Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started. Good morning, everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us today. I just wanna give a special thanks to all of you out here at our autonomous trucking terminal in Palmer, Texas, and those via the webcast for joining us today. We really, really appreciate your time and interest. We have a very exciting program for you today. We're gonna take a deep dive into our roadmap to launch Aurora Horizon, our autonomous trucking service. First, our CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Urmson, will provide a brief overview of Aurora, our market opportunity, and our business model.
Next, he'll share some great technological progress we're making with the Aurora Driver, review our key milestones on our roadmap, and outline the framework we committed to sharing, which will enable the investment community as well as all of our stakeholders to measure our progress toward launch of Aurora Horizon. We'll then have a safety discussion in the format of a fireside chat with our Vice President of Safety, Nat Beuse, and Dr. Jeff Runge, former NHTSA Administrator and Chair of our Safety Advisory Board. We think this will be a really valuable discussion to talk about a critical aspect of self-driving technology development and deployment. Next, Sterling Anderson, our Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, will review some progress we've made on hardware advancement as well as our vehicle programs.
Kendra Phillips, Vice President of Service Delivery, will give an update on our autonomous trucking pilots, as well as a look into how we're building out our operations. Lastly, Chris Urmson will close out with an overview of the regulatory landscape for autonomous trucking, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Before I turn it over to Chris Urmson, one housekeeping item I need to note. You're all familiar with this, but I have to read it. We will be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 in today's presentation. These statements are based on current expectations of the management of Aurora and are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainty and changes, which may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.
More detail can be found on this slide, which is available for download along with the balance of our presentation on our investor relations website, which is ir.aurora.tech. A replay of the keynote presentation will also be available on our website for 30 days, so welcome all of you to watch that. With that, I would now like to introduce our CEO and co-founder, Chris Urmson.
Thanks, Stacy. Stacy always gets to do the fun part of the presentation. Well, welcome and again thank you all for joining us here at our South Dallas terminal. Really appreciate the opportunity to share with you what we're up to at Aurora and keep you abreast of our progress. I wanna make a particular thank you to some of our partners who are here. We have Eric Fuller here from U.S. Xpress. We have Matt Cullum, who is the Chief Engineer on the vehicle program with PACCAR. Sasko Cuklev from Volvo Autonomous Solutions is here. Stephanie Cook from FedEx is here. A little later, we're gonna be joined by Matt and Jason from Covenant. Please seek them out. They'll be here. I'm sure they'd be happy to share with you their experience working with us.
We're gonna have a little bit of a keynote session right now, and then we're gonna get you in the back to meet some of our team, see some of the technology up close and personal, and then give folks an opportunity to experience the truck on the road around here in South, just south of Dallas. We also offered folks to get a ride down to Houston. I know at least one person took us up on that. Have a fun day with that. It should be a good experience and look forward to you learning from that. Aurora was founded in 2017 with the mission to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly.
When we set out to build the Aurora Driver, we really set out to build a driver that would work across different vehicle types. Of course, we're focusing now on delivering Aurora Horizon, our product in freight first. We've built this driver in a way where we can transfer the capabilities that we developed on light vehicles to trucks to light vehicles. We showed that transferability in Q1 of this year. I think I skipped something there. The Aurora Driver is this combination of self-driving software, hardware, and data services that enable vehicles to drive themselves. Again, it's designed to operate across Class 8 trucks and light passenger vehicles. Trucking and Horizon will be the first product.
Aurora Horizon was designed to provide carriers and fleet owners with a safe, reliable, and efficient autonomous driving service along with the support and monitoring tools to easily integrate it into your business. The benefits of Aurora Horizon will help you realize the full potential of your fleet and scale your business for increasing demand. With no hours of service limitations, the Aurora Driver will dramatically improve productivity, reduce fuel consumption, and most importantly, reduce crashes and save lives with technology that never gets tired or distracted. Here's how Aurora Horizon will work. Simply secure a truck from one of our OEM partners and subscribe to Aurora Horizon. We'll provide the tools you need to integrate autonomous trucks into your existing fleet network and begin moving goods.
