If anything has changed between today and the halcyon days of 2016, it’s that those building and marketing self-driving tech are now less ... promise-y. The robots are still coming, the software developers and hardware mavens and balance-sheet-wielding CEOs insist. But more and more, they emphasize that this work is hard, the problems varied, the risks manifold, the regulations slow in coming. Even Waymo, the putative leader in the industry, flush with Alphabet funding—which plans to launch a commercial service this quarter—is having trouble teaching computers to be competent drivers.

Which is why the team at Ike would like to make the thing as easy as possible. “Our core features are descoping and focus,” says Nancy Sun, a cofounder and the startup’s chief engineer. Also, robot trucks.

The cofounders of Ike, which emerges from stealth today, have their share of experience trying to crack self-driving. CEO Alden Woodrow, CTO Jur van den Berg, and Sun have worked at most of the major AV players: Google, Apple, Otto, and Uber. But this time—after all fled Uber’s self-driving truck project, which shuttered this summer—they'd like to keep their project elementary. As elementary as a 15-ton computer that drives itself can be.

The team picked trucks over cars so they can focus on relatively simple highway driving. (Ike's namesake is Dwight Eisenhower, who signed the interstate system-spawning Federal Aid Highway Act into being.) No pedestrians, no cyclists, (hopefully) clear lane lines: Everything’s easier on the highway. And they're serious about staying there.

“We do not want to do a single right turn off the highway,” says van den Berg—even right turns are technological complications. Instead, he envisions Ike's trucks pulling into roadside transfer hubs, where humans drivers will climb in and pilot the rigs to their final destinations. It expects to start testing these trucks on California highways in a matter of months. (As of today, two red big rigs sit in the garage of its San Francisco offices.)

Ike inputs its own sensor data—in this case, lidar data collected on the I-101-380 interchange south of San Francisco—into Nuro's software. Ike

To get itself on the road, Ike is taking a shortcut—a big one. Instead of building its own autonomous vehicle software stack, it's licensing one from Nuro. The two-year-old self-driving startup focuses on delivery robots; the company launched its first pilot project with the grocer Kroger in June.

The nascent self-driving space is littered with “partnerships”—Waymo with Avis and Fiat Chrysler, Lyft with Aptiv, Toyota and Uber. But Ike and Nuro have got something different going on. “This type of licensing arrangement seems rather new in the AV space," says Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineer who studies autonomous technology at Carnegie Mellon University. It might be a sign that once-unlimited autonomous vehicle startup funding is now limited, and that companies are getting creative with money.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars

Or that they're getting creative, period. The automated vehicle sector is still pretty new, especially to answering important questions like How hard is it to build a self-driving truck, really? and How do we make money off this, anyway?