A fleet of self-driving trucks is now rolling the 435 miles between Dallas and Laredo, hauling refrigerated and dry freight for consumer packaged goods and food and beverage customers on what has become Kodiak AI's first route into the nation's busiest commercial land port of entry. The companies behind the effort, Kodiak AI and Charger USA, say the trucks are equipped with the Kodiak Driver autonomous system but are still running with a safety driver behind the wheel while the technology works toward full driverless certification.
Kodiak and Charger completed their first delivery on the corridor on September 8, according to a joint announcement reported by globenewswire.com. Truck News, which first covered the Dallas-Laredo launch, reports the companies plan to transition the lane to fully driverless operations once Kodiak completes what it calls a safety case — a structured, evidence-backed argument that its driving system is acceptably safe to operate in a specific domain.
The choice of Laredo as a destination is not incidental. The Port of Laredo handled more than $350 billion in international trade in 2025, representing nearly 40% of all U.S. trade with Mexico, per the companies' own figures relayed through globenewswire.com. Separately, Port Laredo's own data shows the crossing recorded $354 billion in trade value in 2025, a 4.40% increase over the prior year, and ranked second only to JFK among all U.S. airports, seaports, and border crossings for exports that year.
How the Service Fits Into Charger's Network
Charger USA operates an asset-based freight network across North America that includes temperature-controlled transportation, and the company combines its in-house transportation management system, managed transportation services, and now the Kodiak Driver into a single offering on this lane. Charger plans to integrate the Kodiak Driver further into its own fleet and, alongside Kodiak, expects to expand the autonomous arrangement to additional lanes in its network over time, the announcement states.
Andy Khera of Charger USA said autonomy lets the company build a network that serves both customers and drivers, while Don Burnette of Kodiak AI said the Dallas-Laredo lane extends the Kodiak Driver into a new corridor and lays the groundwork for eventual driverless service. Kodiak commercializes its technology through what it calls a Driver-as-a-Service model, deploying its software on trucks that customers themselves own and operate rather than running its own trucking fleet.
Kodiak's Readiness Score Keeps Climbing
Kodiak tracks its progress toward removing the safety driver through an internal metric it calls the Autonomy Readiness Measure, which the company says reached 96% at the end of September, up from 93% at the end of August, according to a report from kodiak.ai. That score has climbed steadily through the year, rising from 84% in February to 86% in April, 91% in July, and then 93% in August before this fall's jump. Kodiak maintains it remains on track to launch unsupervised, driverless long-haul commercial service by the end of 2026.
The Dallas-Laredo corridor is not Kodiak's only bet on that timeline. The company also plans to launch a driverless long-haul service between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston in partnership with retailer Ikea by year's end, according to supplychaindive.com.
A Crowded Field of Texas Autonomous Freight Bets
Kodiak is far from alone in chasing Texas freight corridors. Aurora Innovation has signed Charger Logistics as a customer for autonomous runs on the very same Dallas-Laredo route, with plans to deploy Aurora's second-generation driverless trucks there, as reported by trucknews.com. Meanwhile, Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi have launched their own commercial autonomous operation hauling freight for logistics provider Warp along the Dallas-Houston corridor, a route where Volvo also ran an earlier pilot with global logistics firm DSV in May 2026 using Aurora's driverless technology, according to ccjdigital.com. Volvo and Waabi say they intend to use real-world performance data from that Dallas-Houston lane to expand to additional routes as they scale.
For now, the Dallas-Laredo trucks still carry a human in the cab, and the exact timeline for removing that safety driver on this specific lane has not been disclosed beyond the companies' stated dependence on Kodiak finishing its safety case. What is clear is that Texas's freight corridors, and Laredo's border crossing in particular, have become the proving ground where multiple autonomous trucking rivals are racing to show their technology can handle real commercial loads at scale.