A subscription to Aurora Horizon will include the Aurora Driver, an autonomous system that's safe, powerful, and continuously improving, is just the first step. Aurora Beacon, our mission control system, will manage and monitor your fleet network through every step of a delivery. Aurora Shield, our roadside assistance service, will offer 24/7 support in addition to fueling, inspection, and maintenance services at our terminals, keeping your trucks running efficiently and on time. We will introduce Aurora Horizon with a terminal-to-terminal autonomous network that will rapidly expand throughout the Sun Belt, North America, and beyond. Eventually, Aurora Horizon will support end-to-end routes between a load's origin and final destination. Join our launch fleet, and we'll work with you to create a customized plan that optimizes and scales your business. Aurora Horizon, it's the dawn of a new era in transportation.
We've brought you here today to share our vision for how we're going to deliver this and how we can transform this concept into reality. While many AV companies have been focused on ride-hailing first, we've been focused or we're focused on delivering what we think is the fastest way to build a business in this space, and that's through scale and through freight. As you know, America's highway system is really very self-similar. A mile of freeway in Texas looks an awful lot like a mile of freeway in California, looks an awful lot like a mile of freeway in Minnesota. As we deliver the technology that operates here, we expect to be able to scale it and operate it across the country. Longer term, we intend to leverage this technology into ride-hailing.
As we expand from driving on the freeway in our terminal-to-terminal type operations, our trucks will then expand to go from warehouse to warehouse. Our passenger vehicles will expand to drive from airports to convention centers and hotels and ultimately into city centers and all the way between stores and distribution centers. The opportunity in freight is incredible. The U.S. market is about $700 billion. When you compare this to ride-hailing today, which is about a $35 billion market, it's a much bigger opportunity. Over time, we don't want to lose track of that ability and personal mobility because we expect that personal mobility space to be about a $1 trillion opportunity eventually. We focused the last six years in actually building the core technology to capture this opportunity.
We've also invested heavily in building partnerships because at Aurora, we want to focus on the thing we can do best and then find like-minded partners to work with us to scale and deploy the technology. We see immense opportunity. We've got these incredible partners in PACCAR and Volvo. Together, they're two of the top three truck manufacturers in the U.S., and they deliver almost half the vehicles in the U.S. We also work with incredible partners that take those trucks and drivers to do work in the world. FedEx is the largest less-than-truckload carrier in the U.S. Werner is a top five full truckload carrier. Schneider is one of the largest multimodal carriers in the U.S. Uber Freight, of course, is an up-and-coming significant technology-forward freight broker. We also work closely with U.S. Xpress and Covenant in collaboration.
Thank you again for those of you who've been able to join us here today. First and foremost, Aurora is a mission-driven company. We're motivated by the incredible opportunity to improve safety on the world's roads and on the U.S. roads. It's fundamental to everything we do here. In the U.S., roughly 500,000 truck accidents happened last year, and about 5,000-5,500 people died in truck fatalities. The vast majority of these are addressable with the technology we're building at Aurora. We can make this much, much better. We see an incredible opportunity to improve the businesses. The challenges that our customers face first is a shortage of drivers. We're delivering a scalable, stable driver supply. Hours of service limit how much our customers can use their vehicles on any given day.
This will allow them to get better revenue per vehicle and allow them to move freight more quickly. Fuel cost is one of the largest contributors to their cost structure. We expect these vehicles to be significantly more fuel efficient. Of course, higher insurance costs continue to increase. We expect both a combination of safer operation and better visibility into the events that happen on the road will allow us to manage and bring those costs down over time. Solving these pain points makes a whole lot of near-term value for our customers. It allows them to have better safety. It allows them to move freight more quickly. That leads to better revenue generation per truck and reduced operating costs. This will allow us to improve both their top line and their bottom line.
