet operator wants to maximize utilization.

The autonomy company wants its software installed everywhere.

Those incentives don’t perfectly line up.

That is the part I don’t think gets enough attention.

Everyone keeps debating which company has the better self-driving technology.

The bigger question may be:

Who owns the machine’s brain when the human driver disappears?

Because once the driver stops being the limiting factor, the economics of trucking can change from owning more trucks to getting more work out of every truck.

And that is where a $13 billion valuation versus a $700 million valuation starts looking less like a simple comparison of two self-driving companies.

It becomes a bet on who gets to own the software layer of a trucking industry that could eventually need fewer trucks, fewer drivers and far more utilization from every vehicle on the road.