Kodiak driverless truck ran 64 days without shutting down

Kodiak driverless truck ran 64 days without shutting down

20 October 2026: Kodiak says an unsupervised driverless truck running its autonomous driving system completed 64 consecutive days of continuous uptime, "never powering off or re-starting", in its industrial deployment in the Permian Basin of Texas. Five other trucks each passed 45 consecutive days.

Not yet independently verified. The uptime figures are Kodiak's own and not independently audited; the 35-truck fleet size is as of 30 June, and the highway launch date is a forward-looking statement. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The record

The streak began on 30 June and ended on 1 September 2026. Kodiak defines uptime as both the autonomy stack and the truck being running and available for service, which is a measure of availability rather than miles driven. As of 30 June, the trucks belonged to a fleet of 35 driverless trucks owned and operated by Atlas Energy Solutions, which Kodiak calls the largest fleet of its kind in the world, and the fleet had passed 40,000 cumulative hours of paid driverless operation.

"Uptime is a critical measure of reliability and operational performance for our customers," said Don Burnette, founder and chief executive. Don Lepard, vice president of operations, said sustained uptime of more than two months shows the system's reliability "in our driver-as-a-service model."

The hardware behind it

The trucks use Kodiak's sixth-generation platform, which it says was engineered for maintainability. It unveiled a seventh-generation system this summer, which it says improves efficiency, reliability and serviceability and lasts nearly 50% longer in operation.

The highway launch ahead

The Permian work runs on industrial routes for Atlas rather than on interstate highways. The bigger test comes on Interstate 45, where Kodiak is making final preparations for a driverless highway launch between Dallas and Houston by the end of 2026. In earlier announcements, Kodiak named IKEA as its launch shipper on that lane and added a refrigerated and dry-freight route between Dallas and Laredo with Charger USA, so far with a safety driver.

For shippers weighing autonomous trucking, uptime matters because a driver-as-a-service model is priced and planned around how many hours a truck is available. Long streaks on a closed industrial site are a necessary step but do not show how the same system performs in mixed highway traffic, weather and breakdowns far from a depot, which the I-45 launch will start to answer.

Sources

• Kodiak: Kodiak Driver sets new uptime record running 64 consecutive days on an unsupervised driverless truck, 20 October 2026