To meet the needs of our customers and most effectively monetize our technology, we're using a business model of driver as a service. This model is basically a subscription model where we expect really in the long term these software as a service type revenue structure or margin structure. We're gonna be providing this technology to the fleet owners in a basically you pay as you use it or pay as you go way. This model aligns very well with what our customers need. It increases their revenue potential. It allows us to operate really as a valuable technology partner and supplier to them rather than a competitor in the space. They operate their trucks more. That allows them to have bigger revenue opportunity. That increases our revenue opportunity as well. It allows them to have really consistent pricing.
The variable part of the cost structure becomes less variable with us. The customer continues to operate their business as the way they know how to today, right? Again, we're slotting into it in a way that feels natural. They have drivers on their fleet today. We provide a driver to them. We're gonna talk a bit more about the three parts or the pillars of our technology, of our product, the Aurora Driver, which is the part that's kind of constantly improving every day. The operations, service, and delivery. This is the part of our system that enables our customers to actually integrate the Aurora Driver onto their businesses. Then, of course, the truck platform, the work we're doing with our amazing OEM partners.
At the end of last quarter, we shared with you our roadmap between here and actually delivering the Aurora Driver commercially. We've got basically three milestones between here and commercial launch: getting to feature complete, delivering the Aurora Driver at the point where it's ready to go, and then, of course, launching it. Today, I'm gonna focus first about the Aurora Driver. Now, as you think about driving vehicles on the road and operating our service, imagine taking a trip with me. We're going to head out of the terminal. We're gonna drive down surface roads. We're going to get onto the freeway. Along the freeway, we have to interact with traffic. We may encounter emergency vehicles. We may encounter debris in the road, construction. We have to be able to navigate all of that.
Ultimately, we'll exit the freeway, get back onto surface streets, and pull into terminals. That's the set of capabilities we've been developing at Aurora, and that's what you can see reflected in our roadmap. Over time, we release new capabilities, but we're also constantly improving the features that we've already have on the vehicles. Many of you may have been here last year and got a ride. You'll see it's another experience today with the vehicles, and you'll unfortunately probably not get to experience most of what we've been working on over the last year because these are the more rare events that are out there on the road. Here are some examples of some of the things we've been working through. Here's the Aurora Driver navigating a lane closure. Here it's dense traffic. I think this is down near Houston.
The Aurora Driver is slowing, creating room, understanding this driver on the left is trapped, leaving space for them to cut in, and operating in this kind of heavy traffic. Here's another example where we're having to deal with contemporary construction signs. This is on the drive between Dallas and El Paso, driving into the setting sun. On the side of the road, we're seeing a sign that's reducing the speed limit. The Aurora Driver understands that and reflects up in the top left here that the speed limit is reduced from 75 to 65 mi per hour. In Texas, they have this amazing road structure.
Just on the road closure, if it forces that into the service lane, will it do that, or will it shut down?
That's one of the capabilities that is. Actually, do we have Carl here? Today, are we able to drive in the service lane?
A little bit.
Yeah.
One of the things that we're gonna be doing is we're gonna hard code that.
Yeah. I think that's next on the roadmap. Right. Yes, we'll drive partially in it today. We won't move all the way into a fully over into the service lane.
Everybody, this is just a reminder, we will have Q&A opportunity at the end. We'll just ask that you reserve your questions for that time frame, please.
Yeah. Thank you, Stacy. As I was saying, in Texas, we have this great road structure. They call it a Texas U-turn or Texas boomerang. This is the ability to basically change direction around a freeway without having to come to a stop. This is a technology we developed first on the Toyota Siennas and have now transferred back to the truck. Here the driver is coming to the left-hand lane, makes the little turn here, and then has to merge into traffic as it comes around the corner to get back and head in the opposite direction onto the freeway. Of course, we have to deal with other drivers on the road. In this case, the Aurora Driver's attempting to make a lane change.
