Self-driving trucks developed by Kodiak Robotics contain some remote-driving DNA courtesy of Vay, a driverless car-sharing startup out of Berlin.
The two companies, which announced a partnership Wednesday, have been working together since last year when Kodiak’s self-driving trucks began making driverless deliveries for Atlas Energy Solutions in the oil-rich Permian Basin of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico.
And it will play a critical operational and safety role when Kodiak, which plans to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company, begins commercial driverless deliveries on public highways in Texas in the second half of 2026.
Remote driving, also called teleoperations, has emerged as a bridge technology of sorts for autonomous vehicles. The technology is often used to support sidewalk delivery robots, low speed autonomous shuttles, and even self-driving forklifts. The rise of robotaxis has brought new attention — and speculation of which companies are using it — to the technology.
Vay’s remote-driving technology plays a supporting role to Kodiak’s autonomous driving system. The two technologies work together — each one with its own redundant systems and guardrails — to allow a human to remotely control a Kodiak self-driving truck in certain low-speed environments.
Vay’s teleoperations rig includes a steering wheel, screen, vehicle controls, and software that lets a human driver — using low latency communication and located in a remote location — to operate the Kodiak truck. However, Kodiak’s self-driving system, and specifically its proprietary “assisted autonomy” technology, still has control. That means the underlying automated driving system is still active and setting limits on what the remote human driver can do if they begin navigating the self-driving truck, at low speeds, through a construction zone or to a new drop-off point.
“It’s not a direct system where you just turn the steering wheel and you flip a truck,” Kodiak CTO Andreas Wendel said, who explained Kodiak’s autonomous system still handles much of the driving. The remote driver, using Vay’s rig, tells the vehicle where to go, but Kodiak’s system is still running through all of the checks to keep it on track.
“Why is that important?” Wendel asked. “Because 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, and that’s what we achieve here.”
Kodiak employees, all of whom have commercial driver’s licenses and undergo rigorous training, use Vay’s system to operate the self-driving truck in low speed scenarios such as if the driverless truck were to encounter a complex construction zone with law enforcement making hand signals.
Wendel told TechCrunch the company began investigating remote-driving technology when it was awarded a contract by the U.S. Army in 2022. He said the Army needed a system that could turn to remote operators, if needed.
“They run into a lot of use cases where they can’t just rely on the autonomy doing its thing,” he said, explaining a driverless military vehicle might need to suddenly change course and hide behind brush. “Getting your autonomy to actually understand that is very tricky,” he said.
Kodiak did begin to build out its own remote-driving technology, but then found Vay, a company that had already deployed its system in the real world.
The partnership is the latest win for Vay, a startup that has made teleoperations technology the centerpiece of its car-sharing business.
Vay got its start as a driverless car-sharing company that developed remote-driving technology that allows employees sitting in an office to pilot empty vehicles to customers.
When a Vay vehicle arrives, the customer hops in and takes over manual control of the car. Customers drive themselves to their destination. The teleops driver pilots the vehicle back when the customer is finished. Vay, which was founded in 2019, has taken more than 10,000 commercial trips.
Co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe sees the company extending beyond its consumer-facing service. And last September, the company began to expand its business model into commercial and business-to-business services.
“I often describe it is a bit like how Amazon built AWS on the back of their Amazon success,” he said. “This is how we want to build out that global remote driving platform.”
Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette said its branded “assisted autonomy” system gives the company more flexibility to deliver customers’ freight in a greater range of locations and 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 said.
