America is already locking up toothpaste, and the mass layoffs have barely started

I was recently in Kansas City. My Uber driver was Jesse — sharp, easy to talk to. He mentioned, almost offhandedly, that his girlfriend’s mother and a close friend had just moved in with them. Between housing costs and gas prices, the math had stopped adding up for him.

Jesse drives people for a living. He is one of roughly 1.6 million rideshare drivers in the U.S.

The same week I was there, PepsiCo announced the largest deployment of fully autonomous delivery trucks in American history — a $600 million investment, partnering with Gatik AI. Medium-duty Isuzu trucks, many carrying Doritos and Frito-Lay products, have been running with no human on board since June 2025 on fixed short-haul routes between distribution centers, bottling plants, and stores like Walmart and Dollar General. The fleet has logged zero accidents and a 99 percent on-time delivery rate.

PepsiCo is not just experimenting. Gatik, Isuzu, and Nvidia are developing a production facility in South Carolina that will begin mass-producing Level 4 autonomous trucks in the second half of 2027. “The volumes that we’re looking at for this year are in the hundreds of trucks,” said Gatik’s CEO.

America has 3.5 million truck drivers. Do the math slowly.

Now extend the logic to Jesse’s world. Waymo alone operates nearly 3,800 robotaxis on American roads and is targeting 20 new U.S. markets by end of 2026. Tesla, Amazon’s Zoox, and others are scaling........

© The Hill