Army Tests Driverless Vehicles at Fort Benning With $30 Million Challenge

The Army and the Defense Innovation Unit are offering companies up to $30 million in prizes to build autonomous replacements for more than 150,000 sedans, SUVs, trucks and vans in the Department of War fleet. The money flows through the Robotic Operation for Autonomous Delivery and Sustainment challenge, launched in May, and the first hardware is already rolling at Fort Benning, Georgia.

The stakes are practical, not experimental. Soldiers currently drive trucks as an assigned duty even for routine deliveries around an installation, and every hour spent moving water and MREs is an hour not spent on combat tasks. According to the Defense Innovation Unit, the project is intended to reduce demands placed on military personnel and lower transportation costs.

The pilot at Fort Benning is tied to a larger Department of War effort to modernize the military's support fleet. Officials are testing autonomous cars and vans as replacements for vehicles that transport troops and move heavy supplies to field exercises.

Who is building the vehicles?

Five companies will test their vehicles and autonomous systems at Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Texas, through the end of 2026:

• Applied Intuition
• Forterra/May Mobility
• Perrone Robotics
• Overland AI/Gatik
• Bot Auto

Fort Benning plans to bring four electric vehicles and two hybrid vehicles into its pilot. Those six vehicles will come from three of the five private companies involved in the broader effort.

The mix matters beyond autonomy. The Army released its own climate strategy in 2022, which said the service had already replaced 18,000 fuel-powered support vehicles with electric or hybrid models. That strategy followed a 2021 executive order signed by President Biden calling for federal government vehicles to be replaced with zero-emission cars, vans and trucks over the following decade. The autonomous pilot extends the same fleet-replacement logic from propulsion to drivers.

What does the testing actually involve?

Human drivers first. During the first few weeks of the pilot, people will drive the vehicles around the base while collecting video and other data needed to develop the maps and GPS information the autonomous systems rely on.

The mapping routes will "explicitly exclude" sensitive locations, officials said. The restricted areas include the base airfield, ammunition supply points and tactical compounds. That exclusion is a small but telling detail: the Army is willing to hand commercial companies detailed mapping data for its installation, just not the parts that matter most if that data leaked.

After the mapping phase, the selected companies will conduct autonomous development and safety testing through the end of 2026. Human supervision will remain part of the process before any vehicle is permitted to operate without a driver aboard.

"Safety remains the overriding priority throughout this pilot," said Charles Auer, head of the autonomous vehicle pilot at Fort Benning. "Before we transition to completely driverless operations, each vehicle will undergo rigorous testing with a safety driver on board."

The promise of fully driverless operations comes with a conditional attached: no vehicle sheds its safety driver until it passes testing the Army has not yet defined in public. In plain words, soldiers should not expect unsupervised rides soon.

Why does Fort Benning need robot rides?

Scale. "Every day, thousands of initial-entry trainees, permanent-party cadre, and tenant unit soldiers move across Fort Benning's expansive ranges, cantonment areas, and support facilities," Auer said in an Army news release.

The base's daily logistics burden is the core argument for the program. Alex Miller, Chief Technology Officer for the Army Chief of Staff, framed the goal in terms of soldier time rather than technology.

"We want vehicles that let our soldiers operate more safely, more efficiently, and over time, give them more time to focus on core soldier activities other than driving water and MREs around post," Miller said.

The vehicles could carry personnel to field exercises, training events, official ceremonies and other duty locations. That would allow soldiers to travel across base without relying on other troops to drive them, a modest-sounding change with real operational implications for installations where transport duty pulls personnel away from training.

What does the rideshare model look like?

One vendor has already sketched the end state. Forterra, selected for testing at Fort Benning, said its technology includes a command and control system that provides commanders with a live map and dashboard showing every vehicle, while allowing them to adjust requirements and parameters for the installation.

The company said soldiers would eventually be able to request a vehicle through a rideshare application. That setup would place the autonomous vehicles in an on-demand transportation role for troops moving between locations on base, essentially importing the commercial robotaxi model behind a fence line.

Forterra also claims operational pedigree. The company said it has already fielded more than 250 autonomous systems for Department of War programs, including robotaxis used by soldiers at Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was, according to Forterra, among the first American companies to deploy ground autonomous systems in Ukraine, where the company said its systems have assisted with dozens of casualty evacuation missions.

Those claims come from the vendor itself, and the Army has not independently detailed how the prior deployments performed. Forterra's Ukraine and Fort Bragg record will face a harder test under the pilot's formal safety regime.

What happens after 2026?

The testing window runs through the end of 2026, with five companies competing for a share of up to $30 million in challenge prizes. The Army has not said how many vehicles it intends to field beyond the six at Fort Benning, nor what benchmarks a system must meet before driverless operations are approved.

What the service has committed to is process: mapping with sensitive sites excluded, development testing with safety drivers aboard, and phased evaluation at two installations. Whether commercial autonomy survives military installations' ranges, compounds and ceremony traffic is the question the next two years are designed to answer.