The vehicle in front of us, or from behind us, swerves over and is making a lane change aggressively to the right. The driver is making a split-second decision that it's going to kind of pull back, create space, and then once it's safe to do so, move back into the left lane again here and then continue safely on its way. We shared with you at the end of Q2 that we'd delivered our Fault Management System. This, again, is the ability for the Aurora Driver to understand when something is broken, take the appropriate remedial action, in this case, pulling to the side of the freeway and stopping, getting itself out of harm's way, and reducing the risk to other drivers on the road.
This is not one of those sexy things if you think about in self-driving, but it's one of those critical elements of actually delivering a product. We talked in our roadmap about in this quarter delivering managing foreign debris on the road and also driving on repainted or construction shifted lane markings. We've delivered both of those. In this video, what you can see is, we'll wait for it to loop back again here, but what we'll see is it's driving towards this chunk of road here. There's a bit of debris in the center of it. The vehicle detects it right about now and then able to make a little shift to the right around that bit of tire carcass.
For added complexity, of course, there's a stopped vehicle here, that it happened to encounter on the side of the road, and it makes a nice courtesy lane change to create space around that vehicle. On our path to commercialization, we have these two major milestones, for Aurora Horizon. The first is to get to feature complete, which we're working towards at the end of Q1, and then to be, Aurora Driver ready, which we're working to at the end of, the year. Feature complete means that the system does everything we think it needs to do to launch the product, on our initial launch lanes in Texas. We'll know that it's ready because at that point, we won't have any more policy interventions.
Policy interventions are where we ask our operators preemptively to take over because we know that the driver can't handle certain situations on the roadway. We'll expect everything to be able to, maybe not fully reliably, but at this point, operate in a way that we have confidence that we can unleash it on the road. Aurora Driver Ready means that our safety case is complete for everything except for the base vehicle platform. That if we had that platform, the driver could be out on the road running safely. How are we going to share with you the progress we're making between feature complete and Aurora Driver Ready? Well, we committed to providing a measure for this, and what we're gonna share with you is our Autonomy Readiness Measure.
This will allow the investment community to follow along and allow us to continue our tradition of being the most transparent company in the AV space. We've been saying for a while that safety case is the critical thing to actually having a commercially relevant product, and that we will be ready to launch when the safety case is complete. As a reminder, the safety case is this structured argument as to why we have confidence in the safety of the vehicle on the road. At the top level, it's made up of these five things. First, proficient, that when the vehicle is operating in nominal conditions, it's driving well. It's staying in its lane. It's making space for other vehicles. The second is that it's fail-safe.
It understands when something is failed or broken, is able to take the appropriate remedial action to keep itself and others on the road safe. That it's continuously improving, that we have processes in place to close the cycle so that the driver gets better, and we get better as a company, and we learn from our mistakes. That it's resilient, the things that we may not have expected to encounter on the road, that we handle gracefully and keep the world safe. Well, that it's the company is trustworthy, that we operate with integrity. The combination of these things will be. We'll document all of this, and we'll have a collection of evidence that gives us the confidence that we've done the engineering work, we've done the process work, we've done the business work to deliver a safe product.
What we'll be sharing with you is the percentage completion of this safety case framework. We'll begin with when we're feature complete through commercial launch. We expect that by the time we get to Aurora Driver ready, there'll be about 95% is where we'll be with this autonomy readiness measure. 95%. That remaining 5% is about the final bits of integration with the autonomy-enabled truck platform that we have to do once we have those in hand. Then by the time we get to commercial launch, that safety case will be 100% complete. We're targeting Aurora Driver ready at the end of next year. In addition to sharing what we think is the launch bar, right? That fundamental measure of, are we done yet?
We're also intending to share with you a measure that allows you to understand indicatively how the Aurora Driver is performing on the road. The measure we're gonna provide for this is percentage of miles in autonomy. This is kind of how good or how much of the time is the vehicle operating. Now, this measure is gonna be made up of three factors. For each mile that we operate, we're gonna ask, basically, did everything just work the way it should do, the easiest possible, kind of most obvious measure of this. Is everything operating nominally? If yes, then that's operating in autonomy, and we'll count that in the metric.
