Jan. 6, 2026 | Hyundai dives into humanoid robots; Kodiak Robotics CEO Don Burnette

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Welcome to Daily Drive for Tuesday, January 6, 2026. I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, the news is already rolling in here at CES.

Hyundai plans to deploy humanoid robots at its Georgia plant by 2028.

Sony Honda Mobility debuts its second vehicle, and later, Kodiak Robotics founder and CEO, Don Burnett,

talks about his company's partnership with Bosch to scale autonomous trucking hardware.

This is one of the most significant announcements for Kodiak for sure, possibly in the broader autonomous trucking industry.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Hyundai Motors Media Day here at CES started on Monday with a group of Boston Dynamics robots dancing to a K-pop soundtrack.

The automaker announced here at CES on Monday it will deploy Boston Dynamics Atlas robots at its Georgia plant starting in 2028.

Zak Czakowski is general manager of Atlas at Boston Dynamics.

These are your typical factory robots. Atlas can lift 110 pounds, has human-like hands with tactile sensing, and uses AI to learn new tasks.

Hyundai envisions them working throughout entire production facilities alongside people.

The company joins Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes in this race.

Analysts think the humanoid robot market could hit $5 trillion by 2050.

Sony Honda Mobility debuted its second vehicle, the Affila Prototype 2026 SUV at CES in Las Vegas.

The company plans to deliver it to American customers by 2028.

Yasuhide Mizuno is Affila's CEO.

We have shaped a model that brings joy and expands space to meet your needs while staying true to the essence of Affila.

Meanwhile, production of the Affila 1 sedan kicked off last fall at Honda's Ohio plant with deliveries now pushed to late 2026.

A few months later than originally planned, the company is taking a cautious approach, rolling out first in California before expanding to Arizona and Japan in 2027.

And the U.S. auto market finished 2025 up about 2%, but momentum faded after federal EV tax credits expired in September.

The culprit? Affordability.

Average prices hit more than $47,000 and monthly payments reached a record $776.

GM remained the top seller with 2.8 million vehicles up 6%, though its fourth quarter fell nearly 7%.

Ford posted its best year since 2019 up 6% on record hybrid sales even as EV volume tumbled 14%.

Stellantis notched its second straight quarterly gain after eight consecutive declines.

Analysts expect 2026 sales to dim under pressure from high borrowing costs, tariffs, and EV uncertainty.

And those are today's headlines. You can find more details on all those stories at AutoNews.com.

I'm joined now by our own Doug Bolduck, managing editor of Automotive News Europe.

He's on the ground with us this week covering CES in Las Vegas. Doug, welcome to Daily Drive.

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

So Doug, what are the major announcements and themes that you're watching for at CES this year?

Well, there has been an incredible amount of announcements around the software-defined vehicle.

It is one of the big challenges for the automakers, these hardware-focused companies for all these years trying to become software experts.

And they're starting to really get traction in that regard.

And it's very interesting because what you're noticing is that there are not a lot of individual announcements, but a lot of partnership announcements.

So it'll be BMW working with this company or Mercedes working with that company.

And so a lot of these companies are coming together because they're finding out to get this job done is a massive challenge.

And so they're working together.

And it's very interesting because you get to get a very strong feel for not only what the automaker is doing,

but what the tier one supplier is doing, and maybe the chip maker is doing,

and all these pieces all come together to create, hopefully, a vehicle that is indeed software-defined.

All right, I have two questions here.

Now, what does CES mean for the European auto market?

And how do European companies approach this show differently from their American counterparts?

Well, it's interesting because, I mean, with Europe, there is such a strong connection to the engineering of the vehicle.

And that has made, hopefully, put them a little bit on their back foot when it comes to the software because it wasn't really in their wheelhouse.

So what we're seeing right now is that a lot of the Europeans are trying to play catch-up.

Really and truly, the Chinese are a farther ahead of all the Western automakers.

They have kind of set the pace, and the Europeans and the North Americans are trying to catch up.

And that's really what we're seeing here a lot at the show is sort of, okay, we're here,

and we are going to start basically being able to compete with these Chinese rivals on technology.

Don't have the Chinese cars here, but there is a huge number of Chinese cars coming into the European market,

and that has really upped the pressure and made the game even more intense in Europe when it comes to technology

and making the cars more software ready.

Doug Boldug, managing editor at Automotive News Europe, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Kelly.

