OTTAWA — Driverless transport trucks from Volvo Autonomous Solutions may be powered by technology with Canadian roots—including from Toronto-based Waabi—but it could be a long time before they head north to Canada’s highways.

“The U.S. is leading globally on self-driving trucking, long-haul trucking, in terms of the deployment,” Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun said in an interview with The Logic.

One of the issues is that an uneven regulatory regime for testing autonomous vehicles is not set up for self-driving trucks to move easily from province to province.

Internal trade barriers, that longtime foil to Canadian productivity, strike again.

The federal government and the provinces have committed to tearing down as many of those impediments as possible—including in trucking—to shore up Canada’s economy amid the U.S. trade war, but Urtasun suggests they are taking too long.

“Canada needs to understand that this is now,” Urtasun said. “It’s happening now, and if you don’t want to be left behind you need to safely adopt this technology.” 

The Volvo Group launched its autonomous tech unit in 2020 to develop fully driverless freight vehicles for use in long-haul trucking and mining. The Volvo VNL Autonomous trucks, which the Swedish automaker produces at its New River Valley assembly plant in Dublin, Va., integrate virtual driver systems from Waabi, which developed physical AI models to control objects in the real world. Volvo is also working with a system from Aurora, a U.S.-based firm led by Canadian Chris Urmson, who previously oversaw Google’s self-driving car project.

The trucks use a Level 4 “high-driving autonomous” system that can drive and even monitor its surroundings within a specified area without human intervention. The system includes built-in redundancies for added safety, such as a backup braking and steering systems that are powered separately from the primary systems. 

Despite the Canadian connections, their use in long-haul commercial trucking is currently being tested with human safety drivers in Texas. Logistics company DHL Supply Chain has deployed the trucks along its hub-to-hub routes from Dallas to Houston and Fort Worth to El Paso. 

Shahrukh Kazmi, chief product officer for Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said in an interview with The Logic the company is focused on the U.S. market for the foreseeable future.

“The Venn diagram really aligns well,” he said of the choice to test the trucks in Texas.

The good weather is one factor, as being able to handle snow, which decreases visibility of highway lanes and other markers, would require tweaks to the technology. Another is market opportunity, as Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston is a major transportation route. The final ingredient, Kazmi said, is being permitted to test on real highways.

“What governments can do… is to have the environment that we can test with a safety driver in a corridor which is commercially viable,” Kazmi said, “which I think pulls these robotics companies into a place to then go for it.”

Waabi, at this point, is going for it south of the border. Canada’s busiest trucking route is the Quebec City-Windsor, Ont., corridor, but that introduces another challenge: the regulatory guidelines for autonomous vehicles vary from province to province.

Rémi Slama, a corporate lawyer in the Montreal office of Fasken who has written about autonomous vehicles, said provincial jurisdiction over road usage and driver licensing has created a “legal maze.”

A 2024 paper on barriers to interprovincial trucking published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute estimated that the hodgepodge of standards and regulations—governing everything from cargo weight allowances to driver qualifications—upped the cost of freight by about 8.3 per cent. To reduce that friction, the federal government worked with provinces and territories on a pilot program to mutually recognize each other’s trucking rules. 

The situation gets murkier for autonomous vehicles. Even definitions for terms such as drivers or autonomous vehicles can vary between provinces, Slama said, which adds to the confusion. Without a unified national regulatory framework, he said, a self-driving truck rolling through one province with relatively permissive testing regulations could have to switch to manual override when crossing into another, which further undermines the business case. “I understand they are working on it, but there’s really no unity.”

Hicham Ayoun, a spokesperson for the federal Department of Transport, confirmed in a statement that provinces are in charge of their own rules for autonomous vehicles. “Any trial involving the movement of an automated truck in two or more provinces or territories would require approvals from each participating jurisdiction,” he wrote. Ottawa has worked with the provinces to develop a set of national testing guidelines, but they do not have the force of regulations.

The federal government launched a review of red tape last July, aimed at cutting regulations that hamper productivity and growth. Transport Canada promised to advance a “co-ordinated national regulatory framework” for autonomous vehicles, but consultations might take years.

“Canada needs to move,” said Urtasun. “The advantages of an economy that actually adopts self-driving is massive compared to one that doesn’t—particularly for trucking.”

Meanwhile, Urtasun said Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi are approaching a major milestone: removing the safety drivers from their test hauls and launching fully autonomous trucks. “This is where it’s very exciting to see a Canadian company really leading the industry with an amazing [automaker].”

That raises another issue with Canada’s current approach to autonomous trucking: even where rules are more permissive, Urtasun feels testing is framed as a technical demonstration rather than a step on the way to deployment—“theatrics,” as she puts it, at a time when “consumers want their goods yesterday.” 

“If we are going to invest many millions of dollars,” she said, “it’s because we are here to build a business.”