Kodiak is using Vay’s remote driving tech in its self-driving trucks

Kodiak Robotics, a pioneer in self-driving trucks, has solidified a significant partnership with Berlin-based driverless car-sharing startup, Vay, integrating Vay’s remote-driving technology into its autonomous fleet. This collaboration, which began last year, has already seen Kodiak’s self-driving trucks successfully making driverless deliveries for Atlas Energy Solutions in the Permian Basin of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico.

This strategic alliance is poised to play a crucial operational and safety role as Kodiak prepares for its commercial driverless deliveries on public highways in Texas, anticipated in the second half of 2026. Kodiak also recently announced plans to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.

Remote driving, often referred to as teleoperations, has emerged as a vital bridge technology for autonomous vehicles. It’s widely employed to support various low-speed autonomous applications, including sidewalk delivery robots, shuttles, and even self-driving forklifts. The growing interest in robotaxis has brought renewed attention to this technology, sparking discussions about which companies are adopting it.

Vay’s remote-driving technology acts as a complementary system to Kodiak’s proprietary autonomous driving framework. Working in tandem, each with its own redundant systems and safeguards, the combined technology allows a human operator to remotely control a Kodiak self-driving truck in specific low-speed scenarios. Vay’s teleoperations rig features a steering wheel, screen, and vehicle controls, facilitating low-latency communication for remote human intervention.

Crucially, Kodiak’s self-driving system, powered by its “assisted autonomy” technology, maintains primary control. The underlying automated driving system remains active, setting precise limits on what the remote human driver can execute, ensuring safety and operational integrity. “It’s not a direct system where you just turn the steering wheel and you flip a truck,” explained Kodiak’s CTO Andreas Wendel, emphasizing that the autonomous system manages the core driving tasks. The remote driver, through Vay’s rig, provides directional input, but Kodiak’s system conducts all necessary checks to keep the vehicle on track.

Wendel highlighted the flexibility this integration offers: “We drive various different vehicles, from big semis to F-150s to military vehicles. They have different loads and sometimes they have a full trailer; sometimes an empty one; sometimes no trailer. And for our remote assistance personnel, it should feel exactly the same no matter what the load is. That’s what we achieve here.”

Kodiak’s employees, all of whom possess commercial driving licenses and undergo extensive training, utilize Vay’s system for low-speed maneuvers. This includes navigating complex situations such as construction zones where law enforcement might be signaling manually.

Kodiak’s exploration into remote-driving technology was initially prompted by a 2022 contract awarded by the U.S. Army, which required a system capable of remote operator intervention. “They run into a lot of use cases where they can’t just rely on the autonomy doing its thing,” Wendel elaborated, citing scenarios where a driverless military vehicle might need to make sudden, tactical movements, like hiding behind brush. “Getting your autonomy to actually understand that is very tricky,” he added.

While Kodiak began developing its own remote-driving capabilities, it ultimately recognized Vay’s proven, real-world deployed system as a superior solution, leading to the current partnership. This collaboration marks a significant win for Vay, which has centered its car-sharing business around its teleoperations technology. Founded in 2019, Vay started by developing remote-driving tech to allow employees to pilot empty vehicles to customers. Once a Vay vehicle arrives, the customer takes over manual control, drives to their destination, and then the teleops driver remotely pilots the vehicle back. Vay has successfully completed over 10,000 commercial trips.

Vay’s co-founder and CEO, Thomas von der Ohe, envisions the company expanding beyond its consumer-facing service. Since last September, Vay has been steering towards commercial and business-to-business services. “I often describe it as a bit like how Amazon built AWS on the back of their Amazon success,” he remarked. “This is how we want to build out that global remote driving platform.”

Don Burnette, Kodiak’s founder and CEO, emphasized that the “assisted autonomy” system provides the company with enhanced flexibility to deliver freight in a wider array of locations and challenging scenarios. “No matter the maturity of an autonomous driving system, there are still scenarios that will benefit from human assistance, if only as a backup,” he affirmed.