| Thanks for reading Hyperdrive, Bloomberg's newsletter on the future of the auto world. Kodiak Robotics just announced a significant development in autonomous trucking. The startup has sold completely driverless trucks to Atlas Energy Solutions, an oil and gas service company that will use the rigs to ferry loads of fracking sand around a 75,000-mile patch in the Permian Basin in West Texas. It's only two trucks, and they'll drive on a combination of public and private roads. That's easy duty compared to navigating San Francisco's busy Embarcadero, as companies including Alphabet's Waymo have been doing. But with Kodiak's news, we now have self-driving passenger cars and semi trucks driving on US roads with no humans at the wheel. And crucially, these companies are bringing in revenue doing it. "This is a significant announcement not just for Kodiak but the industry as a whole," Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette told me in an interview.  One of Atlas Energy's trucks equipped with Kodiak's self-driving system. Source: Kodiak Robotics More robotaxis and self-driving trucks are on the way. The industry is pushing ahead with plans to deploy more vehicles just as Donald Trump moves back into the Oval Office, with influencer-in-chief Elon Musk nearby. Musk announced plans last year to put a Cybercab into production as soon as in 2026. He's clearly stated a desire for there to be a national approval process for autonomous vehicles like his concept car that lacked a steering wheel or pedals. We at Bloomberg have reported that the Trump transition team was crafting plans for this soon after Election Day. Autonomous-vehicle companies are hopeful that the Trump administration will foster self-driving technology, which Chinese companies also are racing to develop, said Ariel Wolf, chair of the autonomous and connected vehicle practice at law firm Venable LLP. "Everyone is thinking it will be a breakout year for autonomy," Wolf told me. Commercializing autonomous vehicles wasn't a focal point of the Biden administration, although there was some relevant movement around the issue at the 11th hour. Days before Christmas, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a national program for the evaluation and oversight of vehicles equipped with automated-driving systems. Under the agency's framework, companies running these vehicles would provide detailed data on fleet performance and safety. Trump reportedly wants to not only set up a framework, but quash an order that required automakers to report crashes involving cars with automated-driving systems. That would be convenient for Tesla, which reported vastly more crashes involving its driver-assistance systems than any other automaker. NHTSA has conducted multiple investigations into whether the features Tesla markets as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving are defective, and several of its probes are ongoing.  A Cybercab prototype at a Tesla store in San Jose, California. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg There's no mystery as to why Musk would want a national approval process. Roughly half a dozen states have bills proposing their own sets of requirements around self-driving vehicles. A patchwork of rules would stall progress and deployments, even for cars that already have demonstrated safety in other jurisdictions, Wolf said. That said, it's not as though regulation has been standing in the way of progress of late. Kodiak's announcement about its work with Atlas follows Waymo saying in December that it's expanding service to Miami, its fifth city. In November, Toyota-backed May Mobility announced it had started driverless operations in a second city, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gatik, which carries good from distribution centers to retail stores for Walmart, Kroger, Georgia-Pacific and Tyson Foods, has been scaling up its freight-only operations. And Aurora Innovation, the company co-founded by former Google and Tesla pioneers in the field, also is planning to start driverless operations this year. It's no sure bet that Trump will be a full-throated autonomous vehicle ally — he made some skeptical remarks about them hours before Musk's Cybercab event back in October. But the president does clearly have Musk in his ear, and there's no bigger priority for Tesla than to develop and commercialize this technology. That could bode well for the broader industry.  Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg The world's most visible champion of free trade offered some advice at Davos, where rising global protectionism was on seemingly everyone's mind. "Please, let's not hyperventilate," World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said Thursday. "Could we chill?" That was shortly before Donald Trump gave a closely watched video address to the World Economic Forum's annual confab in the Swiss alps for the rich, the well-connected and the powerful. Bluffs or not, Trump's warnings have financial markets on edge, governments fine-tuning retaliation plans and companies worrying they'll be casualties in wider trade wars. The nervous calm held, even after the US president repeated his threats to slap tariffs on partners from Europe to China and Canada. | 
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