The New York Times has a story out about Kodiak and other autonomous vehicle companies that are planning to go driverless on the highway this year.

Don Burnette, the chief executive and founder of Kodiak, whose partners include Bosch and Roush Performance, said it would have self-driving semis with no drivers on long-haul routes in the second half of this year.

The article suggests various obstacles, but also implies (correctly) that companies will solve these along the way to going driverless.

One of the great contributions of Waymo has been to show the public that safe driverless vehicles are a reality. Arguing about this used to a dead-end, because some people would say, “driverless wouldn’t be safe,” and then other people would say, “driverless will be safe,” and nobody would really be persuaded. Now people can see that driverless robotaxis are safe, and driverless trucks are a natural extension of that.

2026 is going to be great!

Kodiak today announced our 2025 Q4 earnings. This was especially exciting for me, because we publicized one of my big projects from the second half of last year – hauling triple trailers autonomously in the Permian Basin.

As our CEO Don Burnette said:

We recently became the first AV company to pull triple trailers, which, when combined with the tractor, weigh over 275,000 pounds, or 137 tons, and extend more than half the length of a football field. Hauling triples requires extreme precision and enables us to provide our industrial customers higher asset utilization and a more cost-effective solution. 

I led this project, working closely with my Kodiak colleagues on our Perception, Planning, Controls, Systems, Infrastructure, and Product teams.

One of the major challenges with triples is just how massive they are. Think about how large the red and white tanker truck is, in the preceding photograph. Now look at how small that tanker looks, next to our triple trailer truck. That’s how big triple trailers are!

My colleague Pete Bigelow just wrote about his first trip to the Permian Basin, to observe Kodiak self-driving trucks first-hand.

The sand-colored tractors and their trapezoid-shaped trailers all look the same as they enter and exit the roads around the main depot. Only a careful eye can discern between the human-driven trucks and the ones powered by an autonomous system.

That’s the way it should appear.

My Kodiak colleague, Sandeep Baddam, describes the traversability framework we built to traverse puddles, potholes, and ditches in the Texas oilfields.

These “negative obstacles” are a major challenge of driving on dirt roads. Sandeep has achieved key results in navigating through and around these elements. Our traversability framework considers many dimensions of such negative obstacles, including depth, gradient, type, area, and then decide how to move longitudinally and laterally, to keep the truck safe and our freight moving.

Great work, Sandeep!

 Looking forward to this next chapter and our journey ahead.

Kodiak put up a job posting recently for early career autonomy and AI software engineers. You should send us your CV and come build self-driving trucks with us!

This posting is specifically for new graduates and upcoming graduates and other engineers very early in their careers. At that stage, people are often flexible and hungry to make an impact. So this job is flexible and high impact, as well. This role is a pipeline to a wide range of our autonomy teams – perception, localization, planning, infrastructure, simulation, and more. The main thing we’re looking for is strong C++ programming ability. Beyond that, we’ll help you find a niche.

A lot has been written recently about the difficulty new graduates have in finding jobs. At Kodiak, we have great opportunities for early career engineers. Join us!

Very exciting news hit the wire this morning!

Kodiak has signed a business combination agreement with Ares Acquisition Corp II (NYSE: AACT), a key step toward going public. A new chapter in scaling Kodiak’s driverless tech across trucking and public sector is beginning.

Learn about the transaction – https://t.co/U53rxxKs3h

— Kodiak (@KodiakRobotics) April 14, 2025

Here are some quotes from the press release that are especially important to me:

First to Market With Fully Active Driverless Semi-Truck Operations: Through its partnership with Atlas Energy Solutions (“Atlas”), Kodiak-powered driverless trucks have surpassed 750 hours of commercial driverless operations across West Texas’s Permian Basin without a human driver on board. This milestone marks the first publicly announced deployment of customer-owned autonomous semi-trucks in real-world operations. Kodiak expects to support Atlas in further expanding its fleet in 2025; in March 2025, the Company secured a firm commitment from Atlas to order an initial 100 trucks, after exceeding key performance and operational milestones.

New and existing Kodiak institutional investors including Soros Fund Management, ARK Investments and Ares have funded or committed over $110 million in financing to support the transaction alongside approximately $551 million of cash held in trust

Kodiak has secured a firm commitment from its strategic partner, Atlas Energy Solutions (NYSE: AESI), for an initial order of 100 trucks

Additional information about the proposed business combination will be described in the registration statement on Form S-4 relating to the transaction (the “Registration Statement”), which AACT and Kodiak will file with the SEC.

I’ve now been part of two autonomous vehicle companies that have gone fully driverless – autonomous driving with no safety driver. Kodiak is the first company where we have sold that driverless vehicle to customers.

This is a big milestone. Selling an autonomous vehicle to a customer adds a lot of new complexity. Kodiak no longer dictates where and when the driverless truck operates.

For sure, we have specific domains in which the truck can operate without a driver. But within that domain, our customers determine where to send the vehicle, whether to send it, what it should haul.

This is a new milestone for the entire autonomous vehicle industry, and I’m super-excited to be a part of it!

Toyota announced that it is committing $500 M to Joby Aviation, above and beyond its existing commitments. The press release states that the this commitment brings Toyota’s total investment to $894 M!

One of the biggest challenges in robotics has been the huge amounts of capital required. Often that capital need leads to selling the company to a larger, established business, as Cruise sold to GM and Zoox sold to Amazon. Alternatively, some companies bring on larger investors without selling the company wholesale, as seems to be the case here.

The announcement is unusually transparent about the mechanics of the investment. The money is split into two tranches, neither of which will be invested immediately. Toyota will invest one tranche before the end of the year, and the other tranche next year. Toyota is subjecting the investments to various milestones, including regulatory approval. This form of capital-staging is typical for large investments, but often glossed over in the big press announcements.

Joby was part of a wave of eVOTL SPACs a few years ago. Those companies made aggressive predictions, which have been hard to meet. But the hardest part of robotics development is raising the money to keep going, and Joby seems to be successful at that. The rest will come eventually.

The Chamber of Progress, which bills itself as “a new tech industry coalition devoted to a progressive society,” has a report out about autonomous vehicles and jobs.

There is a long list of “key findings,” which I boil down to:

• AVs will create a wide range of jobs, from entry-level support staff to high-skill researchers.
• AV jobs will be nationwide
• Job displacement due to AVs will be gradual

It’s a trade group, so of course take the conclusions with a grain of salt. But they seem plausible to me. Most obviously, AV rollout has already been gradual (too gradual), so it stands to reason that job displacement will be very gradual, as well. Professional human drivers will continue to have jobs for many decades.

I found the map in the report interesting. There are AV clusters in a lot of places you’d expect – Silicon Valley, Detroit, Phoenix. Also, though, a lot of AV companies and operations in places I wouldn’t expect – Salt Lake City, Washington, DC, somewhere in northern Minnesota, New Orleans, Buffalo.

These things have a way of spreading out to surprising places.