PrePass and Kodiak AI said Monday they are feeding enhanced inspection results from Kodiak's driverless trucks straight into the roadside screening systems states already run, starting in Texas and Louisiana. The arrangement does not replace the inspection. It makes the result visible to an officer at the scale house, who can verify it, authorize a bypass, or send the truck further instructions.
The timing follows Kodiak's plan to begin commercial driverless runs on US public highways by the end of 2026. PrePass operates more than 580 inspection and screening locations nationwide. "The next barrier to scaling driverless trucking isn't inside the truck. It's the infrastructure around it," PrePass chief technology officer Chas Wurster said.
A zero-defect standard on a 24-hour clock
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's Enhanced CMV Inspection Program is not a driver walkaround. A CVSA-certified inspector has to certify the combination free of safety defects before it operates driverless, and the result is good for up to 24 hours. It is a zero-defect procedure: any defect found, however small, has to be repaired before the unit can be dispatched.
That takes time. Kodiak reported its enhanced inspections average 38 minutes on a tractor-trailer combination, 32 minutes for a tractor alone and 20 for a trailer alone, against the 15 to 20 minutes a driver typically spends on a conventional DVIR. For a fleet dropping trailers into that system, the practical change is that a small mechanical defect stops a load at the yard instead of surfacing as a citation somewhere in west Texas.
The defects are on the trailer, and mostly on the tires
Kodiak's Texas pilot on the I-45 corridor put more than 1,000 assets through the enhanced standard in a year. It turned up more than 525 defects, and 95% of them were on trailers rather than tractors. The sharper number: 70% of partner trailers passed a conventional DVIR, but more than 40% failed the enhanced inspection.
Across more than 160 enhanced inspections of customer trailers, Kodiak logged 137 defects, 46% of them on tires - tread depth, flats and sidewall damage. Kodiak attributed the gap to trailers running longer replacement cycles and getting serviced less often than tractors, and to certified inspectors catching what a driver's walkaround does not. Autonomy is not creating these defects. It is auditing a part of the fleet that has been inspected loosely for years.
What to check before your trailer runs under an autonomous tractor
If you drop trailers for a carrier running autonomous tractors, or expect to in 2027, the trailer is now the thing that strands the load. Work the pilot's own hit list: tread depth and sidewall condition at every trailer position, lamps and reflectors, brake adjustment and lining thickness, air lines and gladhands, and landing gear. Under a zero-defect gate, a $40 marker lamp holds a load exactly as hard as a slack adjuster does, so stage the fast movers on the shelf rather than sourcing them the morning of a run.
When the write-up names an OE part number you cannot get same-day, check the interchange before you order - an aftermarket equivalent that ships today beats a dealer part that clears the defect next week. And when an inspector hands you a symptom rather than a part number, a dragging brake or an intermittent marker circuit, the diagnostic and repair guides will narrow it to the failed component before you buy the wrong one twice.
Find the right part for your truck
Tell PartsNow AI the truck and the job. It checks fitment, finds OEM cross-references and pulls live pricing from the catalog.
PartsNow Newsroom
Parts news, straight to your inbox
Product updates, catalog additions and new cross-references. Unsubscribe anytime.