Kearney and the MIT Mobility Initiative project that autonomous trucks will match the per-mile cost of trucks with drivers in the US around 2028, according to a report released Nov. 5. Their model puts a driverless truck at $4 a mile in 2026, against $2.50 for a conventional truck, with the two crossing at roughly $2.60 in 2028.
The forecast adds a date to the cost case for long-haul fleets, where about half of a US truck’s cost per mile goes to the driver, according to the report. Commercial deployment is still narrow and geographically concentrated, the authors write, though Aurora’s trucks have logged more than 500,000 driverless miles on public roads.
The US crosses first, two years before Europe and four before the Middle East, because its drivers cost the most. A fully loaded US long-haul driver, including roughly 30% in benefits, costs about $10,000 a month, about twice the European cost and four times the Middle East cost, the report says.
How the forecast compares with other estimates
The conventional side of the cost comparison starts near current rates. ATRI’s Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update put the industry-average cost to run a truck at a record $2.336 per mile in 2025, up 3.4% from 2024, a figure FreightWaves used to explain why rates are rising without more freight. Kearney’s model starts at $2.50 a mile for 2026 and rises with inflation to $3.50 by 2035.
The model assumes a $200,000 Class 8 truck with a five-year useful life, running 185,000 miles a year with two drivers who each cover 92,500 miles. Its $4-a-mile driverless cost for 2026 sits well above what some developers have published. Aurora’s own Fort Worth-to-Phoenix case study put its virtual driver cost at $1.84 a mile, against $1.99 for a human driver.
Goldman Sachs Research reached the same crossover year from a much higher starting cost. In an April 30 analysis, analyst Mark Delaney projected that autonomous trucks would become cost-competitive with human-driven trucks in the US in 2028. Goldman put the all-in autonomous cost, excluding corporate operating expenses, at about $8.56 a mile in 2025, falling to about $2.03 by 2035.
The authors built the Kearney model from more than 25 interviews with autonomous vehicle developers, truck makers, carriers, brokers, and investors.
Fleet size sets the timing
Kearney projects the driverless cost will fall to about $2 a mile by 2035, a 49% decline. Most of that drop comes from spreading the cost of building the virtual driver across more trucks. The model amortizes $750 million a year in global R&D spending over five years and assumes the fleet reaches 40,000 trucks by 2035, while remote operators go from one per 10 trucks to one per 20.
The 2028 date depends on that fleet size. If autonomous fleets reach only 10,000 trucks by 2035, US parity could slip to as late as 2032, the report says.
Regulation and liability are also unsettled. Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Georgia permit fully driverless operation, according to the report, while cross-border and many interstate routes still require a human, with no answer yet on how to certify a virtual driver. The authors also leave open how claims get split among the carrier, the truck maker, and the virtual-driver provider after an incident.
Four business models for driverless trucks
The report sorts the market into four business models: an OEM-led platform such as Volvo’s VNL Autonomous, a purpose-built vehicle such as Humble’s, an autonomous carrier such as Bot Auto, and a virtual-driver-only model such as Waabi and Aurora. The value pool all four chase is the human driver, which the report prices at $1.26 a mile.
Private truckload fleets are one of three priority segments the report names, a market of about $450 billion with an estimated $180 billion in driver costs. For-hire truckload and LTL are the other two.
“What remains to be seen is which business model captures the most value when the economics close and which players build the ecosystem position to collect it,” the authors write.
Why it matters: As AI in the physical world continues to improve, autonomous trucks and their virtual drivers are gaining greater attention from fleets and the consulting and management firms that help them make decisions. With a cost parity estimated around 2028 this supports recent bullish news from OEMs and AV developers who hope to have commercialization in place to capture that projected demand.
