Einride Secures Fifth NHTSA Approval to Operate Autonomous Vehicles on U.S. Roads
Einride has secured its fifth NHTSA exemption to operate autonomous vehicles on U.S. public roads — and it wants everyone to know it is moving faster than its competitors in racking up federal clearances.
The Swedish electric truck startup announced the approval this week, adding Texas to a state-by-state rollout that already includes Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, and Tennessee. According to figures provided by Einride, no other autonomous truck developer operating on U.S. roads has accumulated more exemptions from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — a claim the company has made before, and which it is now using to frame the Texas approval as part of a pattern rather than a one-off win. Each exemption represents a non-trivial exercise in proving to federal regulators that a purpose-built vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no cab — designed from the ground up to run without a human inside — can share public asphalt without catastrophe.
"We've been driverless in Sweden since 2020," CEO Roozbeh Charli told KVUE in Austin. That track record is the credibility Einride is selling to U.S. regulators — five years of commercial driverless operations in Europe, now being imported state by state. The Texas approval is the most vivid test yet: Einride will run its cab-less autonomous trucks on SH 130, a 41-mile private toll road between Austin and Seguin that carries the nation's highest posted speed limit at 85 mph.
The Texas operation will start during off-peak hours to minimize interaction with regular traffic, according to SH 130 Concession Company CEO Ananth Prasad, who described the corridor as deliberately underutilized and built for exactly this kind of high-speed freight run. Einride and SH 130 are also drafting a blueprint for a specialized autonomous truck rest stop with high-capacity EV charging and dedicated docking infrastructure — the kind of facility that does not exist at scale anywhere in the U.S. today because the trucks that would use it do not exist at scale either.
The timing of the Texas approval is tightly coupled to a SPAC listing Einride expects to close in the first half of 2026. A $113 million PIPE round announced alongside the regulatory news frames itself as a vote of investor confidence. The valuation underpinning that round tells a more complicated story: originally announced at $1.8 billion, the PIPE values Einride at $1.35 billion. Electrek noted the haircut reflects what it called "a more sober take on the real-world capabilities of self-driving vehicles" in the current market. Aurora Innovation, which went public via SPAC in 2021 at a $13 billion valuation, is trading far below that today. The market reset that hit Aurora has apparently reached Einride's term sheet too.
Einride's most recently stated annual recurring revenue from signed contracts stands at $92 million, according to the company's press release. In earlier company materials — including SEC filings associated with the SPAC transaction — the figure was cited at $65 million. The $27 million difference reflects a change in how Einride calculates or reports the metric; the draft prospectus will likely offer more detail on what changed. Neither figure includes the Texas operations, which are still in the expansion phase.
On the road, Einride is not racing alone. Aurora Innovation launched the first commercial driverless operation on the Dallas-Houston corridor in April 2025, surpassing 250,000 incident-free driverless miles by January 2026. Kodiak Robotics began driverless operations on private lease roads in December 2024 and holds a U.S. Department of Defense contract. Gatik operates fixed-route middle-mile delivery in controlled environments. Waabi is still pre-commercial with an AI-native architecture. Every one of those companies retrofits conventional trucks. Einride's vehicles were built without a cab from the start, which the company says gives it different freight economics — though it also means no existing fleet can be converted, only new trucks deployed.
"I feel like we do need at least have a driver in it until we get it kind of squared away," Aalyah Johnson, an Austin resident, told KVUE. The reaction is typical: not hostile, not welcoming, just watchful. That is where the autonomous truck industry lives right now — between the press release and the on-ramp, between the investor deck and the 85 mph merge.
What to watch: whether the SH 130 rest stop blueprint gets built before the SPAC closes, whether the ARR figure gets reconciled in the prospectus, and whether Einride's fifth NHTSA exemption is the one that finally puts a purpose-built autonomous truck in a commercial freight lane — or whether Aurora's existing Dallas-Houston head start matters more than the regulatory body count.