Thursday, October 29, 2026
The news that moves freight
Trucking & Rail Oct 29, 2026 · 7 min read

Aurora’s driverless ramp slips six weeks as Kodiak signs a 75-truck carrier deal

Aurora’s 200 driverless trucks now arrive in February, not December. Aurora said on 28 October its driverless truck build is about six weeks behind plan. Its target of 200+ trucks has moved to end-February 2027, according to Investing.com’s summary of its results. In July, Aurora said it was “fully allocated to exit the year with 200 driverless trucks in operation.” Our view: the plan is real, but slower than promised. The same day, Kodiak announced a binding deal for 75 driverless trucks with carrier DTL Transport, with deliveries starting in 2028. Our call: Aurora will report fewer than 200 driverless trucks in operation at 31 December 2026.

Aurora’s year-end 200 becomes a February 200, while Kodiak books trucks for 2028

Aurora Innovation says its driverless truck build is running about six weeks behind plan. On 28 October, it moved its target of more than 200 driverless trucks to the end of February 2027, according to Investing.com’s summary of its third-quarter results. In late July, the target was year-end. The same day, Kodiak AI announced a binding deal to supply 75 driverless trucks to a carrier, with deliveries starting in 2028.

Our view: both companies are making real progress, but the dates are drifting to the right. If you buy or sell truck capacity on Texas lanes, driverless trucks are a 2027–2028 planning question. They are not a factor in this winter’s rate talks.

What Aurora said, and what it said before

On 29 July, Aurora’s second-quarter release said the company was “fully allocated to exit the year with 200 driverless trucks in operation.” CEO Chris Urmson said then that “we are positioned to put hundreds of driverless trucks on the road this year.” In March, he said he expected “a couple hundred” driverless trucks by the end of 2026, up from “a handful” at the time, according to a Rallies.ai summary.

So the 200 figure has stayed the same all year. What has changed is the date attached to it.

The third-quarter numbers tell a slower story. Aurora’s own release says it has “20+ driverless trucks already built and coming into the fleet.” It is working with upfitter Roush (an upfitter adds equipment to finished vehicles) toward “an annualized capacity of more than 1,000 trucks.” It “expects to reach 20 trucks per week in early December, with room to scale further.”

Investing.com’s summary of the results slides gives the reason for the gap. It says “material availability issues, component quality concerns, and end-of-line testing refinements” have “pushed the timeline approximately six weeks behind the original plan.” Management called these “normal manufacturing scale-up issues rather than fundamental design problems,” the summary says, without naming a speaker.

The new guidance, per Investing.com: Aurora “aims to exceed 200 driverless trucks by the end of February 2027” and to “exit 2027 with more than 1,000 driverless trucks in operation.” Volvo, a manufacturing partner, is “supporting plans for deployment of more than 300 driverless trucks in 2027 ahead of full industrial production in 2028.”

Urmson was upbeat. “We have reached a defining inflection point for our business and our industry,” he said in the release. He added: “We’ve built an ecosystem designed to put tens of thousands of trucks on the road by the end of the decade.”

The money behind the trucks

The financials show how early this business still is. Investing.com reports Q3 revenue of $3 million from driverless and supervised loads, “matching the prior period.” Aurora expects about $9 million for the full year. The operating loss was $257 million, including $54 million of stock-based pay.

Cash used in operations was $170 million in the quarter. Aurora expects cash burn to rise to about $250 million in Q4. It ended September with $1,034 million in cash and short-term investments. By our simple arithmetic, at $250 million a quarter that covers about four quarters, before any new funding.

Investors noticed. The stock fell after hours to $4.72, from a close of $5.115, according to Investing.com. By our arithmetic that is a drop of about 7.7%.

The demand side looks stronger than the supply side. Investing.com says Aurora now has 10 customers in its driverless group and memorandums of understanding (MOUs, which are usually non-binding letters of intent) for 1,000 trucks. Charger Logistics and Hirschbach have each committed to 500 trucks through MOUs, planned for 2027 and 2028. Aurora’s own release still calls the Charger deal a “non-binding MOU.” Both deals use DaaS (Driver as a Service): the carrier owns the truck and pays Aurora to drive it.

Our read: Aurora has more interest than it can build trucks for. Manufacturing is the bottleneck, not customers.

