Autonomous trucking company Kodiak Robotics is slated to reach revenue quicker than other companies, COO James Reed said on a podcast last week.
Speaking on The Road to Autonomy podcast, Reed discussed factors involved in the tech firm’s competitive advantage, which includes a 24-month U.S. Army contract for nearly $50 million.
“Driver-out autonomy in the trucking business is going to happen in the very near future,” Reed said, adding that there are “two people that really are making meaningful progress at this point in the classic space. And Kodiak is at the top of that list.”
The autonomous trucks feature Light Detection and Ranging sensors where side mirrors are along with radar sensors and 12 cameras. The company debuted its sixth-generation truck on Tuesday at the Las Vegas Convention Center for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
The newest iteration, encompassing five years of real-world testing, means the company’s driverless truck technology is feature complete across hardware and software, Kodiak said in a news release, signaling the readiness of the apparatus’ functioning.
“We’re the first and only company to have developed a feature complete driverless semi-truck with the level of automotive-grade safety redundancy necessary to deploy on public roads,” Kodiak Co-Founder and CEO Don Burnette said in a statement.
Kodiak plans to complete its first driverless runs in the second half of 2024, taking place between Dallas and Houston, according to the company. Its test runs have spanned across sections of the country, including regular commercial routes within Texas as well as routes involving Oklahoma City and Jacksonville, Florida.
“We think we can get to revenue and therefore profitability quicker than anybody else,” Reed said. “We only need very small fractions of the existing embedded trucking base to convert to autonomy for this company to be wildly profitable.”
