The News
Aurora Innovation is charging about $2 a mile, fuel surcharge included, to haul a load between its Texas terminals with no driver on board. The company shared the price in late September along with a plan to run 30,000 driverless trucks by 2030.
Days later, Kodiak said it will take the safety driver off its trucks on IKEA’s Houston-to-Dallas run by the end of the year.
Aurora sells the whole trip. It provides the truck and the self-driving system, then bills by the mile. From 2027, carriers that own their trucks can instead pay Aurora 85 cents or more a mile for the system alone.
Why It Matters
For the first time, a shipper has a public driverless price it can hold up against what it pays a carrier today. Aurora’s driverless routes run from Dallas and Fort Worth to Houston, Laredo, El Paso, Oklahoma City and Phoenix.
There aren’t many trucks yet, though. Aurora expects about 200 on the road by the end of 2026 and plans to cap its own fleet at 500. After that, most driverless trucks will run through carriers that buy Aurora’s system, such as Hirschbach, which signed a preliminary deal for 500 trucks starting in 2027.
The $2 also covers less of the trip than it sounds. The driverless truck runs from a terminal on the edge of one city to a terminal outside the other. Human drivers still move the trailer between the terminal and the shipper’s dock at each end, so the $2 pays for the highway, not the whole move.
By The Numbers
Diesel cost $5.96 a gallon on the Gulf Coast in the last week of September, up from $3.41 a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration’s weekly survey.
Drivers cost carriers about $1.03 a mile in pay and benefits in 2025, the American Transportation Research Institute found.
Fuel cost carriers about 48 cents a mile in 2025, before this year’s jump in diesel.
Aurora’s self-driving system will cost carriers 85 cents or more a mile.
So taking out the driver saves $1.03 a mile, but Aurora’s fee takes back 85 cents or more. That leaves at most about 18 cents a mile. Fuel doesn’t change at all. It is also the cost that has climbed nearly 75% in a year.
Peer Insights
McLane and IKEA already move freight on driverless trucks in Texas. Both still use people at each end of the trip.
McLane, the Berkshire Hathaway food distributor, has moved about 1,400 loads with Aurora between Dallas and Houston since 2023. Its own drivers still make the restaurant deliveries. “Our drivers remain focused on the critical last mile,” McLane Restaurant president Susan Adzick said.
IKEA has had Kodiak haul more than 1,300 loads from its Baytown distribution center to its Frisco store over four years, with a safety driver on board. Of the 292-mile route, 219 miles will run driverless, between Kodiak’s sites near Houston and Dallas. Kodiak says it can predict “precisely when they will arrive in Frisco,” so the store books a specific dock door before the truck pulls in. For IKEA, a known arrival time is part of the deal.
Pushback
Aurora says its trucks cost at least 20% less to own than a truck with one driver, about 50 cents a mile. It says they also run about twice as many miles a year. Two things to weigh before taking that at face value:
Carriers say the math isn’t there yet. “I will be quite honest that we have a gap,” Werner chief information officer Daragh Mahon said. He said the numbers only work at scale.
Insurance costs more. Driverless trucks are priced “slightly above” trucks with a driver because insurers can’t yet tell how bad a crash could be, said Chris Moore of Apollo, a Lloyd’s of London insurance group. He expects those rates to fall 15% to 25% a year.
What’s Next
Kodiak plans to take the driver off the IKEA run by the end of the year, while Aurora works toward its 200 trucks. Shippers will know whether $2 beats a truck with a driver once one of them says what it pays per mile, including the short hauls at each end.
