Kodiak AI will put 75 driverless trucks on Texas highways starting in 2028

Kodiak AI will supply 75 driverless semi-trucks to DTL Transport starting in 2028, the companies announced this week — the self-driving trucking startup's first binding commercial contract to run fully autonomous rigs on public highways.

The deal matters because autonomous trucking has spent years stuck in pilot mode. Companies have logged millions of supervised highway miles and run driverless routes on closed or restricted roads, but a signed contract for a customer-owned fleet of highway-legal self-driving trucks is a different milestone — it means a real business is willing to put its own equipment and freight behind the technology, not just host a demo.

DTL Transport, a mid-market California carrier that hauls fresh produce and other goods to grocery chains, will own and operate the 75 trucks once they arrive. Kodiak licenses its self-driving software on a per-mile basis under what it calls a Driver-as-a-Service model — the customer owns the metal, Kodiak sells the autonomy. That's a shift from Kodiak's earlier Trucking-as-a-Service approach, where it owned and ran trucks itself for other companies' freight.

Initial routes run Dallas to El Paso and Dallas to Atlanta along Interstate 20, corridors Kodiak has already tested and operated. Based on figures Kodiak gave investors in 2025 — roughly $150,000 to $190,000 in annual recurring revenue per truck, a licensing fee near $0.97 a mile, and about 225,000 miles driven per truck annually — the fully delivered fleet could generate upwards of $11.2 million a year in recurring revenue for Kodiak, though neither company has disclosed the contract's actual value.

The timing lines up with a bigger step: Kodiak says it plans to pull human safety operators from its trucks entirely and launch a true driverless highway service in December, moving Ikea freight along Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston. If that happens on schedule, DTL's 75 trucks would arrive into a market where Kodiak has already proven it can run without anyone behind the wheel.

Kodiak, which went public in September 2025, has seen its shares fall roughly 87% from their opening-day price. A dated, revenue-generating contract — as opposed to another pilot or partnership announcement — is the kind of proof point that public investors in the sector have been asking for, and it puts pressure on rivals like Aurora and Waymo Via to show similar binding commercial traction rather than mileage counters alone.

Source: TechCrunch