The second is, did we... Were we able to address whatever maybe has been off nominal using Aurora Beacon by providing input from off-board? If that's the case, then that also will count towards this percentage of miles in autonomy because that is commercially relevant how we're operating the vehicle or how we intend to operate Aurora Horizon and operate the service. Then finally, what we'll assess is any time that our drivers have an intervention on the road or disengage the system, we'll ask the question, was that required? We'll do offline analysis using a combination of simulation and other analysis tools to assess, did they actually need to take over? Now, this turns out to be a subtle but very important point. We train our operators to keep themselves, the vehicle, and others on the road safe.
We wanna make sure that we don't create this weird perverse incentive where they think at any moment, like, "Should I take over right now? Is this gonna, you know, is this going to mess up our metric externally?" We don't want them to ever have that question. We want them to do the right thing on the road, do the safe thing on the road and take over. After the fact, we can ask the question, did they need to or not? We'll be tracking that. We think this is really an important part of having a safe culture, right, is making sure folks don't have weird incentives to behave in ways that don't result in safe outcomes. Now, it's important to understand that this percentage of miles in autonomy won't get to 100%.
It's not a launch bar, right? No matter how good we are, things are going to happen on the road. A tire will blow out. A piece of hardware might fail. Something where we can't solve it remotely or through just pure software on the vehicle. While we expect this to trend towards 100%, it won't actually get there. It's not really our bar for launching. It's not our bar at all for launching. Our bar for launching is that autonomy readiness metric. Is our safety case 100% complete? That's kind of the measure we're gonna be sharing with you. We think it'll allow you to have really good clarity into how close we are to launching and the progress we're making.
With that, given how important safety is to us at the company, and how that's one of our number one priority, it's right there at the beginning of our mission, I'd like to invite Nat Beuse, our VP of Safety, up to talk, have a little bit of a fireside chat, with former NHTSA Administrator, Jeff Runge, Dr. Runge. Nat, I've known since his time in government. I think he was probably one of the first people in the federal government that was actually thinking about automated vehicles. He's been an incredible asset for us at the company. He's allowed us to really understand how regulators think, allow us to engage with them, allow us to have built, you know, a very strong rapport. So thank you, Nat. We'd love to have you up here and Dr. Runge.
Thanks, Chris. I don't think I need that.
You need that.
Okay. Starting with me.
Oh, good. I think better on my butt than I do on my feet.
Morning, everybody. I'm Nat Beuse. Spent many years at the agency in a bunch of different programs, everything from consumer information to regulation, to basically leading the agency's efforts on AV cybersecurity and basically everything else in between all of that. Actually Dr. Runge here is a former NHTSA administrator who was one of the first administrators that I actually worked for at the agency. Because we didn't apparently work him hard enough, the time he came to the agency was right around the time SUVs were coming into their own. If folks remember, that was also around Ford Firestone, and there was a lot of interesting things happening in the vehicle safety space then.
He was bored with that and decided he was gonna go over to Homeland Security, shortly after that got stood up, after 9/11. He's had a really long career in a bunch of different aspects of safety, and I've been honored to kind of have known him, I guess almost 20 years now.
More than.
It's been a while. We're gonna have a conversation just about some of the things that Chris talked about, but some of the things that I think we both believe are kind of fundamental to AV safety. Jeff Runge, thanks for joining us on here.
Absolutely.
I think one of the things that we've talked about before is this idea of our Safety Advisory Board. At least for me personally, I find it always helpful to assume you don't know everything, and it's always helpful to have outside perspective sort of help shape what are your gaps and what are you missing. This idea of a Safety Advisory Board really kind of serves that purpose. You know, we're in the day-to-day working on the vehicle, working on the tech, and it's always helpful to have a group of experts guide you. I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Runge to kind of talk about his perspective of the Safety Advisory Board and why did you join it and what value do you think it provides to Aurora.
