CES is not supposed to be about fire trucks. It is supposed to be about earbuds, Bluetooth, AI, TVs that roll up like yoga mats, phones that fold, and always with promises of a life transformed as the next big thing. So it was startling to see at CES 2026 a hulking beast of a machine, a vehicle ten feet wide, nearly two stories tall. It did not blink, glow, or talk back in the manner of the humanoid robots that we were all expecting to see. It didn’t have to. Its size said it all.
The beast, looming down at attendees with what appeared to be a gun turret, froze attendees in their tracks.
“What is that?” said one to another, no doubt forgetting where they were and where they were headed.
The beast, a creation of Oshkosh Corporation, was not a war machine at all but a giant fire truck. It was on loan from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
Oshkosh booth staffers were asked two questions over and over:
“What are you doing here?” (Isn’t this a consumer electronics show?)
“So you don’t just make overalls?”
On hand was a very patient Chad Smith, senior director of engineering at Oshkosh, to explain that the Striker was an airport rescue firefighting (ARFF) and his company had no relation to Oshkosh B’Gosh other than both are located on the outskirts of Milwaukee.
Making a Statement
Getting the ARFF from Oshkosh (Wisconsin) to Las Vegas was somewhat of a challenge, as it is wider than a single lane and not street-legal. It is designed to operate on airport runways and tarmacs, able to reach the farthest point of an airfield within strict FAA response times. It carries 3,000 gallons of water, multiple turret nozzles, infrared cameras, and enough lighting to turn night into day.
The ARFF has a hybrid power source. Think not of hybrid vehicles that get more miles per gallon; this was a performance move. While the truck operates with a conventional (IC) engine during normal operations, the electric motors kick when the vehicle has to get to the fire, so to speak, combining for over 1,500 horsepower, sending the 93,000 lb vehicle (fully loaded) from zero to 50 mph in about 25 seconds – an extraordinary figure for something heavier than a tractor-trailer, which takes 40 to 50 seconds to achieve the same speed. This is not just for bragging rights; it is compliance. FAA guidelines require the first responding fire vehicle to reach the scene within three minutes.
“Miss that window, and an airport must build another fire station closer to the runway,” says Chad.
CES as a Credibility Test
Oshkosh’s repeated presence at CES is a testament to the show becoming a proving ground for established industrial and manufacturing companies—particularly those eager to demonstrate they are not tech laggards or mere spectators in the AI and autonomy rush that is upon us.
For Oshkosh, that means showing how technology will improve operations in scenarios where failure is not an option.
The ARFF truck itself integrates thermal imaging (FLIR cameras), multiple sensor systems, and specialized tools such as a piercing arm designed to puncture an aircraft fuselage and inject water directly into a burning cabin—without risking firefighters. Unlike much of what is at CES, Oshkosh’s vehicles are not prototypes; they are operational systems in production and draw upon the company’s decades of designing and building military and emergency-response vehicles.
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, for example, operates 11 of these vehicles, five of them hybrids. The hybrids are dispatched first, specifically because they get to the scene quicker.
Racing, AI, and Highway Safety
Oshkosh owns Pratt Miller, the engineering firm behind Corvette Racing. Technology developed for competitive racing—particularly situational awareness systems—has been adapted for emergency and municipal vehicles. In racing, drivers must instantly determine whether a vehicle closing in is a competitor or a teammate. That same predictive logic is now being used to protect emergency responders and road crews.
Smith described a system that uses radar and cameras to monitor oncoming traffic when an emergency or road work truck is parked along a highway. AI algorithms evaluate whether an approaching vehicle is likely to strike the truck. If so, the system can trigger audible warnings giving cops or road crews precious seconds to scramble out of harm’s way.
Seconds matter. Two or three seconds, Smith noted, is “an eternity” in these scenarios.
The implications extend beyond fire trucks. Visitors to the booth have suggested the application to school buses.
Chad points out how useful this would be for autonomous vehicle companies that have been criticized for ignoring school-bus safety or crashing into emergency vehicles.
Robots That Take Out the Trash—and More
One of the more everyday concepts in the booth was HARR-E, an autonomous refuse vehicle designed for on-demand waste collection in residential developments. Here’s the reasoning, explains Chad. Garbage trucks visit every house on a fixed schedule, regardless of how much waste is generated. Instead, HARR-E collects trash only when summoned and transports it to a central collection point. The results include fewer heavy vehicles on neighborhood streets and reduced noise. Oshkosh envisions variants of HARR-E for delivery, security patrols, and even temporary deployment at construction or event sites.
AI Goes to the Recycling Bin
Perhaps the least glamorous application on display involved garbage.
Single-stream recycling has a dirty secret: contamination. Styrofoam, construction debris, and non-recyclable plastics frequently end up in recycling bins, forcing entire loads to be diverted to landfills. Oshkosh’s solution uses machine-learning models trained to identify contaminants as bins are dumped into refuse trucks.
The vision-based system scans the contents in real time, flags non-recyclables, and allows municipalities to identify repeat offenders for education or enforcement. The goal is not surveillance; it is recycling quality. Clean loads get recycled. Contaminated ones do not.
This technology is already slated for deployment under Oshkosh’s McNeilus brand, with shipments beginning this year.
The Airport of the Future
The booth’s “airport of the future” section tied many of these themes together.
Oshkosh, through its AeroTech business, supplies much of the ground-support equipment you might have seen from the cabin window: de-icing rigs, pushback tractors, cargo loaders and jet bridges. Many of these assets have service lives measured in decades, making full replacement impractical. Instead, Oshkosh is layering AI and autonomy onto bolt-on equipment for existing infrastructure.
One example is an AI-guided jet bridge system that visually identifies an aircraft door and autonomously docks the bridge—with a safety operator supervising. Another involves robotic wheel chocks and autonomous pushback vehicles, designed to keep operations moving during lightning events when human workers cannot safely be on the tarmac. Another use might be an automated “wing walker” to replace those whose job it is to walk under the jet’s wingtips when it is taxiing towards or away from the terminal.
Oshkosh at CES?
So why bring a 93,000-pound fire truck to a consumer electronics show, one where IC is understood to be “integrated circuits” rather than “internal combustion?”
CES has successfully expanded beyond consumers and electronics. For Oshkosh, the message it needs to deliver is clear: it is not just a legacy manufacturer now repeating tech buzzwords but an industrial company applying AI, autonomy, and electrification, even with enormous vehicles.