California finally lets autonomous trucks onto its roads — and the first permit goes to Kodiak

For years the map of autonomous trucking in the United States had a hole in the shape of California. Robotaxis carried paying passengers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but any vehicle above 10,001 pounds was excluded from the state's autonomous vehicle programme — which is why the industry's driverless miles were logged in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico rather than in the state where most of these companies are headquartered. That changed on 28 April 2026, when the California Department of Motor Vehicles approved regulations extending its Autonomous Vehicle Tester programme to heavy-duty vehicles. Kodiak AI (Nasdaq: KDK), based in Mountain View, obtained a permit under the new rules on 13 August 2026 and announced it the following day. The permit is deliberately modest. It authorises autonomous operation with a human safety driver behind the wheel — the first of three steps in a phased approach that runs from drivered testing to driver-out testing and only then to driver-out deployment. Nothing about it lets Kodiak repeat in California what it already does in Texas and New Mexico, where its trucks haul frac sand for Atlas Energy Solutions on private lease roads with nobody in the cab. "This permit allows us to begin the first phase of scaling autonomous trucking coast-to-coast, while ensuring appropriate safety oversight from California regulators," said Don Burnette, Kodiak's founder and chief executive, who worked on Google's self-driving car project before founding the company in 2018. The significance is regulatory rather than technical. California is the largest freight market in the country and the gateway for containers arriving from Asia; a route network that stops at the state line is a network with a missing hub. Kodiak's rival Aurora already runs driverless Class 8 trucks commercially on ten routes across the Sun Belt, and Waabi is road-testing a Volvo VNL Autonomous. All of them now have a legal path into California — one that begins with a person in the seat and, on the DMV's timetable rather than the industry's, may eventually end without one.