There’s a shortage of truck drivers in Canada and it’s increasing: Industry estimates provided by Transport Canada say this country needs more than 25,000 new drivers today and that number could double by 2035. This is where the Canadian Automated Vehicle Initiative (CAVI) believes it can help.
“With the Trump tariffs and all that’s happening, there is a renewed focus on interprovincial trade,” says Barrie Kirk, the president of CAVI, a non-profit association for autonomous vehicle stakeholders in government, industry and academia. “Ninety per cent of that trade is done via truck and we have this shortage of long-distance truck drivers and it’s getting worse. The answer is automation”
To prove automation is possible, CAVI wants to help develop a self-driving tractor-trailer, and work through regulations in numerous jurisdictions so the truck will travel from Halifax to Vancouver with no driver in 2028. This journey would set a world record for autonomous vehicle travel, and the first meeting of 20 of the association’s stakeholders met in July to consider the challenges.
A NuPort autonomous tractor-trailerCourtesy of manufacturer
There are already pilot projects in other countries to develop automated, long-distance trucking, including the MODI project in Europe that began three years ago. It is spending €28-million ($45 million), mostly funded by the European Union, to co-ordinate 36 different organizations across eight countries. It intends to prove that Level 4 autonomous trucks can operate safely and efficiently on the Rotterdam-to-Oslo freight corridor. Level 4 autonomation can handle all driving tasks, but only within a pre-defined area.
The challenges are similar in Canada, though distances are significantly greater.
“The real challenge, and opportunity, is regulatory harmonization across provinces, which this project will solve,” says Andrew Miller, the principal of Toronto-based Paladin Consulting and an advisor to CAVI’s Trans-Canada Autonomous Truck Demonstration Project.
“If we can demonstrate that long-haul trucking is safe, effective and valuable, we can begin to roll it out at scale. But we can’t roll it out at scale until it is demonstrated.”
The sensor bar is shown on a NuPort tractor-trailer.Courtesy of manufacturer
The project now has an initial steering committee, but it is still in its early stages and was only publicly announced this month. If all goes to schedule, regional pilot drives will happen in 2027 before the cross-Canada demonstration drive the following year.
“We’ve yet to encounter anyone who says, ‘this is a terrible idea, don’t do it’,” says Miller. “I don’t want to sound glib. It’s not like we could do this next week. There are technical issues that have to be solved, but they are technical issues that we know how to solve. If we put in the time, and we put in the effort and the money, they can be solved. It’s real, but feasible. The part that frankly seems most difficult is not technical, it’s regulatory.”
The 6,000-kilometre demonstration drive route would not include Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island, but that still means eight provinces and the federal government would have to agree on standards and find regulatory clarity. Ontario began a 10-year Automated Commercial Motor Vehicle Pilot Program in August to allow automated testing of heavy trucks on public roads, but so far, is doing so alone.
“Here in Canada, we have a lot of expertise in self-driving vehicles, but it tends to be in silos across the country,” says Kirk. “We have companies that are doing their own thing – there’s not as much co-operation as I would like to see. The provincial governments have their own separate approaches to the regulation and we would need consistency across the country.”
Self-driving trucks have already proven themselves in restricted sites, such as mines and quarries, and on short-haul, “middle-mile” deliveries, such as the Gatik trucks that deliver items between Loblaws distribution hubs and retail locations in the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto-based AI startup Waabi has been operating fully autonomous trucks on public roads in Texas since 2023. So far, the farthest that a tractor-trailer truck is known to have travelled without a driver operating it is 212 kilometres, in a test in Colorado in 2016. However, there’s a different public perception toward long-haul heavy trucks, says Miller.
Loblaw testing out driverless vehicle technology for moving products to stores for pick-up of online orders. They’re partnering with a Silicon Valley-based startup to test the technology. Handout loblawsClifton Li/Supplied
Gatik, a middle-mile delivery company based in Palo Alto and Toronto, recently announced what it says are the industry’s first electric self-driving box trucks.MARC PAGANI/Courtesy of manufacturer
“Safety is the No. 1 question that comes up with this, but to the extent that automated truck driving has been tested globally – and there’s more than 10 million miles (16.2 million kilometres) of such testing – there’s yet to be a fatality. The amount of lives that this would save when automated trucking rolls at scale is immense. Safety is one of those hard, but solvable, problems.”
The challenges are as diverse as driving in winter and secure encryption of data as well as detailed mapping of routes and reliable sensing by cameras, sonar and Lidar.
“Globally, automated trucking is going to happen,” says Miller. “The people who move first and best will reap the most benefits. So we (in Canada) can either follow, as we so often do – pick up the dribs and drabs and build nothing, give up our advantages that we have – or we can lead. This project is a way to try to ensure that we lead.”