IKEA turns to driverless semis with nobody in the cab

What happens if something breaks while the at highway speed? Is someone secretly driving it from a control room? How does it react to a police car or ambulance? And, yes, I wanted to know what keeps a hacker from getting anywhere near something as important as the steering or brakes. So, I took those questions directly to Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette to find out how the company says these driverless trucks will handle them.

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"The decision to remove the driver isn't based on any single test or milestone," Burnette told CyberGuy. "It's the result of years of operating experience, rigorous validation and a clear safety case that gives us a clear, evidence-based framework for determining when the Kodiak Driver is ready to operate safely without anyone in the cab."

Kodiak calls its autonomous driving system the Kodiak Driver. The company also uses something called an Autonomy Readiness Measure, or ARM, to track its progress toward running long-haul trucks without anyone aboard.

As of the end of September, Kodiak said 96% of the claims and evidence required for its long-haul safety case were materially complete, up from 93% at the end of August. The remaining work includes engineering verification, validation and final safety assessments. Kodiak expects to complete that work before launching driverless long-haul service by the end of 2026. The company also has experience running trucks commercially with empty cabs.

Kodiak-powered trucks have been in the Permian Basin without anyone aboard since December 2024. Burnette says that by the end of the second quarter, 35 driverless trucks were operating there commercially and had logged more than 40,000 hours of paid driverless operations. To put things in perspective, that is the equivalent of more than 4 ½ years of nonstop driving. So, the IKEA route will take Kodiak into a different setting, but removing the driver itself will not be new territory for the company.

I asked Burnette what drivers on I-45 will actually notice once the new service starts. His answer was pretty straightforward. "The biggest difference is that there won't be anyone in the cab," he said.

The driverless section will cover 219 miles, primarily along Interstate 45 between Kodiak facilities in the Dallas and Houston areas. That stretch is part of a longer 292-mile delivery route connecting IKEA's distribution center in Baytown with its store in Frisco.

Kodiak has been carrying IKEA products along the route for four years with a safety observer aboard. During that time, the companies have also been figuring out the less obvious parts of running autonomous freight, such as when trucks should leave, when they will reach the destination and how maintenance should be scheduled.

The trucks themselves have redundancy systems built into safety-critical components including braking, steering, power and computing. "From the outside, the drive itself should look pretty boring, and that's exactly what we want," Burnette said. "The Kodiak Driver is designed to be predictable, courteous, conservative and defensive." Frankly, boring is exactly what I think we all want from a giant truck with nobody sitting beh