Einride has been running autonomous freight for years, but always on its own hardware. That changes now. The Swedish operator is partnering with DAF to integrate its Einride Driver software into the Dutch manufacturer’s electric truck production.
It’s the first time Einride’s autonomous technology is climbing into somebody else’s cab rather than building its own. The target is to bring the DAF trucks on the road as soon as next year.
Scaling up the technology
For its logistics arm, providing emission-free freight carrier services, Einride builds on deals with Scania, Mercedes-Benz, BYD, and other OEMs. But up to now, its autonomous fleet has always been a proprietary ecosystem.
The company developed its own cabless Pod, ran its first commercial daily autonomous freight operation in Sweden with pharmacy retailer Apotea in late 2024, and secured permits for SAE Level 4 on US roads in Los Angeles.
In the industry, this logic is called vertical integration: own the vehicle, the software, the charging, and the freight platform. The DAF deal breaks that model open. Einride is now licensing its autonomous driving stack to a third-party truck manufacturer.
Why the change? The Swedish company bets that scale comes faster through partnerships than by building every vehicle itself.
Type-approval in the loop
The partnership targets DAF’s newest electric truck range. That means the XB Electric for city distribution, and the XG and XG+ Electric for longer hauls. Einride Driver will be integrated into these production platforms, not retrofitted as an aftermarket add-on. The deadline is tight. Both companies aim to bring SAE Level 4 autonomy (hands-off in most traffic conditions) to public roads by 2027.
The technical work starts this year. DAF and Einride are working with TNO, the Dutch applied research institute, to develop the hardware interfaces between Einride’s autonomous stack and DAF’s electric truck architecture.
Type-approval authorities are already in the loop, which matters because nobody in Europe has yet secured full homologation for a Level 4 electric truck on public roads.
Not new to the game either
Though Einride is the unicorn in autonomous trucking, DAF is not new to the game either. Parent company PACCAR has been running a North American Autonomous Vehicle Platform program for years, and DAF has already worked with autonomous technology providers on other projects. The Eindhoven truck maker frames this as a logical extension of its electrification push.
“By combining our high-quality truck platform with leading autonomous technology, we are actively shaping a more efficient, safer, and more sustainable ecosystem for goods transport,” said Jeroen van den Oetelaar, DAF Chief Engineer and board member.
For Einride, the math is about reach. The company has proven its concept with closed-loop operations and short-haul warehouse runs. To move beyond pilots and into the kind of commercial scale that justifies the remote-operator business model, there need to be vehicles on the road in numbers that DAF can deliver.
That a major European truck manufacturer is now treating Einride’s tech as a product roadmap item rather than a research project is definitely a stepping stone.
