Few executives have had a front-row seat to as many inflection points in modern technology as Gary Hicok. Over more than 25 years, his career has spanned foundational platform engineering, safety-critical automotive systems, global business leadership, and the commercialization of AI at scale. 

Gary Hicok has seen nearly every serious attempt to build autonomous transport. Some were technologically advanced. Many were well capitalized. Most failed to translate capability into scalable operations.

Einride is different.

“I’ve watched many smart companies pursue autonomy and struggle with doing everything in house,” Hicok says. “That approach consistently breaks at scale - economically, operationally, or regulatorily and it doesn't leverage the expertise of the industry, whereas Einride’s approach does. This is built to win.”

After engaging with Einride’s leadership team for nearly eight years, Hicok will join the Board of Directors of Einride. The timing, he says, reflects extended exposure to how different autonomous strategies perform under real market, regulatory, and operational conditions — and which architectures continue to compound advantage as the industry moves from experimentation to selection.

A vantage point across the industry

Hicok is best known for his leadership roles at NVIDIA, where he played a central role in building and scaling the company’s automotive, mobile, and platform businesses during a period of rapid transformation. As head of Automotive Hardware and Systems, he oversaw the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, now a cornerstone of autonomous vehicle computing and safety-critical automotive AI worldwide. Earlier, as Senior Vice President of the Mobile Business Unit, he led the development of the Tegra processor platform, shaping next-generation mobile and in-vehicle computing.

From these roles, Hicok worked closely with automakers, suppliers, and autonomous technology developers across the industry. That vantage point provided direct visibility into which approaches advanced beyond pilots, and which stalled under regulatory friction, cost structure, or system complexity

“My career has serendipitously allowed me to be involved in many pioneering, technology-driven endeavors as both an engineering and business leader,” Hicok explains. “More recently, I was fortunate to be directly involved in both the emergence of AI and in enabling automotive’s adoption of AI edge computers.”

Technology vision: System thinking at scale 

From senior roles spanning platform computing and automotive systems, Hicok engaged closely with nearly every serious autonomous transport effort, including Einride. Over time, the contrast became clear. While others stalled as they attempted to move from pilots to deployment, Einride continued to convert progress into durable operating advantage. His decision to join the Board now reflects that separation.

What distinguishes Einride in Hicok’s view is not just the sophistication of its autonomous technology, but the discipline of its platform strategy.

“I have engaged with the leadership of Einride for the last eight years,” he says. “They have a pragmatic and healthy platform execution strategy that makes them uniquely suited to succeed.”

Hicok further points to Einride’s underlying technology vision as a critical differentiator

“What I respect most is the way Einride thinks about autonomy as a system, not a feature,” he says. “That vision was clear early on, and it has remained coherent as the company has scaled.”

The Company’s technology roadmap treats autonomy, electrification, software, and operations as interdependent layers of a single platform. As Hicok joins the Board, he adds experience scaling comparable system architectures globally, reinforcing a vision designed not for demonstration, but for durable deployment at scale

Built for Deployment, Not Demonstration

At a time when much of the autonomous transport industry has focused on vertically integrated, closed systems, Einride has taken a different path: building a flexible, vehicle-agnostic platform that integrates best-in-class partners while retaining ownership of its most critical intellectual property.

“The industry has developed most of the core technology needed for autonomous transport,” Hicok notes. “Einride’s AV platform is positioned well to utilize both internal elements while leveraging the best the rest of the industry has to offer.”

This approach aligns closely with Hicok’s own experience scaling platforms at NVIDIA, where openness, modularity, and ecosystem thinking proved essential to global adoption.

Einride has developed a comprehensive autonomous freight platform built on three core pillars:

• the Einride Driver, a proprietary vehicle-agnostic software system that integrates advanced sensors from leading partners like NVIDIA and Aeva into a multi-modal perception system

• a rigorously audited safety framework that has secured government permits across four countries with increasing regulatory efficiency; and 

• remote fleet operations, allowing a single human operator to supervise multiple autonomous vehicles — a prerequisite for autonomy-driven margin expansion

The platform is paired with purpose-built autonomous trucks, manufactured by a European contractor with premium automotive experience and designed with redundancies in steering, breaking, and power systems that legacy OEM platforms were never built to support.

Safety, by Design

Einride’s architecture reflects its safety-first philosophy. A dual-path system combines an end-to-end machine learning model, using imitation and reinforcement learning to deliver human-like driving behavior, with a secondary, rules-based deterministic layer that provides regulatory-grade safety guardrails.

This is not theoretical. Einride currently runs autonomous trucks in daily service across multiple sites and has maintained a zero traffic incident safety record across its autonomous operations to date.

“Einride hasn’t just operated in some of the world’s most rigorous regulatory environments, it has earned the trust to help design those systems alongside regulators,” says Hicok. “By combining Europe’s disciplined approach to growth and scale with America’s strength in innovative engineering and design, they’ve built a model that gives a true global competitive edge.”

From Technology to Transformation

Einride uses electric freight operations as an entry point, embedding itself in customers’ logistics networks, building data-driven joint business plans, and delivering immediate cost and emissions benefits. Its AI-powered platform, Saga, continuously optimizes routes, vehicles, batteries, chargers, and energy usage, enabling customers to move more freight with fewer assets at a lower cost.

Independent research has validated a 13% reduction in fleet-level total cost of ownership compared to diesel operations using Einride’s optimization models, before accounting for the upside of autonomy.

Leadership

Beyond technology and architecture, Hicok points to execution as a defining factor for Einride’s position.

Founded by Robert Falck who serves as Executive Chairman, Einride combines long-term vision with institutional leadership. In that context, Gary Hicok will join the Board of Directors later this year. The appointment reflects alignment between the company’s leadership and the view that Einride is progressing from technology validation toward scaled platform execution.

“What stood out to me over time was not just the platform, but the way the company is run,” Hicok says. “Einride has a leadership structure that balances its vision with disciplined execution.”

Led by CEO Roozbeh Charli, with CTO Henrik Green overseeing technology and autonomy, the company brings together long-term strategic direction with deep technical and operational leadership across autonomy, software, hardware, and fleet operations, balancing growth with capital efficiency, and execution with financial rigor.

Hicok also points to the company’s commercial leadership as increasingly important as autonomous freight moves toward market readiness.

“You need management that understands how to take a complex platform into the market, commercially, regulatorily, and at scale,” he says.

Looking Ahead

As autonomous transport transitions from experimentation to scaled deployment, the basis for competition has shifted.

“Only a small number of teams ever reach true technical excellence at this stage, that is simply the qualifier to participate,” Hicok notes. “What determines the winners will be the ones who can translate that technical strength into fully operational systems, earn the regulators trust, and deploy that technology into economically sustainable customer adoption. That is why I believe Einride is the forerunner. 

With a growing global customer base, industry-first regulatory approvals, and a platform designed for scale, Einride is positioned to play a defining role in the future of freight. For Gary Hicok, joining the Board is both a continuation of a career spent at the frontier of technology, and a chance to help contribute to autonomous transport being delivered in a way that works, safely and at scale.