Kodiak's virtual drivers ace a human fleet safety score by Nauto (www.freightwaves.com)

Kodiak Robotics asked Nauto to treat its autonomous stack like a regular human driver and the result was striking: Nauto’s Visually Enhanced Risk Assessment (VERA) — a trip-level safety benchmark that uses in-cab vision plus behavioral heuristics (e.g., stop-sign compliance, tailgating, near-misses, and takeover events) rather than just telematics — scored the Kodiak Driver 98/100 across Nauto’s network of 1,000+ commercial fleets, tying with the top human fleet. For context, Nauto reports average VERA scores of 78 for fleets using its tech and 63 for fleets without it. This is the first public instance of a virtual truck driver being evaluated under a human-focused, vision-based safety rubric. Technically and practically, the milestone matters because it provides a behavior-level, third‑party performance metric that complements traditional AV safety cases — which can be limited by rare-event statistics and selective reporting. VERA lets fleets compare human and autonomous driving behavior in mixed traffic, captures human overrides and responses to chaotic maneuvers, and highlights that Kodiak’s conservative, lane-disciplined approach handles everyday driving at or above top human performance. Limitations remain (rare “black swan” events need far greater mileage to statistically prove), but this pushes the industry toward transparent, vision-based performance benchmarks and may influence how regulators and fleets validate and adopt autonomous trucking.