HOUSTON - Kodiak AI said IKEA Supply will be the launch shipper for its first unsupervised driverless long-haul service, with trucks carrying no one in the cab on a 219-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between Houston and the Dallas area later in 2026.
The initial driver-out leg will run primarily along I-45 between Kodiak's Houston and Dallas-area facilities, the company said in a Sept. 29 announcement. It is part of an established 292-mile delivery route that connects IKEA's distribution center in Baytown with its store in Frisco.
Kodiak said that over four years it has delivered more than 1,300 loads and logged more than 750,000 miles carrying IKEA goods autonomously with a safety observer aboard, with what it called a "nearly perfect on-time delivery record." The trial was originally intended to last three months, Digital Commerce 360 reported. "We are now only months away," Kodiak wrote of unsupervised operations.
Ahead of the launch, Kodiak said it is completing its highway launch safety case, which it described as "a structured, evidence-backed argument that the Kodiak Driver, our autonomous driving system, is safe to operate without a human on board in a defined operating area."
The company began its long-haul launch program last month from its hub in Lancaster, Texas, running trucks with a safety observer on board, and the technology is now in its final validation phase, Trucking Dive reported. Kodiak has raised an internal autonomous readiness measure for its long-haul domain to 93 percent and considers itself ready for driverless service at 100 percent, according to the publication.
"Our progress since beginning our final push towards driverless commercial deliveries has been incredible, and it is a strong signal we are ready to scale unsupervised driverless service on long-haul lanes," Don Burnette, Kodiak's founder and chief executive, said in a Sept. 25 release. In that release, Kodiak said its trucks had made deliveries between Lancaster and Houston since August without the safety driver taking control, including on surface streets, according to Digital Commerce 360.
Kodiak already runs trucks without drivers in a different setting. Since December 2024, Atlas Energy Solutions has used trucks equipped with the Kodiak Driver to haul freight in the Permian Basin of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, and as of June, 35 of those trucks had logged more than 40,000 hours of paid driverless operations, Digital Commerce 360 reported.
The Texas plan comes after California regulators approved Kodiak's heavy-duty autonomous vehicle testing permit, which allows it to haul perishable goods for DTL Transport along Interstate 5 and State Route 99 with a safety driver behind the wheel at first, Trucking Dive reported.