You can follow Doug Boldug's reporting from CES All Week at AutoNews.com and right here on Daily Drive.

Coming up, Kodiak Robotics founder and CEO, Don Burnett, talks about his company's partnership with Bosch,

announced yesterday here at CES to scale autonomous trucking hardware that's next on Daily Drive.

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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellan Walker.

Kodiak Robotics announced a major partnership on Monday here at CES with global automotive supplier Bosch.

It's meant to scale the manufacturing of production-grade autonomous trucking hardware.

Don Burnett is founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics.

He spoke with Automotive News executive producer Jake Neer about the partnership and what it means for scaling autonomous trucks.

Don, thank you so much for joining us on Daily Drive.

It's great to be here.

So the big news of the day is the partnership with Bosch.

Tell us about what's going on with that and what you're trying to achieve.

Absolutely. This is one of the most significant announcements for Kodiak for sure,

possibly in the broader autonomous trucking industry.

And you have on one hand a global leader in automotive supply chain components in Bosch

partnering with Kodiak, leading supplier of self-driving AI technology,

coming together to ensure that we have a scalable future for autonomous vehicles.

As you probably are aware, Kodiak already has fully driverless vehicles out in production in the hands of customers today.

Those trucks are running 24-7. They're running day and night. They're running rain or shine.

But it's still early days and we want to make sure that we have the right suppliers,

the right manufacturing partners with us as we look to bring the technology and deployment to the next level.

And that's what Bosch offers.

Talk more about that.

So I know that you already partner with other big Tier 1 suppliers.

What does Bosch bring to the table that kind of puts you into a new chapter here?

So there's been a lot of talk in the industry over the years about the need to have strong partners to enable scale.

And for the longest time, everyone thought one-stop shop OEM partners were effectively the keys to the castle, right?

That was going to be the path forward.

And Kodiak has taken a slightly different approach historically speaking.

We've worked directly with Tier 1s on an individual basis for individual components of the system.

And we have brought together the redundant, fully automotive grade production self-driving platform.

And we use a partner in Roush as our system integrator, as our manufacturing partner.

They have a line based out of Detroit that's up and running supplying customers with that technology.

But having a single global leading component supplier like Bosch able to bring all of those pieces under the same roof with a shared level of expertise,

understanding of the requirements and understanding of our specs allows us to be much more efficient.

It allows us to ultimately bring down costs and it allows us to accelerate that deployment over the next several years.

And so we see this as effectively the next step in the journey for us as we work to scale the technology into significantly higher truck deployment counts.

Talk a little bit about the decision and the strategy to build up your supplier base with sort of traditional OEM suppliers.

There are a lot of companies that have looked in other directions, not the traditional Detroit OEMs.

What was that decision about and what does that kind of mean for the company?

Well, one of the great things about Bosch is that they're not only capable of supplying AV redundant platform technology to companies like Kodiak,

but they also are the primary supplier to the OEMs.

And so in some ways, this is really enabling Bosch to be the go to supplier to the autonomy industry both at the OEM level,

but also at the autonomy supplier level.

And so I think that's very attractive from their perspective.

It's also attractive from our perspective because we want to standardize the specs.

We want to standardize the requirements across the industry.

And of course, as you know, we've built our system to be platform agnostic.

We want to work on different makes and models of vehicles, large trucks, medium trucks and everything in between, long haul trucks, industrial trucks, etc.

And so in order to enable that type of generality, you need to standardize.

And going to a Bosch to set that standard for the industry broadly is a way for us to ensure that as we move from platform to platform

and as we serve different customer needs, we have a standardized base platform to work off of.

As you mentioned, Kodiak already has fully autonomous trucks out in the real world, driving without drivers in the cab.

What is the next step?

I know you've got some really big plans here in 2026.

Absolutely.

I mean, 2026 is going to be a pivotal year for Kodiak in much the same way that 2025 was the transition from R&D to production company.

As we said, we've got real driverless trucks on the road.

And as a reminder, when we say that it really is nobody in the cab, these are owned and operated by the customer.

But it's still early days.

We've deployed 10 trucks as of the end of Q3, of course, with the promise to deploy more in Q4.

But the contract that we have with our customer Atlas Energy Solutions is the initial order for 100 trucks.