Thanks, Nat. You know, we only have 20 minutes, so I can't expound to you in much detail on this. But I will tell you that, you know, I was an emergency physician working in one of the country's busiest trauma centers for two decades, and my research was in traffic injury control, and trauma care. You know, frankly, I got burned out because of the revolving door of trauma that kept coming into the emergency department, and road crash injury was the leading cause of those injuries. It's still the leading cause of death in Americans between the ages of two and 34.
You know, the fact that there was not a national crisis declared around that motivated me to leave my practice and come to NHTSA. There were 43,801 deaths on the road when I got there. When we left, we introduced some regulation that required technology, namely electronic stability control and side curtain airbags. That technology reduced was responsible for reducing the number of crashes down to about 32,000 once those you know once the vehicles got into the fleet and those things started to change. I was convinced that technology could be the answer. Human behavior is very difficult to change. I'm the click it or ticket guy, okay?
I get the fact that we need to do human behavior change, but you know, technology has to step in when human behavior is not capable of doing this. I've been very bullish on autonomous driving now for a long time with basically hopefulness, because you know, I don't care if you're disabled, if you can't see or you can't hear or you're too old or you're too reckless, you know, autonomy has a solution for this. When you asked me to come and join back in the Uber days, I was skeptical, but hopeful.
You know, what I'm seeing now, and I think everybody on our Safety Advisory Board would agree, we've got people from , you know, an audit background, aviation, product development in aviation, trucking, road safety, and everybody is convinced that, and Chris, I think you sort of alluded to this, that you know, the safety case is the business case for this, okay? We, you know, and it, y ou have to be safe. You know, I joined the board for that reason, and it's why I'm here today.
Yeah, I think that's right. I think when I think of the broad expertise that we have on the board, one of the points that you've made to me a couple of times about the safety case and why it's relevant is the fact that it's a claims-based argument, right? It's not this idea that we don't understand what we need to solve. You actually break all of this down to these different claims, and then you do the work to answer the claims. It's a very powerful tool from that perspective. I think to me, when I figure out, you know, and think through the value of such a thing, it was very new in the AV space.
You know, most of the folks in the AV space for the last decade or so have been talking about it's some other metric about how it's safer than a human and all of that. I think that's actually not the answer. The answer is you actually have to do the engineering. This is an engineering problem. Go solve it. I think other industries have used this technique, and what we've done is kind of modified it. You know, I would ask you how you know it's not that simple though, right? It took you, the rest of the board and myself many conversations to actually really unpack this safety case and why it's so valuable.
Right. You know, the safety case is kind of jargon, and maybe I should explain a little bit.
Sure.
You know, think about this. You're an investment analyst. You get it. It's a spreadsheet. Column A is a series of claims of what the Aurora Driver can do. It's a long list. You know, and each of the other columns beyond column A is the evidence that those safety claims have been met. It's a matrix of claims and evidence. The safety case is built upon capabilities that they want to attain. There are milestones in the safety case where they cannot proceed beyond the next stage of development until the safety case is made, which makes Nat's job very difficult. It also instills confidence, you know, in.
When the Safety Advisory Board probes, you know, have to convince us that these things have actually been met, Nat reminds me that, look, we have to convince ourselves first. They're not, you know. It starts with safety. Safety is not only a reason to have this, but it's also it has to be safe if the benefits are gonna be attained.
Yeah. One of the things we've done in our safety case is incorporate both product aspects, organizational aspects, and operations aspects. I wanna talk about the organization piece for a minute. One of the thing that's been very powerful in other industries is the idea of strong safety culture and kind of how you manage risk within a company. You know, you can have a bunch of processes, but how do you know you're actually using those processes? Are they actually effective? Are they working? Are they doing the intended thing that you thought they were supposed to do? Another thing you have to measure is actually the employees themselves. You know, do employees actually believe in the things that you're saying, and how do you actually know that?
