The California Department of Motor Vehicles has issued its first permits allowing heavy-duty autonomous trucks to test on public roads, granting drivered testing permits to both Kodiak AI, Inc. and Aurora Innovation under the state's newly expanded Autonomous Vehicle Tester (AVT) programme1,2,3,6. Kodiak received its permit on August 13, 2026, and has already begun testing with a handful of trucks near its Mountain View office.
The permits follow regulations approved on April 28 that lifted a long-standing ban on testing autonomous vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds on California's public roads5. Both companies are based in California but had been unable to test heavy-duty autonomous trucks in their home state until now9.
The permits are narrow in scope. A human safety driver must remain behind the wheel at all times, and testing is barred on roads with posted speed limits of 25 mph or less unless the truck is on a direct route between destinations. The DMV confirmed that both Aurora and Kodiak met its permitting criteria, including requirements related to safety, insurance, vehicle registration, and safety driver qualification.
The framework is structured in phases: drivered testing first, then driver-out testing, then driverless commercial deployment7,8,13. Before a heavy-duty developer can operate driverless freight commercially in California, it must log roughly 500,000 miles in the safety-driver phase and another 500,000 in the driverless phase, with about 200,000 of the total accumulated inside California. As one analysis noted, a test fleet of 20 trucks running 500 miles a day could clear 500,000 miles in approximately seven weeks.
"California's comprehensive autonomous vehicle regulations are a major unlock for freight innovation," said Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak. "This permit allows us to begin the first phase of scaling autonomous trucking coast-to-coast, while ensuring appropriate safety oversight from California regulators"14.
Kodiak brings operational experience from outside California. The company began commercial driverless operations in January 2025 in the Permian Basin of West Texas, working with Atlas Energy Solutions. As of March 31, 2026, Kodiak had 28 driverless trucks running across 15 routes, having moved approximately 7,000 loads and more than 450,000 tons of sand, and logged over 23,500 driverless hours in Q1 2026 alone. Kodiak has since expanded onto highways, including a Dallas-to-Houston route. California does not accept Kodiak's Permian Basin operational data as credit toward its California driverless testing permit.
Aurora launched a driverless freight service in Texas in May 2025, starting with a Dallas-to-Houston route and adding runs between Fort Worth and El Paso, El Paso and Phoenix, Fort Worth and Phoenix, and Laredo and Dallas.
The permits arrive amid legal challenge. Teamsters California filed a writ petition in Alameda County Superior Court on August 5, days before the permits were granted, asking a judge to repeal the regulations outright. The union argues the DMV sidestepped requirements to study and publish the economic impact of allowing driverless heavy trucks and failed to properly weigh the risk to other road users. The DMV pegged the economic impact of the rules at $5.8 million, focusing on data-reporting burden; the Teamsters put the figure at $288 million in direct costs and $576 million counting indirect effects.
The regulatory framework also imposes compliance obligations: manufacturers must respond to law enforcement noncompliance notices within 72 hours, answer first-responder requests within 30 seconds, and clear vehicles from an area within two minutes of an electronic geofence directive from local emergency officials. Required reporting covers driving-task system failures, vehicle immobilizations, hard braking events, collisions, and vehicle miles traveled.
ANALYSIS The permits represent a regulatory milestone for autonomous trucking but remain a supervised first step — the phased mileage requirements and active legal challenge from the Teamsters mean commercial driverless deployment in California remains distant from the current authorization.