After four years of testing autonomous freight with a safety driver behind the wheel, Ikea is preparing to go fully driverless in Texas using Kodiak’s autonomous driving technology.
Later this year, the Sweden-based home furnishings retailer plans to launch driverless service with Kodiak on a roughly 220-mile stretch connecting the Houston and Dallas metro areas. The highway leg is part of a nearly 300-mile delivery route moving Ikea goods from its Baytown distribution center to its store in Frisco.
“IKEA has been a wonderful partner and customer for four years, and this represents the next chapter,” Don Burnette, Kodiak’s founder and CEO, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sept. 29.
Originally intended as a three-month trial, the pilot between Ikea and Kodiak continued for four years. During that span, Kodiak said its trucks carried more than 1,300 Ikea loads and logged more than 750,000 autonomous miles. The company described the service as operating “without incident” and with a “nearly perfect” on-time delivery record.
The launch comes as autonomous freight moves beyond small-scale pilots and into day-to-day operations. Walmart, Kroger and Loblaw have all tested or deployed autonomous vehicles for middle-mile deliveries, while PepsiCo said it’s expanding driverless freight across several states.
Ikea ranks No. 6 in the Europe Database, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest online retailers in the region by their annual ecommerce sales. There, Digital Commerce 360 categorizes it as a Housewares & Home Furnishings retailer.
How Kodiak is preparing for driverless freight
In a Sept. 29 update, Kodiak said it has hauled Ikea goods along the Texas route day and night, seven days a week, and through varying weather conditions. Later this year, Ikea will become Kodiak’s launch shipper for driverless long-haul highway service, with no safety driver aboard.
Kodiak provides the autonomous driving system behind the trucks. Its core product, the Kodiak Driver, combines AI-powered software with modular hardware installed on commercial vehicles. The company offers the technology through a Driver-as-a-Service model and strategic partnerships.
Before it removes safety drivers, Kodiak is also completing its final round of testing. In a Sept. 25 release, the company shared that its trucks have been making deliveries between its Lancaster, Texas, hub and Houston since August without the driver taking control, including on surface streets. Kodiak said it’s also running closed-course tests to recreate situations “that occur too rarely, or are too risky, to test on public highways.”
“Our progress since beginning our final push towards driverless commercial deliveries has been incredible, and it is a strong signal we are ready to scale unsupervised driverless service on long-haul lanes,” Burnette said in the Sept. 25 release.
Kodiak already operates without drivers in another setting. Since December 2024, Atlas Energy Solutions has used customer-owned trucks equipped with the Kodiak Driver to haul freight in the Permian Basin of West Texas and eastern New Mexico. As of June, Kodiak reported that 35 Atlas trucks using the system had logged more than 40,000 hours of paid driverless operations.
What driverless freight could mean for Ikea
With Ikea, Kodiak is taking that technology from an industrial setting to a major interstate freight lane. The company said four years of testing also taught it how to integrate autonomous trucks into Ikea’s supply chain, from scheduling departures and unloading docks to using vehicle data for predictive maintenance.
“We now know exactly what it takes to transform the underlying technology into an AI-driven product that generates value and efficiency,” Kodiak said in its Sept. 29 blog post.
Ikea has already seen some of those potential benefits elsewhere. After testing, Ikea China permanently adopted self-driving electric vehicles at its Hefei operation, Ingka Group said in March. Ingka is Ikea’s largest franchisee and operates its U.S. retail business, including 61 retail locations.
The vehicles move goods between a warehouse and the store for customer pickup orders and restocking. During the test, the trucks traveled nearly 75,600 kilometers, or about 47,000 miles, according to Ingka. The company said they cut average wait times for pickup orders from six hours to two. Transportation costs between Ikea locations also fell by more than 50%.
Ikea is also testing autonomous deliveries directly to customers in China. Ingka said it is evaluating whether the Hefei model could work in other markets where regulations and infrastructure allow.
Other companies expand driverless freight
Retailers and consumer brands are increasingly using autonomous trucks for middle-mile routes.
Walmart was an early adopter. In 2021, the retailer and autonomous trucking company Gatik removed the safety driver from box trucks running a roughly 7-mile route between a Walmart facility and a neighborhood market in Bentonville, Arkansas. According to Gatik, it was “the first time an autonomous trucking company has removed the safety driver from a commercial delivery route on the middle mile.”
More recently, in June, PepsiCo signed a multiyear agreement with Gatik to expand autonomous freight across its North American supply chain. Driverless trucks are already operating for PepsiCo in Texas, Arizona and Arkansas. FreightWaves reported that the network serves about 250 retail locations, including Walmart and Dollar General stores. Walmart ranks No. 2 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 Database. The market research tool tracks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales. Dollar General is ranked No. 674 in the Top 1000.
Meanwhile, the economics of autonomous trucking may depend heavily on distance and scale. A 2026 study by researchers at North Dakota State University estimated potential savings of about 13% for a 200-mile hub-to-hub route, rising to 31% at 1,000 miles when fleets reach sufficient scale.
Without that scale, shorter autonomous routes could cost more, they found. The study did not examine Ikea, but its roughly 220-mile driverless leg is close to the shorter route modeled.
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