One of the things we've done within our safety case is incorporate this idea of a Safety Management System. This is an idea that's really I would say a lot of people point to aviation as being the poster child for Safety Management System, meaning you had very safe aircraft, but you were missing a lot of different pieces in order to really make that system what it is today that we all kind of take basically for granted. We're instilling that now today in Aurora, and I've actually shared that with others in the industry. I wanted to ask you, Jeff, you know, 'cause you've been in a lot of other different areas as well, how do you see the power of this Safety Management System really playing out?
Yeah. Once again, I wanna make sure that the jargon is understood. Big S, big M, big S. Safety Management System is an internationally accepted standard for how to manage safety across an organization. Aurora is the first company in the automotive space that I have encountered that actually has fully adopted Safety Management System or is working on it. You're very, very close. We have aviation experts who go around auditing airlines around the world to see if they are compliant with safety management. This has basically four pillars. It's safety policy. Are your policies in place where safety has its preeminent role in your operations? Second is the ability to manage risk. Understand risk, manage risk, put in countermeasures for risk and hazards.
The third one is safety assurance, where you actually measure if what you're doing is actually meeting the mission of the organization, and if your risk management procedures are actually working to manage risk. The fourth one is what you just mentioned, which is safety promotion, externally, internally. How do you be safety? You know, a safety management culture, if you go into a company that has a safety culture and you ask, "Where is the safety office?" Everybody self-identifies. Well, let's start. It's right here. It's not down the hall and to the right. You know, it's complicated. It's transparent. It's open. You can look up Safety Management System. It was promulgated by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO.
The U.S. was slow to adopt, but the FAA requires it now. It's also spread into maritime and rail. Coast Guard uses it for their operations. It is a great target and a methodology to manage safety across your company.
Yeah. I wonder if you could talk a little bit too about how you've seen this play out, particularly in the auto sector where this isn't paid attention to, and kind of the ramifications of that.
I mean, you know, listen, I'll start with my pedigree. I mean, there's no Safety Management System in medicine. Yet, you know, the Institute of Medicine came out and said, you know, "Well, you know, it's a crisis of medical safety." Well, first of all, there was not a safety culture in medicine when I was practicing. It was blame. It was malpractice claims. It was all that. You know, the safety management is a permissive environment where everybody's job is to root out problems and solve them.
Yeah. I think that's really, really powerful. I think one thing we'll also talk about in how we use the safety case is this idea of transparency. One of the ways we're leveraging that safety case, as Dr. Runge mentioned, is even with the Safety Advisory Board, we can have very detailed conversations about very specific claims. The other way we're leveraging that is actually also with regulators and with the public. Not everybody has the same questions. What this allows us to do is actually share that framework, and we have shared that framework, for them to zero in on whatever particular thing they want to talk about.
For some stakeholders, it's like, "Tell me how you understand what operational design domain you're in, and that you actually have evidence to prove that you understand that." For other stakeholders, it's more around, "Tell me about, you know, your safety culture and how you know your employees are reporting safety concerns." For yet others, it's like, "Well, just tell me that you meet the rules, and I'm good to go." We're able to kind of service all of those stakeholders with this kind of universal framework. I wanna talk a little bit about public trust. You know, Jeff and I in our career when we worked together and even now more directly, there's always this aspect of public trust that's really important in motor vehicle safety.
Partly because the public has a really bad perception of risk, particularly when it's self-imposed risk, but they kind of get very agitated when it's the risk that someone else is imposing on them. What do I mean by that? Driving a car is likely probably the one of the riskiest things that humans do on a day-to-day basis, and yet, as Jeff pointed out, we're up to 40,000 deaths a year, and it's kind of like not the necessary action, at least in our humble opinion, that there should be.
Yet, if there was a bus crash today, and no one got injured or one person maybe got, unfortunately fatally killed, there'd be front page news across the country about that one particular crash because it was a bus, it was a driver, and it's kinda like, well, it was them, not me kind of attitude from the public. We're in this space with self-driving where we have to work really hard day in and day out to explain what we're doing on safety, in a way to convince the public and build that kind of public trust. Jeff, I wanted to know if you could talk about a little bit from what you've seen, what are the things that we're doing right in terms of bringing that public trust and building that awareness?
