Tech and AI

California issues its first heavy duty autonomous truck permits

By Staff Writer  |  15 August 2026

Two developers now hold permits to test driverless heavy goods vehicles on Californian public roads, under rules the state approved in April. A safety driver stays behind the wheel, and a union is already challenging the process by which the rules were made.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has issued its first testing permits for autonomous heavy goods vehicles. Kodiak AI said on 14 August that it obtained its permit the previous day, and Aurora Innovation has also been permitted. Both companies applied in the spring under regulations the department approved on 28 April, which lifted a prohibition on testing driverless vehicles above 10,000 pounds, or roughly 4.5 tonnes, on public roads.

Kodiak says it has begun with a small number of test trucks, mostly around its Mountain View office. Neither company is carrying freight without a person in the cab, and neither is permitted to.

This permit allows us to begin the first phase of scaling autonomous trucking coast-to-coast, while ensuring appropriate safety oversight from California regulators.

Don Burnette, Founder and Chief Executive, Kodiak AI

The permit is a stage, not a licence to operate

What the department has built is a three stage route rather than a single approval. The permit granted this week authorises testing with a human safety driver aboard. Driver-out testing is a separate application, and driver-out deployment is a third. Each stage has to be earned, and the department retains the power to refuse or withdraw at every one of them.

The conditions attached to the first stage are worth reading as conditions rather than as formalities. The applicant has to satisfy the department on safety, on insurance, on vehicle registration and on the qualification of the safety driver. Operation is barred on roads where the posted speed limit is 25 miles per hour or less, unless the vehicle is on a direct route between destinations, which keeps a heavy vehicle off slow residential streets while allowing it to reach a depot that sits on one.

A regulator faced with an unproven technology has set graduated conditions with a human in the loop, rather than choosing between prohibition and free operation. That is the pattern worth watching, because it is the one most transferable.

The first challenge is to the process

Teamsters California has sued the department in the Superior Court in Alameda County. The claim is that the department went round the requirements to study and publish the possible economic effects of allowing driverless heavy vehicles onto public roads, and that it failed to consider the safety risks to other road users. That is a challenge to how the rules were made rather than to whether the vehicles work.

Practitioners will recognise the shape of it. Where a public body is required to assess and consult before it decides, the assessment is not a courtesy that can be caught up later. A challenge of that kind can unwind a decision that is otherwise defensible on its merits, and it does not require the challenger to prove that the technology is dangerous.

Why California mattered to companies already running in Texas

Both companies are based in California and both had taken their operations elsewhere. Aurora started a self-driving truck service in Texas in May 2025 between Dallas and Houston, and has since added routes linking Fort Worth, El Paso, Phoenix and Laredo. Kodiak began driverless commercial work in January 2025 off road in the Permian Basin in west Texas, and moved on to highway routes including Dallas to Houston.

Texas took the traffic because California would not have it. That is the practical lesson for anyone drafting a technology restriction: a prohibition on testing does not stop development, it relocates it, and the jurisdiction that imposed it loses both the operating experience and the regulatory oversight that comes with hosting the work.

Daniel Goff, vice president of external affairs at Kodiak, said the Californian rules had been more than a decade in the making and were the product of extensive input and review, and that they allow the state's regulators oversight and enforcement powers. The department has not said when it expects the first driver-out application. Until one is granted, the safety driver is the whole of the safety case.