Bot Auto Plans Driver-Out Autonomous Trucking Pilot in 2025

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Autonomous trucking startup Bot Auto announced that it intends to begin its first driver-out commercial freight operations this year with a pilot program in Texas.

The company did not set a specific target date for its driverless launch but said the program will involve continuous autonomous truck runs between Houston and San Antonio while hauling cargo for shippers.

Xiaodi Hou, Bot Auto’s founder and CEO, said the goal is not simply to demonstrate unmanned trucks on public roads, but to build the business case for autonomous trucking in a real-world setting.

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“We are plugging ourselves into the real trucking transportation system,” he said.

The planned driver-out program will run for at least four months with a fleet of five to 10 trucks capable of operating without a safety driver behind the wheel, he said.

After this period of deployment, Bot Auto plans to further refine its system based on its learnings, the Houston-based startup said in its March 4 announcement.

For Hou, self-driving trucks have already moved beyond the technical demonstration phase. His previous autonomous trucking venture, TuSimple, conducted a driverless truck run in Arizona in late 2021.

Instead, the biggest challenge for autonomous truck developers to overcome today is achieving a cost per mile that surpasses manually driven trucks and proves the commercial value of the technology, Hou said.

The clearest path to that inflection point, he said, is increasing the number of miles run and the availability of autonomous trucks.

“This is exactly what we want to solve with this driver-out program,” Hou said.

While several other self-driving truck developers have partnered directly with original equipment manufacturers to develop production-ready autonomous truck models, Bot Auto is building its driverless trucks itself by retrofitting Freightliner tractors with its autonomous driving technology and additional safety components.

While OEMs excel at designing vehicles for high-volume production and cost optimization, Hou made the case that this “small batch period” for autonomous trucks is not the right time to focus on mass production.

He also offered a counterpoint to the common perspective that autonomous trucks built on OEM assembly lines are inherently safer than retrofits.

After reviewing hundreds of hardware failures during his time at TuSimple, Hou concluded that building a reliable autonomous truck platform is not tied to OEM production but instead is primarily a Tier 1 supplier issue.

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“We need to focus on working with Tier 1s, making sure that we have reliable cabling, we have reliable sensors, and we have reliable Tier 1 components for steering and braking,” he said.

Bot Auto is equipping its autonomous trucks with redundant safety systems so that the vehicles can come to a safe stop at roadside in the event of a component failure, Hou said.

In addition to the numerous cameras and lidar sensors in the vehicle’s perception stack, the company also is adding layers of redundancy to the communication cabling, the power supply and the steering and braking systems so that a component failure would not lead to a system failure, he said.

Like several other autonomous truck developers, Bot Auto is focused on automating specific longhaul freight lanes between designated freight hubs, which in turn could create more local driving jobs for professional drivers in first- and final-mile transportation.

Unlike most of its peers, however, Bot Auto is targeting a transportation-as-a-service business model. Rather than positioning itself as a supplier of virtual driver technology to fleet operators, the company is acting as a motor carrier using autonomous trucks that it retrofits, maintains and operates itself.

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Hou said recent advances in technology have created benefits for autonomous truck development that didn’t exist a decade ago, when he co-founded TuSimple.

For example, Bot Auto’s developers use artificial intelligence to boost efficiency and minimize manual tasks.

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Today, the company is preparing for its driverless pilot program with about 60 total employees, something that would have been “unimaginable” years ago, he said.

“We can build a small company and achieve big results,” Hou said.

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