Venti prepares autonomous trucks for US railyards

Venti Technologies plans to introduce driver-out container trucks at a live US intermodal rail yard during 2026, moving autonomous vehicle technology into an environment shared with cranes, trains, forklifts, conventional vehicles, and terminal workers.

The launch forms part of a commercial agreement signed in July with an unnamed Class I North American railroad. Venti says the programme envisages more than 130 autonomous container-moving trucks across eight railroad sites by 2027, with potential expansion beyond 600 vehicles by the end of the decade.

The first vehicles are designed to load, move, and unload containers within normal yard activity without dedicated autonomous lanes or major terminal modification. Venti says its autonomy technology can be fitted to existing vehicles or supplied on newly produced trucks depending on customer requirements.

Intermodal yards are a demanding environment for autonomous equipment because vehicles carry out short, repetitive journeys through areas where the physical layout remains relatively controlled but traffic conditions change constantly.

A yard truck may travel between cranes, container stacks, rail loading areas, and staging positions while other vehicles cross its route. Equipment can reverse, stop suddenly, or change working position as trains and containers move through the facility.

Removing the driver therefore involves considerably more than following a fixed path between two coordinates. The autonomous truck has to recognise surrounding equipment and people, choose appropriate speeds and routes, and position itself accurately enough for container handling machinery to complete transfers.

Venti says localisation and decision making are performed onboard and that its vehicles can park to within around two centimetres. That precision figure is supplier-reported, but accurate positioning is a genuine operational requirement where a container chassis has to align consistently with cranes or other lifting equipment.

The company also says the vehicles can operate in day, night, rain, snow, and other adverse conditions. Those claims will need to be demonstrated under the specific weather, surface, traffic, and maintenance conditions of the US rail sites rather than assumed from the technology specification.

The lack of dedicated autonomous lanes is one of the more significant elements of the proposed deployment. Segregating driverless vehicles from normal traffic simplifies parts of the automation problem but consumes yard space and can restrict how operators change traffic patterns when workloads shift.

Mixed operation avoids that infrastructure requirement but places greater responsibility on sensing, vehicle control, and operating procedures. Human drivers and workers also need clear rules around how autonomous equipment behaves when routes intersect or unusual situations arise.

Venti points to almost three years of commercial operation at PSA Singapore as evidence behind the US programme. The company says its autonomous fleet there has moved more than 360,000 containers and travelled more than 500,000 autonomous miles while operating among approximately 1,200 human-driven trucks.

Those figures are reported by Venti and should not be treated as an independent performance audit. They nevertheless show that the technology has progressed beyond a short demonstration and has accumulated experience in a high-throughput container environment.

A North American rail yard will present a different operating configuration. Port terminals and intermodal rail facilities use different equipment, layouts, software, labour processes, and traffic rules, so the US deployment will require the autonomy system to be integrated with the railroad’s local operating model rather than copied directly from Singapore.

The business case centres on repeated internal transport tasks. Yard tractors spend substantial working time carrying containers between known locations without travelling onto the public road network. Their operating area is geographically limited, and the same types of movements recur throughout the shift.

That makes them a logical automation target, particularly at sites where throughput requires vehicles to operate across long or irregular hours. The commercial result will still depend on utilisation, maintenance, supervision, software support, and the cost of keeping enough vehicles available during rail and crane peaks.

Venti claims its technology can reduce transportation costs within logistics facilities by between 40% and 70%. That is a supplier estimate rather than an expected saving for the unnamed railroad and should not be applied directly to the US programme without site-specific operating data.

Scale will introduce another challenge. A small deployment can rely heavily on engineers and manual intervention when a truck encounters an unusual condition. More than 130 vehicles across eight sites require repeatable commissioning, remote support, spare parts, maintenance procedures, software deployment, and recovery methods that can be handled by normal operations teams.

The possible expansion beyond 600 trucks would make those support systems more important still. At that point, autonomous vehicles would represent a sizeable materials handling fleet rather than a technology project operating at the edge of the railroad’s business.

Venti has not yet publicly identified the railroad or first US site, and fleet size for the initial installation remains undisclosed. Those details will determine the immediate industrial scale of the 2026 launch.

The first live operation will therefore provide the most useful evidence. If the trucks can work reliably in mixed railyard traffic without dedicated lanes or substantial terminal rebuilding, the case for replication across the remaining sites becomes materially stronger. The 130-vehicle figure sets the programme’s intended scale; the initial yard will show how much operating change is required to reach it.