But the drive also showed that the technology is not yet ready to realize its potential. Each day, Kodiak rotated a new team of specialists into the cab of its truck, so that someone could take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong. These "safety drivers" grabbed the wheel multiple times. Tech start-ups like Kodiak have spent years building and testing self-driving trucks, and companies across the trucking industry are keen to reap the benefits. At a time when the global supply chain is struggling to deliver goods as efficiently as businesses and consumers now demand, autonomous trucks could alleviate bottlenecks and reduce costs.

In the video above, one of Kodiak's trucks can be seen traveling down the highway at 65 miles per hour in the right-most lane. An occupant inside the truck (but not at the wheel) cuts a cable to simulate a sudden loss of communication between the truck and its main computer. That's when Kodiak's Actuation Control Engine kicks in. ACE is Kodiak's fallback system which enables the truck to safely pull over to the side of the road when it notices a crucial system failure. In this circumstance, ACE recognizes the interruption from the cut cable and plots a lane path ahead of the truck to move onto the shoulder and begins to brake.

Kodiak Robotics is one of the last private autonomous vehicles companies focused on trucking that is still standing. Nearly all the rest have been wooed by the public marketplace and the capital it can provide. But co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says the three-year-old company's strategy of staying focused and small(er) is paying off. It will be able to deploy a commercial-scale operation for about $500 million in funding, he says in the interview below. To put those go-to-market costs in perspective, that's 10% of what Waymo has raised in external fundraising and less than 25% of newly publicly traded company TuSimple's total fundraise.

A year after coming out of stealth mode with $40 million, self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics will begin making its first commercial deliveries in Texas. Kodiak will open a new facility in North Texas to support its freight operations along with increased testing in the state. There are some caveats to the milestone. Kodiak's self-driving trucks will have a human safety driver behind the wheel. And it's unclear how significant this initial launch is; the company didn't provide details on who its customers are or what it will be hauling.