The freight industry needs autonomous trucks that complete entire logistics journeys. To truly improve service and reliability, AVs must fully integrate into supply chains—seamlessly handling both highways and the complex surface streets. Without this, autonomous trucking remains unable to serve the full breadth of shipper needs or achieve widespread industry adoption.
Waabi has unlocked a direct-to-customer commercial model that works within existing logistics operations by driving on both highways and surface streets—delivering the technical capabilities and commercial approach the industry has been waiting for.
Mastering the complexities of highways and general surface streets
After rapidly unlocking highly performant highway autonomy with our first-generation technology, we began expanding into the far more complex domain of surface streets in 2024. These are the local roads where all freight journeys begin and end—and they represent a critical component of any logistics journey.
Surface streets also pose particularly unique and complex challenges for AVs, demanding safe handling of a wider range of unpredictable conditions than highways, including roads with a high-density of erratic pedestrians and cyclists, complex intersections, unprotected turns with poor visibility, varied traffic light patterns, and tight manoeuvers, for example in and out of facilities and loading zones.
In the first quarter of 2025, we mastered this challenging domain and reached another major milestone: feature complete autonomous driving capabilities across both highways and general surface streets. This means that all the intended features needed to remove the human driver are now implemented for both highway driving and surface streets.
Here the Waabi Driver navigates both highways and surface streets, managing unpredictable conditions with ease.
Because the Waabi Driver is the only verifiable end-to-end AI model with reasoning capabilities that provide true generalization, we are able to safely and quickly scale autonomous driving across very different ODDs (operational design domains), unlike any other player in the industry. This opens up not only the massive expansiveness of national highways, but also the vast surface street network for the safe deployment of the Waabi Driver. A breakthrough that fundamentally changes what’s commercially possible in autonomous trucking.
Unlocking a direct-to-customer commercial model
Each year, more than 40% of miles traveled by combination trucks (tractor-trailer) are on surface streets, including principal arterials, collectors, and local roads, representing nearly 84 million miles. Despite this, the autonomous trucking industry has largely coalesced around a hub-to-hub model, which restricts service areas to fixed routes primarily on highways, and adds inefficient handoffs between autonomous and human-driven trucks to facilitate the first and last miles of the shipping journey. This adds cost and friction, while also limiting shippers that can feasibly adopt autonomous trucks.
Operating on general surface streets and unlocking the ability to meet the end customers where they are is a critical step in building a better autonomous freight model. It opens up a much more profound opportunity for genuine industry transformation and ensures that all shippers, not just a select few, can benefit from autonomous technology.
With the ability to safely and comprehensively navigate both highways and general surface streets at scale, Waabi is uniquely positioned to unlock a direct-to-customer model for autonomous trucking, in which the Waabi Driver completes the entire journey rather than relying on fixed routes and hand-offs. This model expands the serviceable market dramatically, removes barriers to adoption across the freight industry, and ultimately mirrors the way freight actually moves today — from shipper facilities directly to customer facilities.
Industry leaders are recognizing the power of this shift. For example, Waabi has a deep partnership with Uber Freight to deliver transportation services to a wide range of customers, including Samsung, who now ships with Waabi on the Uber Freight network and recognizes the impact of Waabi’s approach.
A direct-to-customer model, like the one Waabi offers, is the only truly scalable approach for autonomous truck deployment because it mirrors our current operations and can be leveraged across our whole network. There isn't the added friction of complex hand-offs or geographical limitations, so we can fully realize the efficiency gains of this exciting technology.
Matt Do, Senior Manager at Samsung Electronics America
Laying the foundation for commercial autonomy at scale
At Waabi, we are not just building transformative autonomous technology, we’re pioneering the commercial model that makes it viable at scale.
Our vision has always been to enhance the physical world through AI and to unlock the full potential of autonomous technology to solve real-world problems. With the incredible momentum we’ve had over the past few months, we are closer than ever to making that vision a reality.