A truck without a cab, without a driver and without a safety operator now runs a scheduled supermarket round in Germany.
The approval came from the Federal Motor Transport Authority, known as the KBA. Lidl uses the vehicle for daily replenishment between its Edermuende distribution centre and a nearby store. Swedish freight technology company Einride built it, and both firms describe the permit as a German first for a cab-less Level 4 truck inside ordinary logistics rather than a closed trial.
Trips are short and capacity is small. Fifteen Euro pallets fit on board, three round trips fit in a day, and the four-month project should move more than 3,000 pallets while covering every dry-goods delivery on that route.
Thomas Dangelmayer, who leads operational logistics at Lidl Germany, called it a milestone being tested step by step in live operations. Cost, utilisation and productivity figures have not been released, and no wider roll-out has been announced.
The commercial case is labour. In June the International Road Transport Union put Europe’s unfilled truck-driver posts at about 502,000 for 2025, roughly 13 percent of roles in the markets surveyed. It expects about a fifth of the current driver workforce to retire inside five years.
Einride describes a driving stack that pairs machine-learning navigation with an independent deterministic safety checker and redundant lidar, radar and cameras. Sweden’s RISE examined the control system’s functional safety, covering obstacle detection and cybersecurity, for a 2025 trial application. German law has allowed Level 4 operation on public roads since 2021, inside approved areas and with a minimal-risk stop when limits are reached.
