IKEA teams with self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics to test deliveries in Texas – CNBC

Kodiak Robotics truck in front of an IKEA store.

Source: Kodiak Robotics

Self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics said that it has begun a pilot program with IKEA in Texas.

A semitruck equipped with Kodiak's autonomous driving system is making daily delivery runs from an IKEA warehouse near Houston to a store close to Dallas, roughly 300 miles away.

The trucks have human safety drivers on board, but they're being driven by Kodiak's autonomous-driving system.

Kodiak's CEO, Don Burnette, said that he isn't looking to put truck drivers out of business in fact, he's aiming to make their lives easier.

"Adopting autonomous trucking technology can improve drivers' quality of life by focusing on the local driving jobs most prefer to do," Burnette said. "Together [with IKEA] we can enhance safety, improve working conditions for drivers, and create a more sustainable freight transportation system."

This isn't Kodiak's first self-driving rodeo. The company has been running freight in Texas with its autonomous test trucks since 2019, and recently opened a new route between Dallas and Oklahoma City. Kodiak has also conducted pilot tests with logistics giants Werner Enterprises and U.S. Xpress, running self-driving trucks on routes from Dallas to Lake City, Florida, and Atlanta, respectively.

Texas has become a hotbed for self-driving truck testing, in part because of favorable regulations -- and also because the long highway stretches between its cities are ideal for automation. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that grew out of the Google Self-Driving Car Project, has been testing a fleet of self-driving Freightliner semitrucks (with human safety drivers) on a route between Dallas and Houston for several months.

Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation has also been testing trucks in Texas.Aurora began a Texas pilot with Werner Enterprises in April, running on a 600-mile stretch between Fort Worth and El Paso. Another startup, TuSimple, has been testing its self-driving semitrucks in Arizona and is planning to expand to Texas next year.

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IKEA teams with self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics to test deliveries in Texas - CNBC