Beyond the highway: Waabi’s bet on door-to-door autonomy
Autonomous trucking has spent years proving itself on highways, where lanes are predictable and traffic patterns are more consistent. Now, Waabi is signaling a push into a tougher part of the job: moving beyond highway-only driving toward door-to-door autonomy.
The company said that “getting away from just highways is the next level in terms of technical difficulty.” For working drivers, that statement lines up with reality: the hardest parts of most trips aren’t the miles at 65 mph, but the transitions—surface streets, tight turns, complex intersections, and the final approach to customers and yards.
Waabi tied this next step to the broader shift in artificial intelligence, saying the generative AI boom has made the problem easier—or at least faster—to work on. In plain terms, the company is pointing to newer AI methods as a tool to speed up development for more complex driving environments.
In separate industry news included in the same raw briefing, the company will begin to assemble its next-generation robotaxi on Zeekr's RT platform, with a stated goal of building “tens of thousands” of fully autonomous Waymo vehicles per year. That note underscores how quickly autonomy efforts are expanding beyond pilots and small fleets, and how production plans are becoming part of the conversation.
For trucking, the key context is that “highway autonomy” and “door-to-door autonomy” are not the same job. Highway-focused systems can limit where they operate and when they hand off control, while door-to-door operation requires handling the messy, high-judgment sections of a route that drivers deal with every day. Companies that can safely bridge that gap could change how freight moves between shippers, receivers, and the open road—though the technical bar is higher.