Kodiak’s deal is smaller, but it is signed

Kodiak’s news is narrower but firmer. TechCrunch reports Kodiak “will deliver 75 self-driving trucks to freight company DTL Transport starting in 2028.” TechCrunch calls it Kodiak’s first binding commercial contract for driverless big rigs on public highways.

DTL is “a California mid-market trucking company that hauls fresh produce and goods to grocery chains.” It plans to start on Dallas to El Paso and on Interstate 20 between Dallas and Atlanta. Last month, Kodiak hauled perishable goods for DTL about 225 miles between Fresno and Los Angeles. A human safety operator was behind the wheel.

Kodiak did not disclose the deal’s value. TechCrunch used Kodiak’s 2025 investor presentation, which forecast $150,000 to $190,000 of annual recurring revenue per truck. On that basis, TechCrunch says the deal “could generate at least about $11.2 million” a year once all 75 trucks are delivered. That is 75 trucks times the low end of $150,000. It is an estimate, not a disclosed number.

One detail matters for anyone hoping driverless trucks will be cheap. TechCrunch says Kodiak’s forecast assumed a per-mile licensing fee of about $0.97, “in line with current human driver costs per mile.” In other words, the carrier pays Kodiak roughly what it would pay a driver. Our view: any saving to the carrier comes from longer hours and higher use of each truck, not from a cheaper “driver”. Shippers should not expect that saving to be passed on quickly.

Founder and CEO Don Burnette explained why Kodiak wants carriers to own the trucks. “We don’t want to be in the business of running a trucking company,” he said, according to TechCrunch. He also said: “You have to prove out the technology first using your own truck.”

Kodiak has nearer dates too. It plans to remove safety operators in December and run a driverless highway service for Ikea on I-45 between Dallas and Houston. Off-road, Atlas Energy Solutions runs 35 Kodiak driverless trucks in the Permian Basin. Burnette expects up to 100 there by mid-2027, TechCrunch reports.

Regulators have cleared one hurdle

The rules are moving faster than the factories. On 7 October, the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) granted a five-year exemption. It lets carriers running Level 4 autonomous trucks (trucks that drive themselves with no human in set conditions) “use cab-mounted warning beacons in place of reflective triangles,” FreightWaves reported. Normally a driver must put triangles on the road when a truck stops. A driverless truck has no one to do that.

The exemption “runs through Oct. 7, 2031.” Aurora asked for it in April 2026. Kodiak, Waabi and Stack AV had opted in to the earlier temporary waivers. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) and the Truck Safety Coalition were among the opponents.

“Going from a temporary waiver to a five-year exemption gives the industry a lot of confidence,” said Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, per FreightWaves.

So the federal paperwork is settled for now. The limit is how fast trucks get built and tested.

What this means for forwarders and shippers

First, the lanes. Every highway route named this week starts in Texas. Kodiak’s DTL lanes run Dallas–El Paso, a US–Mexico border city, and Dallas–Atlanta on I-20. Kodiak’s Ikea service is on I-45 Dallas–Houston. If driverless capacity changes rates anywhere, it will be on these corridors first.

Second, the timing. At 20 trucks a week from early December, Aurora might add roughly 80 to 100 trucks by year-end. That is our estimate, assuming the rate holds. Even 1,000 trucks by end-2027 is small against the US truckload market. It will not move national spot rates in 2027. It could matter on a handful of Texas lanes where one carrier puts dozens of driverless trucks on a single route.

Third, contracts. If you are pricing 2027 linehaul (long-distance terminal-to-terminal moves) in Texas, do not assume driverless discounts. Ask your carriers directly whether they have DaaS deals, and whether they are binding or MOUs. Kodiak’s DTL deal is binding but starts in 2028. Aurora’s two 500-truck deals are MOUs.

Fourth, the service model. Driverless trucks run long hours on fixed hub-to-hub routes. Investing.com says Aurora will start driving “directly to customer sites” from November. That suits shippers with steady, high-volume flows between two Texas points. It suits less-than-truckload (LTL, shared truck) and irregular freight less well, for now.

Our call

When Aurora reports its fourth-quarter 2026 results in early 2027, we expect it to report fewer than 200 driverless trucks in operation at 31 December 2026. Its own new guidance points the same way: 200-plus by end-February, not end-December.

We also expect the Charger Logistics MOU to still be non-binding, or converted for well under 500 trucks, by the end of Q1 2027. Aurora’s interest list is long. Its factory output is what will decide how many trucks actually run.

Sources