The RoboTrucks are really rolling now.

In late January, Atlas Energy Solutions had delivered 100 loads of proppant to Delaware Basin customers using two driverless trucks. That was about a month after the first driverless delivery. By late February, they were up to 300.

It's clear how the math is mathing here.

“We plan to be adding additional autonomous trucks to the fleet with the goal of going to a significantly higher number,” said Kyle Turlington, Atlas vice president of investor relations. “We’re really excited about what we’ve seen.”

The trucks are outfitted with self-driving technology by Kodiak Robotics Inc. of Mountain View, California. Kodiak and Atlas announced in July 2024—just eight months ago— that they’d be working together.

The launch of driverless trucking coincides with Atlas’s first deliveries of sand from the Dune Express, a 42-mile long, fully electric conveyor system that carries sand from an Atlas plant in Kermit, Texas, to a loadout facility in eastern New Mexico.

The Atlas-Kodiak combination started when Atlas noticed that Kodiak was helping the U.S. Department of Defense navigate off-road environments, said Jordan Coleman, Kodiak’s chief legal and policy officer. Kodiak was founded in 2018 to bring autonomous vehicle technology to over-the-road trucking.

Atlas needed those trucks to run rugged off-road environments, Coleman said.

“We went out, started working with them, kind of fine-tuning our tech to work within their environment,” Coleman said.

The trucks run mostly on lease roads in West Texas rather than public roads, Turlington said.

They are “the perfect test case for this just because you've got very light traffic and very low speeds. The average speed on these lease roads is 20 miles per hour,” he said. “It actually makes a tremendous amount of sense to apply this technology.”

The RoboTrucks are also safer, more efficient and less expensive.

“When you use autonomous deliveries, you're removing fatigue from the driver,” Turlington said. “Drivers have a certain number of hours they can work each day,” while the RoboTrucks can run at any time.

"There's a fair amount of cost savings associated with this as well,” he said. “A very large percentage of the fee to deliver any product is the cost of the driver.”

For Kodiak, the successful runs make the case for expanding driverless technology. The company has relationships with major transportation companies such as J.B. Hunt and C.R. England, as well as the furniture company Ikea and Tyson Foods.

Coleman said the work for the Defense Department and Atlas shows the company can operate in all kinds of environments.

“If you can handle the rugged world of the Permian Basin, you're going to be able to handle the ruggedness of U.S. freeways,” he said. “If you can handle the off-road pushes that are required in defense, you're going to be uniquely suited to be able to operate in the oil and gas fields. It's a real virtuous cycle, the work that we do in these three areas and they all really support and push one another to be all the better.”

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