Autonomous trucks are officially on California's roads. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles has granted testing permits to Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI under new rules — approved April 28 — that lifted California's ban on testing heavy-duty vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds on public roads. Kodiak has already started, running a handful of test trucks primarily around its Mountain View office.
The permits, obtained under the DMV's updated regulations, require a human safety operator behind the wheel and prohibit testing on roads with speed limits of 25 mph or less, except on direct routes between destinations. Aurora and Kodiak both met the agency's criteria covering safety, insurance, registration and driver qualification.
For the two companies, the permits end years of exile. Both are California-based but had focused on Texas, where Aurora launched a self-driving truck service between Dallas and Houston in May 2025 (later adding routes to El Paso, Phoenix and Laredo), and Kodiak began commercial driverless operations in West Texas's Permian Basin in January 2025 before expanding to on-highway routes including Dallas–Houston.
The homecoming is not uncontested. Last week, Teamsters California sued the DMV in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging the agency circumvented laws requiring it to study and publicly disclose the economic impacts of allowing self-driving trucks on public roads, and failed to consider safety risks to motorists. The court fight could shape how — and how quickly — the driverless-truck era arrives in the state that invented the freeway.