And we looked to fulfill that order of 100 trucks in 2026 and also make the leap and pull our safety observer on our highway operations in the second half of the year as well.

So I think 2026 is going to be a really exciting year for the company, a really pivotal year for the industry more broadly as we look to really transition into a scaled production company.

So with that in mind, what is the environment for, you know, for self-driving trucks right now?

I mean, a lot has changed in a short period of time.

It seems like how are you navigating that?

I think the environment is very strong from a customer demand perspective.

I think the customers are ready.

Generally, more broadly, the general public and consumers of self-driving technology are becoming more comfortable with it.

People are experiencing and I always say seeing is believing.

And so the more people we have in and around self-driving vehicles, the higher the acceptance is.

And I think we've kind of gone beyond a point where it's no longer a question of if it's coming as a question of when it's coming.

And really that's on us.

We need to finish our safety case.

We need to get all of our supply chain and manufacturing partners ironed out so that we have a smooth transition to deploy these trucks more broadly.

But I think from a customer demand perspective, it's there.

They want this technology.

They understand the benefits of safety.

They understand the benefits of efficiency and cost savings.

And ultimately, I think this is going to really transform the broader trucking industry.

There was news recently that President Trump had signed an executive order making it more or limiting states' ability to regulate AI.

And I'm curious how that affects Kodiak, if at all, in what your reaction.

Could that be a, I guess I could see an argument for either side that it could help the deployment.

It could make it more difficult or maybe somewhere in between.

Where do you fall on that?

Generally speaking, with all of these types of matters, it's more of a we'll see it's a wait and see type of situation.

We think in general it is helpful for AI technologies.

And look, this is physical AI.

Self-driving is the tip of the spear for physical AI.

And there's a lot of challenges in physical AI that you don't have in sort of digital AI, data center AI.

As people refer to it, you need to collect a tremendous amount of real world data in order to deploy these massive models and build the system up.

But as we do that, I think you're seeing a lot of tailwinds.

It's those executive orders.

We're seeing a lot of movement in Congress.

We think there's going to be legislation on the federal side for the allowance of self-driving vehicles.

Hopefully this year, again, there's a lot of tailwinds there.

And so we feel very optimistic that from a regulatory perspective, we're in a great place.

Talk a little bit about CES and what you're hoping to, obviously you've made a big announcement already to kind of kick things off this week.

But what else are you interested in seeing?

What kind of conversations do you want to have with people?

I've been coming to CES for many years and it's one of my favorite times of the year, mainly because it's really the only opportunity where everybody in the industry comes in person.

You can have all kinds of conversations with customers, with partners, with contractors and everybody in the ecosystem over zoom these days.

Sometimes it's in person if they happen to be local.

But CES is really the opportunity to have face-to-face interactions.

And I kind of miss the era where we used to have a lot more face-to-face interactions.

And so for me, that's really the value of CES.

It brings everyone around the globe at one time together where we can all meet and have meetings of the mind to talk about the future, to talk about our visions, to talk about strategy.

And it's just a great forum to facilitate those types of conversations.

And that's really what I'm excited about.

Are you hearing anything, specifically any through lines this year, things that are kind of a buzz here?

Not yet. It's still early.

It's still early. It's still early in CES.

Obviously, our announcement is, I think, is really exciting from an autonomy perspective.

And I'm sure there's going to be other great announcements as we go and I look forward to learning more.

Anything else you want to add before we end off here?

I think you've pretty much covered it.

We're super excited about this partnership with Bosch.

We really think it sets a new standard for partnerships within the industry.

It enables a new level of scale that just hasn't been seen in this industry before.

And this is something, again, that can be applied to both at an OEM level and at an up-fit level.

So it works for both models.

And that, to me, is the important factor that makes this really credible, that actually makes this meaningful for the way that we're going to schedule our deployment over the coming years.

And so, yeah, a lot more to come.

Thanks for having me.

Don Burnett, CEO, founder of Kodiak Robotics.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Jan. 6, 2026 | Hyundai dives into humanoid robots; Kodiak Robotics CEO Don Burnette

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Hyundai

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BMW

Mercedes

Affila Prototype 2026 SUV

Affila 1

EV tax credits

average vehicle price

monthly payments

GM

Ford

Stellantis

software-defined vehicle

Bosch

Kodiak Robotics

autonomous trucking

autonomous vehicles

Roush

Dodge Journey

OEM suppliers

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