Waabi and Warrior Logistics announced a commercial partnership Wednesday to move routine customer freight on Waabi Driver-powered autonomous trucks between Dallas and Houston. Warrior, an asset-based carrier headquartered in Coppell, Texas, has added a fleet of Waabi’s trucks to its network to haul recurring shipments for food and beverage, consumer goods and other customers.
The companies began commercial operations earlier this year. Routes completed by the autonomous trucks since then have produced 100% on-time pickup and delivery and zero safety incidents, according to Waabi. Neither company disclosed how many Waabi trucks Warrior runs or how many loads they have hauled.
The carrier, founded in 2015, runs more than 200 trucks of its own, according to the companies’ release. It is using the Waabi trucks to add capacity and raise utilization across that broader fleet as customer demand grows.
“Our customers want more capacity on our core lanes, and they want it to be consistent,” said Scott McFarlane, CEO of Warrior Logistics. “Our partnership with Waabi gives us the flexibility to deliver that. Waabi Driver-powered trucks complement our professional drivers, build density on our power lanes, and add capacity on the routes that are less desirable for our drivers.”
McFarlane described a network where autonomous trucks and professional drivers run side by side. That mix lets Warrior take on more freight and keep its drivers on the lanes they want to run, he said.
Why Warrior signed on
Warrior began the partnership for three reasons, McFarlane said: a leadership team it trusts, technology he called truly innovative and a co-development approach that let the carrier see firsthand how safely the Waabi Driver performs.
“The results on our own freight speak for themselves,” he said.
“Warrior has helped shape our technology over the course of our partnership and the impact we’re seeing across their operations shows how we can help carriers take on more freight, serve more customers and grow their business,” said Lior Ron, COO of Waabi.
Over the coming year, the two companies will jointly pick and develop the next lanes for the autonomous trucks across Warrior’s network.
Waabi’s Dallas-Houston business
The Warrior deal comes nine days after Waabi and Volvo Autonomous Solutions began hauling freight for Warp, their first customer operation together. Volvo VNL Autonomous trucks running the Waabi Driver move Warp freight directly to third-party facilities on the same corridor, with an observer in the driver’s seat.
Commercial load volume on Waabi’s Dallas-Houston route has grown more than 80% this year, the company said. It did not give a baseline.
Its first revenue loads on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston moved in September 2023, the week it announced a 10-year deal with Uber Freight.
In July, Waabi said its software, trained only on a Peterbilt 579, drove a Volvo VNL Autonomous truck with no new data or fine-tuning.
Waabi’s trucks are not yet driverless. Ron told FreightWaves in January the company will remove the driver only once the truck and its fully redundant platform are ready from the manufacturer.
This month, he said Waabi is “fully on track for driverless next year, with Volvo as the first OEM platform.”
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