Volvo and Waabi Begin Hauling Customer Freight for Warp Between Dallas and Houston

DALLAS - Volvo Autonomous Solutions and the self-driving truck developer Waabi have started hauling customer freight for the logistics company Warp along the Dallas-Houston corridor, the first customer operation in their partnership, the companies said on Monday.

The trucks, Volvo VNL Autonomous tractors running the Waabi Driver software, are carrying freight directly to third-party facilities along the route, according to Volvo's announcement. The hauls are autonomous, but for now each one runs with an observer in the driver's seat, Volvo said. Neither company gave a date for taking the observer out of the cab.

Warp runs a freight network that handles both less-than-truckload and full-truckload shipping, and counts Walmart, DoorDash and Gopuff among its customers, according to the release. Less-than-truckload service consolidates shipments from several customers and moves them on tightly coordinated schedules, a business that Nils Jaeger, the president of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, called "one of logistics' most demanding segments."

"This shows how quickly our ecosystem can adapt to new customers and more complex operations," Mr. Jaeger said in the statement. "What we learn on the Dallas-Houston corridor will help us strengthen our partnership and continuously improve the ecosystem as we scale."

Lior Ron, Waabi's chief operating officer, said the work with Warp showed that the truck "can take on the full range of real-world freight, from operating within less-than-truckload networks to moving goods directly to third-party facilities, meeting customers where they are." Daniel Sokolovsky, Warp's chief executive, said: "The value of autonomy grows when you can coordinate the freight around it."

Volvo says the VNL Autonomous was built from the ground up for self-driving operation, with redundancy across six safety-critical systems, and is designed to take driving software from partners such as Waabi. The service runs through Volvo's Autona / freight system, which bundles the truck, the driving software, fleet and transport management, terminals, operations and uptime support. The announcement did not say how many trucks, loads or miles the operation involves.

The companies said they would use experience from the Dallas-Houston lane to prepare additional routes. Waabi, founded by the artificial intelligence researcher Raquel Urtasun, says it has raised more than $1.3 billion and plans to deploy at least 25,000 robotaxis on Uber's platform in the coming years.

The corridor has drawn several autonomous trucking companies. Aurora began commercial driverless trucking in Texas in May 2025, and Kodiak has named the 219-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Houston as the lane for its first unsupervised long-haul service, with IKEA as the launch customer and a target of the end of this year, ACT News reported. Volvo Autonomous Solutions has also hauled freight on the corridor using the Aurora Driver, with a safety driver aboard, The Dallas Express reported.

Waabi Logistics is also one of four carriers, along with Aurora, Kodiak and Stack AV, covered by a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration waiver that lets self-driving trucks use cab-mounted warning beacons instead of reflective triangles. The current waiver expires at 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 9, and an Illinois cargo van operator has asked a federal appeals court to block its reissue, Carrier Atlas reported.