Driverless big rigs are about to become a real sight on Oklahoma highways. Autonomous semi-trucks could start rolling as soon as June, and state troopers are already drilling on what to do when a 40-ton truck shows up at a traffic stop with nobody in the driver’s seat.
Early runs are expected to stick to mapped freight corridors and keep human staff in the cab as backup. Over time, companies say they plan to pull those attendants and move to fully unattended operations.
“They're highly technical,” Lt. Mark Southall told reporters as troopers and point-of-entry officers put their hands on the hardware instead of just reading about it. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol says crews are learning how the trucks respond to emergency vehicles, how to get them to safely pull over, and how dispatch centers should field calls about robot-driven cabs, according to KOCO. Southall added that the agency expects those first operations to keep a person in the cab before transitioning to true driverless runs.
Volvo and Aurora Add a Dallas to Oklahoma City Freight Lane
Behind the scenes, Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions have already opened a roughly 200 mile autonomous freight lane between Dallas and Oklahoma City, running supervised hauls to customer facilities five days a week, according to a joint press release via BusinessWire. The companies say they were able to map the route and validate the endpoints quickly as they worked to push their commercial network beyond Texas.
How the VNL Autonomous Is Put Together
Volvo describes its VNL Autonomous as a production truck built with duplicated safety critical systems so that one failure does not make the vehicle unsafe, per Volvo Autonomous Solutions. That includes redundant brakes, steering, communication, computing, lights and power.
The VNL is being integrated with the Aurora Driver and, in a separate effort, with Waabi’s AI stack as part of a broader industrialization push, as reported by CNBC. Volvo also notes the truck is produced at its New River Valley assembly plant in Dublin, Virginia, to support scaling up and to tap into its existing dealer service network.
Texas Got the Driverless Trucks First
Oklahoma is not the first place to see these robot rigs. Aurora initially launched commercial driverless hauls in Texas, starting with the Dallas to Houston corridor in spring 2025, and has been steadily expanding routes across the Sun Belt as it racks up driverless mileage, according to TechCrunch. That track record is a big reason companies and state officials see Oklahoma as the next logical link in the network.
What Oklahoma Law Requires
State lawmakers cleared the legal road in stages. A 2019 law set out key automated driving definitions and blocked cities from writing their own conflicting rules. Then, in 2022, Senate Bill 1541 created a framework for fully autonomous vehicles on public roads, including a requirement that operators submit a law enforcement interaction plan to the Department of Public Safety, according to the Oklahoma Legislature.
The 2022 measure also requires registered autonomous vehicles to be able to achieve a minimal risk condition after system failures and to remain at crash scenes while owners report incidents.
For troopers, the law is only half the job. They say the immediate challenge is public familiarity. At some point, drivers may find themselves cruising next to a semi with no one visible in the cab, and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol wants dispatchers and officers to recognize what they are looking at and how to respond, KOCO reports. For now, training sessions and ride-alongs continue while companies and state agencies hammer out playbooks for everything from tow-aways to emergency pull-overs.
