A 100-year-old truckmaker picks a partner for the driver's seat: DAF will build its trucks around Einride's autonomy

DAF Trucks, the Eindhoven-based subsidiary of PACCAR, has agreed to integrate Einride's autonomous driving system into its own vehicle platform. The two companies describe the goal in the plainest possible terms: large-scale commercial operation of SAE Level 4 electric freight — trucks that handle repetitive, pre-defined routes with no human in the cab. The deal matters less for what it delivers today than for what it settles. Autonomous trucking has spent a decade split between two camps: software developers retrofitting other people's trucks, and manufacturers building their own stacks in-house. DAF, which has been making trucks since 1928, has chosen neither. It is putting a supplier's driving system at the centre of its platform, the way it would source an engine or a gearbox. The first stage is deliberately unglamorous: defining and testing how Einride Drive fits DAF's electronics, brakes and steering, with the Dutch applied-research institute TNO brought in as an independent party. No launch customer, no route and no date for revenue service has been named. Einride is not a newcomer to this. The Stockholm company, founded in 2016, runs one of the world's largest heavy-duty electric fleets and sells both freight capacity and software. It listed on the public market through a SPAC merger in June 2026, bought the charging-software firm Flipturn in July, and last week extended its autonomy work into defence logistics. Level 4 trucks built by an established manufacturer would give all of that a vehicle to run on. Jeroen van den Oetelaar, chief engineer and board member at DAF, framed the partnership as "future-proofing the logistics sector". The honest reading is narrower: the driver shortage and rising operating costs are structural, and a truckmaker that cannot offer an autonomous option by the end of the decade will be selling into a market someone else has defined.