Texas autonomous trucking: Waabi signs a carrier, Bot Auto prices its hardware

Texas self-driving trucks are turning into normal carrier capacity, and now they have a price
Waabi, a self-driving truck developer, has signed Warrior Logistics to move routine customer freight between Dallas and Houston on its autonomous trucks. FreightWaves reported the deal on 14 October 2026. Warrior is an asset-based carrier, which means it owns and runs its own trucks. It is based in Coppell, Texas, and runs more than 200 of them.
A day earlier, FreightWaves reported that Houston-based Bot Auto expects its full self-driving hardware to cost about $50,000 per truck.
Taken together, we think these two stories mark a change on Interstate 45, the highway linking Dallas and Houston. Autonomy there is moving from showcase pilots to plain, priced capacity inside ordinary trucking networks. It is not cheaper for shippers yet, and it will not be until the person in the cab is gone. But the direction is now clear, and forwarders moving freight out of Houston should start asking their carriers about it.

What Waabi and Warrior agreed

Warrior is hauling recurring shipments for food and beverage, consumer goods and other customers on trucks running the Waabi Driver, Waabi’s self-driving system. Commercial operations started earlier this year. Over the next year, the two companies will choose new autonomous lanes across Warrior’s network together.
Waabi says the autonomous runs have had 100% on-time pickup and delivery and zero safety incidents since they began. It also says its commercial load volume on Dallas–Houston has grown more than 80% this year. It did not give a starting figure, so that growth rate could rest on a small base. Neither company said how many trucks or loads are involved.
Warrior’s chief executive, Scott McFarlane, framed the deal around capacity, not cost. “Our customers want more capacity on our core lanes, and they want it to be consistent,” he said. He added that the trucks “complement our professional drivers, build density on our power lanes,” “and add capacity on the routes that are less desirable for our drivers.”
That last line is the most honest one in the announcement. Carriers have long struggled to staff unpopular runs. Autonomy is being sold to them first as a way to fill those gaps, not to replace the drivers they already have.
The deal came nine days after Waabi and Volvo Autonomous Solutions started hauling freight for Warp on the same corridor. FreightWaves reports those Volvo trucks run with an observer in the driver’s seat. Waabi’s first paid loads on I-45 moved in September 2023.

Why “not driverless yet” matters

Waabi’s trucks are not yet driverless. Waabi’s chief operating officer, Lior Ron, said the company is “fully on track for driverless next year, with Volvo as the first OEM platform.” OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, here the truck maker. In other words, Waabi’s driverless launch is tied to Volvo’s truck.
That timing matches another public plan for Volvo. In Aurora’s second-quarter results release of 29 July 2026, Volvo Autonomous Solutions is listed as planning driverless operations in Q1 2027.
This is our main point of caution. As long as a person sits in the cab, a self-driving truck costs more to run than a normal one, not less. The carrier pays for the driver and the technology. So any saving for shippers on this lane is still in the future.

The $50,000 question

That is why Bot Auto’s number deserves attention. The company told FreightWaves on 13 October that it has chosen Lenovo’s AD1 computer, which runs on Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Thor, as the production computer for its Class 8 driverless trucks. Class 8 is the heaviest US truck class, which covers standard tractor-trailers. Deployment starts in Q1 2027.
Bot Auto expects the whole autonomy hardware kit, computer and sensors together, to cost about $50,000 per truck. It says that is three to eight times less than other systems.
Treat that comparison carefully. It is Bot Auto’s claim. FreightWaves reports it rests on a Heavy Duty Journal cost guide that puts a complete autonomous truck at $350,000 to $600,000. Bot Auto read that as $150,000 to $400,000 for the self-driving system alone.
Even so, a hardware price is useful. Trucking runs on thin margins. A carrier can work out whether $50,000 of kit, spread across the life of a truck, beats the cost of a driver on a given lane. Until now, outsiders have had almost nothing to plug into that sum.
Bot Auto is not just talking. It moves about 350 loads a month across Texas and says revenue grew 270% from May to August. In April it ran a 231-mile load from Houston to Hutchins, near Dallas, with no safety driver, remote operator or in-cab observer. Its founder and CEO, Xiaodi Hou, said in September 2025 that the company had spent $41 million to reach its first driverless run.
Hou also explained why Bot Auto has kept its fleet small. “We made a deliberate choice not to scale our fleet until the compute platform itself is scalable,” he said. Read plainly: the company wanted the cost of each truck settled before building many of them.

