J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Bridgestone Americas, and Kodiak Robotics' delivery partnership has led to Kodiak autonomous vehicles covering 50,000 long-haul trucking miles. The three companies launched the weekly delivery project in January 2024.
“Working closely with Kodiak and Bridgestone, we were able to deliver a complementary solution that integrates autonomous technology with day-to-day operations while also solving backhaul challenges,” said Nick Hobbs, chief operating officer and president of contract services at J.B. Hunt. “It’s a great example of how our mode-neutral approach can leverage multiple service offerings to produce efficient, value-driven solutions unique to our customers’ needs.”
Through the program, Kenworth T680 sleeper cabs fitted with Bridgestone M719 drive tires, R213 steer tires, and the Kodiak Driver to ship Bridgestone passenger car tires between South Carolina and Dallas.
More specifically, the three partners are using a hub-to-hub delivery model where J.B. Hunt moves the load from Bridgestone’s Aiken Passenger Tire plant in Graniteville, South Carolina, to Kodiak’s Atlanta-area autonomous truckport in Villa Rica, Georgia. Once there, autonomous vehicles (AVs) handle the long-haul portion of the journey, which runs roughly 750 miles from Atlanta to the company’s Lancaster, Texas facility.
J.B. Hunt then takes the tires another 50 or so miles from Kodiak’s Lancaster location to Bridgestone’s Roanoke distribution center. Without AVs, Michael Wiesinger, VP of commercialization and general manager transportation sector, Kodiak Robotics, said that the entire delivery process from beginning to end can take a couple of days.
“If you take the end-to-end journey, including everything with pickup and so on, with a single driver, you would typically take roughly 48 hours,” Wiesinger said. But even with two human drivers bookending the Kodiak deliveries, the total drive instead took about 25 hours. “It's nearly half of the time that it takes compared to the human driver,” he noted.
100% on time, no accidents
And all the while, a two-person Kodiak safety team kept watch over the deliveries in the cab, not to mention all the data the trucks themselves collected and sent back to Kodiak’s operation center. These included truck location and destination data, vehicle speed, and the truck’s overall health status.
Read more: Autonomous trucks: The road ahead
“[It’s] roughly 1,000 processes that we check every 100 milliseconds,” Wiesinger explained. “It's everything from tire pressure to if everything looks fine in the engine or if I’m getting all the [radar and LiDAR] sensor data.”
Then, for the AVs’ return trip, the companies use the J.B. Hunt 360box network of company trailers for added capacity. This allows them to find other customers with live/drop freight needs along the return route, which J.B. Hunt can pick up from Kodiak’s return to Atlanta to bring to its next destination.
Yet between all these moving pieces, the companies reported that the autonomous trucks have had no accidents, instead racking up a 100% on-time pick-up and delivery. This score is helped by the enhanced, 40-minute inspection processes each AV undergoes both before and after it begins their 750-mile journey.
“It's really pre- and post-trip, just like any other driver would have to do,” Wiesinger stated. “Within a 24-hour window, you have to do that enhanced inspection once, and then after 24 hours you have to do it again. But other than that, you do a visual inspection to check if you need to clean any sensor, anything like that.”
And meanwhile, Kodiak, J.B. Hunt, and Bridgestone are learning more about how to smooth out operations involving autonomous trucks, especially if they’re going to be as consistent as Bridgestone’s tire deliveries.
“We're doing four round trips a week between Dallas and Atlanta,” noted Daniel Goff, head of External Affairs, Kodiak. “This is about, ‘How do we make this even more efficient and scale and get ready to deploy driverlessly?’”
This includes understanding how often a truck component might need to be maintained between runs, potentially with someone waiting at the truckport upon arrival, and how to prepare for that eventuality to avoid delays.
“Those are things that are really, really valuable from an operations perspective,” Wiesinger said, especially as AVs continue to make deliveries like these and grow in the industry, potentially resulting in further partnerships.
As an example, Bridgestone first invested in and partnered with Kodiak in June 2021. As part of that agreement, Bridgestone integrated their smart-sensing tire technologies into Kodiak’s autonomous trucks and became the company’s exclusive tire supplier. J.B. Hunt, meanwhile, provides Bridgestone with pickup and delivery services for multiple customer locations throughout the country through its Dedicated Contract Services program.
