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Self-driving truck startup Waabi is partnering with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to jointly develop and deploy autonomous trucks, an important milestone as it gets closer to a commercial launch. The tie up also marks Volvo’s second partnership to co-develop self-driving big rigs with a startup partner. In May 2024, Volvo teamed up with Aurora Innovation to reveal the Volvo VNL Autonomous truck. Waabi will be using the same truck, but it will have Waabi’s tech on it, including its sensor suite, compute, and the Waabi Driver software. “We now have everything we need to scale our product,” Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, told TechCrunch. “We have the next-generation AV 2.0 technology, we have an approach that is much more capital efficient, and a much faster path to market.” Waabi plans to launch commercial pilots with the Volvo-built trucks in Texas over the next couple of months, with a product-ready driverless demonstration on public roads planned for the end of 2025. A fully driverless commercial launch – directly between customer depots from day one, rather than via terminals – will follow soon afterwards, according to Urtasun.