A crowded corridor

Waabi and Bot Auto are not alone on I-45.
Aurora launched commercial self-driving truck service between Dallas and Houston in May 2025, TechCrunch reported at the time, with Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight as launch customers. In its 29 July 2026 results release, Aurora said it was “already fully allocated to exit the year with 200 driverless trucks in operation.” It also said its upfitter, Roush, the company fitting the self-driving kit to trucks, expected to reach a run rate of 1,000 trucks a year in October.
Kodiak, another developer, has named Dallas–Houston as its first long-haul driverless lane, according to a 1 October 2026 report by Runtime Wire. That report said Atlas Energy Solutions owned and operated a 35-truck driverless Kodiak fleet in the Permian Basin as of 30 June, and that Kodiak’s driver-out service for IKEA was planned for later in 2026 but had not launched. Separately, FreightWaves reported on 31 July that Atlas and Kodiak plan to grow the Atlas driverless fleet, which stood at 28 trucks on 31 March, to 100 by mid-2027.
So at least four developers are now chasing the same stretch of Texas highway. That kind of competition tends to push developers to sign carriers quickly and to talk openly about price, which is what we saw this week.

What it means for forwarders and shippers

For forwarders, I-45 is not an abstract test track. It is a main road for containers leaving Houston’s port for distribution centres around Dallas–Fort Worth. If autonomous capacity becomes common anywhere in US freight first, it is likely to be on linehaul, the long highway leg, between those two cities.
We see three practical effects.
First, autonomy will mostly arrive hidden inside a carrier’s normal service. The Warrior deal shows the model. The shipper books Warrior. Warrior decides which loads go on a Waabi truck. Forwarders may not be told which loads ran without a driver unless they ask.
Second, the first benefit is likely to be capacity and reliability, not price. McFarlane’s pitch was consistent capacity on core lanes. For forwarders, that could mean fewer missed pickups when the truck market tightens, especially on less popular runs.
Third, the cost case starts once drivers come out. With Waabi, Volvo and Bot Auto all pointing at early 2027, and Aurora targeting 200 driverless trucks by the end of this year, the next 12 to 18 months will show whether the numbers work at scale.
Practical step: when renewing Texas truckload contracts, ask carriers whether any of their I-45 capacity runs on autonomous trucks, whether a human is aboard, and how they handle insurance and claims on those loads. These are fair questions now, and the answers will tell you who is ahead.

Our call

We expect Waabi to run its first commercial driver-out load on Dallas–Houston by the end of Q2 2027, on a Volvo truck. We also expect at least one more mid-sized Texas asset carrier to announce an autonomous partnership like Warrior’s within the next six months.
We do not expect a visible, published rate cut on Dallas–Houston truckload because of autonomy before 2028. The hardware price is coming down, but fleets are still too small to move a whole lane’s pricing. The early savings will stay with carriers and developers, and shippers will see the change first as steadier capacity.

Sources

• \
• FreightWaves — Waabi signs Warrior Logistics for Dallas-Houston freight, 14 Oct 2026 \
• FreightWaves — Bot Auto taps Lenovo, Nvidia, pegs autonomy hardware at $50,000, 13 Oct 2026 \
• Business Wire — Aurora Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, 29 Jul 2026 \
• TechCrunch — Aurora launches commercial self-driving truck service in Texas, 1 May 2025 \
• Runtime Wire — Kodiak reports 35 driverless trucks and names its first long-haul launch lane, 1 Oct 2026 \
• FreightWaves — Atlas grows Kodiak driverless truck fleet to 100 rigs, 31 Jul 2026