How Scania is driving autonomous transport forward – Insights from Daniel Frylmark
05 DECEMBER 2025
“I truly believe we are working to make the world safer and more sustainable”.
Perhaps not everyone can say they have a strong sense of purpose in their job, but Daniel Frylmark certainly can. He tells us about his passion for his work with autonomous transport.
Daniel Frylmark is a Solutions Manager at TRATON Group R&D who works with the development of autonomous transport. He’s a true believer in the power of this technology to make a difference to our lives.
“We have to make sure we develop safe, sustainable solutions that are efficient and safe, and tackle the transport problems we have in the world today, including road safety, driver shortages, traffic congestion and pollution,” he says. “It’s a really tough challenge but it’s also a rewarding one.”
Bridging business with tech
Daniel started working with autonomous transport six-and-a-half years ago, the latest stage in a 22-year career within first Scania and, since a few months back, its mother company TRATON. An important part of his daily work is bridging the business side of autonomous with the tech side, which means working with strategy, alignment and leadership to ensure the various parts of a team of software and hardware experts based in Sweden, Germany, the United States, Portugal and India are all pulling in the same direction and targeting customer value.
Aligning daily work between the business and technical sides of autonomous development.
“Involving leaders and working through others is where I enjoy working the most. It’s a balance of being quite operative with doing some troubleshooting, but it’s mostly about the overarching aspect of keeping up with what’s happening with the technology and what our response will be,” he explains.
“I’m a strong believer in working with direction and leading through principles rather than micromanagement. You have to work a lot with values and cultures to get it to stick. And you also need to have psychological safety, making sure that people are okay about trying things and making mistakes because that’s where we grow.”
Reviewing sensor data to understand how the system behaves in real conditions.
A fast-paced field with close customer contact
The things that excite Daniel most about the company’s autonomous transport journey are how quickly it is developing and the extensive customer contact.
“It’s a very fast-changing area when it comes to the technology. The early iterations are quite similar to traditional conventional embedded systems but now we are seeing an increased percentage of AI and data-driven methods both in the product and how the product is being developed, which I think is really interesting,” he says.
“It’s so much fun when we involve the customers. I think it differs a lot here compared with many other technological areas because with most embedded development you meet some customers, get input, go back and develop, test and validate, start production and maybe get customer feedback if something is great or not so great.
“That’s not at all how we work here. There is much more involvement with the customers early on, so we need to develop both the business operations and the solution in parallel. That changes the conventional development process. In autonomous we need to adapt to be successful and I like that,” he says.
Breaking down challenges and next steps in the development process.
Autonomous: a technology whose time has come
Now that Scania’s autonomous vehicles have had a true moment in the sun with the Red Bull mountain biker challenge, Daniel can reflect on the hugely successful impact of that initiative.
“The question was how to do the challenge in a way that contributed to speed and development and that’s something I think we truly managed with this exciting project,” he says.
“It was so nice to see this iterative development and testing where we could do a code change, review it and test with just a few hours in lead times. That was very inspiring and something we should look even more deeply into.”
A strong sense of purpose drives the work to make transport safer and more sustainable.
He also looks ahead to the future of a technology whose time has come, with Scania’s autonomous mining trucks present in mines and tests of hub-to-hub highway transports already far advanced.
“Purpose is so important to me and I truly believe in making the world a safer and more sustainable place. That’s what we are pursuing with autonomous. We are changing the transport system as we know it and we’re doing it today as we speak.”
