Ikea, after 4 years of testing autonomous goods with a safety driver behind the wheel, is ready to go completely driverless in Texas, through using autonomous driving technology from Kodiak.
The home furnishings retailer, based in Sweden, plans to launch driverless logistics service in Texas with Kodiak later in 2026. The highway segment is a portion of a delivery route that spans almost 300 miles, bringing Ikea goods from its Baytown distribution center to its store in Frisco.
Sais Kodiak’s founder and CEO, Don Burnette, wrote in a LinkedIn post on September 29, 2026, “IKEA has been a wonderful partner and customer for four years, and this represents the next chapter.”
The pilot between Ikea and Kodiak was supposed to last three months but lasted four years. During that period, Kodiak said its trucks hauled upwards of 1,300 Ikea loads and logged over 750,000 autonomous miles. The company said the service has run without incident and has an almost perfect record for on-time deliveries.
The launch follows autonomous freight moving from small-scale pilots to everyday operations. Walmart, Kroger, and Loblaw have all piloted or launched autonomous vehicles when it comes to middle-mile deliveries, and PepsiCo said it is expanding driverless freight in multiple states.
It is well to be noted that Ikea ranks sixth in the Europe Database, Digital Commerce 360’s list of the biggest online retailers in the region, based on their annual e-commerce sales. Digital Commerce 360 ranks it as a housewares & home furnishings retailer there.
How Kodiak is getting ready for driverless goods
In a September 29, 2026, update, Kodiak said it has been hauling Ikea goods day and night, seven days a week, and through various weather scenarios along the Texas route. Ikea will be the launch shipper for the driverless long-haul highway service for Kodiak later in 2026 with no safety driver onboard.
Kodiak offers the self-driving system for the trucks. Its main product, the Kodiak Driver, is a combination of AI-enabled software and modular hardware installed on commercial vehicles. The company provides the technology by means of a driver-as-a-service model and strategic alliances.
Kodiak is also wrapping up its last round of testing before it takes out the safety drivers. The company said in a September 25, 2026, release that since August its trucks have been performing deliveries between its Lancaster, Texas, hub and Houston without a driver exercising control, including on surface streets. Kodiak is also doing closed-course testing to recreate situations that happen too infrequently or are too dangerous to test on public roads, Kodiak said.
Burnette added in the press release dated September 25, 2026, “Our progress since beginning our final push towards driverless commercial deliveries has been incredible, and it is a strong signal we are ready to scale unsupervised driverless logistics service in Texas on long-haul lanes.”
It is worth noting that Kodiak already drives by itself in another setting. Atlas Energy Solutions has been hauling freight in the Permian Basin of West Texas and eastern New Mexico with customer-owned trucks and the Kodiak Driver since December 2024. Kodiak said that as of June 2026, the Atlas trucks with the system had driven over 40,000 hours of paid, driverless operations.
What driverless goods might mean for Ikea
Kodiak is moving that technology from an industrial environment to a major interstate freight lane with Ikea. The company said the four years of testing also taught it how to fit autonomous trucks into Ikea’s supply chain, from planning departures and emptying docks to making use of vehicle data for maintenance predictions.
Kodiak said in a September 29, 2026, blog post, “We now know exactly what it takes to transform the underlying technology into an AI-driven product that generates value and efficiency.”
Some of those potential benefits have already been reaped by Ikea elsewhere. Ingka Group said in March 2026 that Ikea China has permanently embraced self-driving electric vehicles at its Hefei operation after trials. Ingka is the biggest franchisee of Ikea and runs its U.S. retail business, which has 61 retail locations.
The vehicles move goods back and forth from a warehouse to the store for customer pick-up orders and restocking. The trucks covered almost 75,600 kilometres, or about 47,000 miles, during the test, Ingka said. The company said it cut the average wait time for pickup orders in half, from six hours to two. In addition, Ikea’s transportation costs fell by over 50%.
Ikea is also trialling autonomous deliveries directly to customers in China. Ingka is testing whether the Hefei model can be rolled out to other markets where regulations and infrastructure are suitable.
Other companies are growing driverless logistics service
More and more, retailers and consumer brands are moving middle-mile routes to autonomous trucks.
Walmart has been an early adopter. In 2021, the retailer and autonomous trucking company Gatik eliminated the safety driver from box trucks on a nearly 7-mile route between a Walmart facility and a neighbourhood market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Gatik had said back then that it was the first time an autonomous trucking company eliminated the safety driver from a commercial delivery path on the middle mile.
PepsiCo also signed a multi-year agreement in June 2026 with Gatik to further develop autonomous freight throughout its North American supply chain. PepsiCo already has driverless trucks running in Texas, Arizona and Arkansas. FreightWaves reported the network consists of about 250 retail locations such as Walmart and Dollar General stores. Walmart is ranked No. 2 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 1000 Database. The market research tool ranks the biggest online retailers in North America by annual e-commerce sales. Dollar General is No. 674 on the Top 1000.
Notably, the economics of autonomous trucking could be highly distance- and scale-dependent. In a 2026 study, researchers at North Dakota State University estimated that savings could be about 13% on a 200-mile hub-to-hub route and 31% at 1,000 miles as fleets scale up.
They found that without that scale, shorter autonomous routes could cost more. The study did not include Ikea, but its approximately 220-mile driverless stretch is comparable to the shorter route that has been modeled.
