Key Takeaways

• Autonomous trucking is moving from pilots to real commercial freight, with Aurora, Kodiak, and Gatik demonstrating distinct paths to scale across North America – from long-haul Sun Belt corridors to fully driverless middle-mile networks already generating hundreds of millions in contracted revenue.
• Rising diesel prices, geopolitical conflict in the Middle East, and structural freight rate pressure are forcing steel shippers and service centers to treat logistics as a front-line competitive issue rather than a back-office function.
• The most likely early winners in steel logistics are providers that can retrofit or integrate with existing fleets, especially on predictable mill-to-service-center lanes, where route discipline and scheduling reliability align naturally with what autonomous systems do best.

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