Kodiak Delivers First Self-Driving Semi Truck to CustomerKodiak Delivers First Self-Driving Semi Truck to Customer

Self-driving company Kodiak Robotics is claiming a world first by delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer.

The customer is Atlas Energy Solutions, with whom Kodiak has been performing driverless operations since last July.

However, the news that Atlas now owns two RoboTrucks marks a significant step forward, in that it defines the model which Kodiak is keen to deploy in future – selling its Kodiak Driver self-driving tech to companies who can use it on their own vehicles and run their own operations.

This is in contrast to how the driverless service launched last summer, where Kodiak-owned driverless trucks were delivering frac sand (or proppant) for Atlas along a 21-mile off-road route in West Texas’s Permian Basin.

Atlas’s own RoboTrucks have already delivered 100 loads of sand and gravel in the Permian Basin. While this constitutes a tech breakthrough, it also marks a commercial one too, with Kodiak claiming to be the first autonomous semi-truck company to generate ongoing revenue from driverless trucks.

Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak, said: “This is an incredible moment, for us and for the autonomous trucking industry, as we have officially delivered a commercial RoboTruck to a customer and launched commercial operations.

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 “The commercialization of autonomous trucks has been a goal for the industry for many years, and it has now come to fruition. Kodiak is the first company to make autonomous trucking a real business, and this is a major step towards profitability for our company.”

Both Atlas and Kodiak are already looking to scale. The former expects “multiple” RoboTruck deployments throughout the course of the next 12 months, while given these expansion plans, Kodiak has established an office in Odessa, Texas, to support Atlas’s efforts.

The 18,000-square foot facility already employs a dozen people and this is expected to grow to up to 20 by the end of March.

Atlas’s launch of the RoboTrucks has coincided with the first deliveries off the Dune Express, a 42-mile long, fully electric conveyor system that carries sand from the company’s facility in Kermit, Texas to an end-of-line loadout stop in eastern New Mexico. As the fleet of trucks grows, they will move sand off the Dune Express to multiple destinations.

John Turner, CEO, Atlas, said: “Incorporating these driverless RoboTrucks into our operations is a significant advancement in the automation of our business, enhancing our ability to maintain a fundamentally safe and reliable service at the best price for our customers.”

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While Atlas’s RoboTrucks operate off-road, Kodiak is also forging ahead with its plans for long-haul autonomous trucking on public roads, following a number of pilots with partners. It says its next step is to extend its “safety case” – essentially an evaluation that demonstrates the readiness of the tech – to highways, having applied it within Atlas’s operating domain.