Well, first let me talk about the ideal, okay? You build public trust with consistency, predictability, and transparency. When in driving, there is a... You depend upon the predictability of what other drivers are doing. There's gonna be a learning curve with public interacting with autonomous vehicles. You know, 95% of motor vehicle crashes involve human error. If you can take the Aurora Driver's potential culpability out, you will create a very predictable, very consistent vehicle that people will learn how to interact with on the roads. Much more predictable than the Mustang that cut you off this morning, you know, on I-45, okay?
Now, y ou saw it. You were ready for it. You saw him coming, you know, and you backed off. I saw Chris's demo where he saw somebody, the Aurora Driver, sorry, he, she, it, saw somebody cutting in front of them, and they stopped back to allow space. I don't always do that, you know. I kinda wanna punish him a little bit for like, you know, being a jerk, okay? The Aurora Driver's intended to be predictable and consistent. The transparency piece is a piece that we talk about all the time. You know, right now, nobody has a clue what you all are doing to safeguard safety, to make the to drive the culpability out of the Aurora Driver, right?
At some point in time, you're gonna have to share not just the story, but the spreadsheet with you know, not really the spreadsheet, but the idea of what's in the claims that you make. You know, I've made the case all the time that I love NHTSA. I talk to them every week. It was the best job I ever had. The regulatory scheme that NHTSA uses for automobile regulation certification will not cover this. It's self-certification. If they can pass a test, they can sell a car. This is more like how the FDA approves drugs where a drug company comes in and says, "My drug will do this. These are the side effects. These are the benefits. We know from testing that, you know, we've done ample testing, you know, phase I, phase II, phase III studies. Here are the data on our claims."
The automobile regulatory scheme that we have does not anticipate this. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that, you know, through that sort of leadership role, Nat, that Aurora has developed, that you've developed through your whole career in autonomy, that you're in position to sort of lead that discussion among government regulators.
Yeah. I think it's an important point to end on is, you know, and I think Chris is gonna talk about this later, but you know, it takes a long time to do regulation. Even if you started today, you know, Jeff started one on electronic stability control that.
It took us, what, five years, right?
Yeah. That I had to finish. I've worked on other ones, backup camera is one of them that took nearly 10 years. 10 years. You know, this is a journey, I think is what Dr. Runge is trying to say. We have to start that journey at some point. I think we believe the way that we are operating now in the current structure is the way to do it and to really deliver this technology in a way that's first and foremost safe, but in a way that's very transparent on what we're doing. We're not hiding behind a magic stat.
We're actually fully showing all of the things that we're thinking about and inviting folks to challenge on whether we've actually thought about the right things. Thanks, everyone. I think now I'm gonna invite Sterling Anderson to come up and talk about some of the great progress we've been making on hardware.
Thank you. All right. Thanks, Nat. Jeff. All right. One of the hallmarks of our developmental approach over the last several years has been our willingness to invest strategically in not just the software, but also the hardware. When done right, this co-evolution, this joint development of hardware and software can be really powerful. Can you all hear me okay? Okay. It can be a really powerful tool. It not only accelerates our path to market, but also allows us to do it with a far more performant integrated system than we could otherwise do were we to cobble together a set of off-the-shelf solutions, many of which don't even exist, at quite the specifications required for a problem like this. We've included in our hardware roadmap a high-level overview of the key phases left between here and commercial launch.
In the next few minutes, I hope to unpack with you an illustration of both the progress that we've made, but also define what each of these phases means. The first of those phases that you see here, at least in the timeframe that we've shown, is where we are or were last quarter. This is with an autonomy development platform, a kit of self-driving hardware designed to be representative in all the ways that are meaningful to the self-driving system. For things like sensors, this is the range, this is the resolution. For things like compute, it's the bandwidth with which to power the software that we're developing.
Importantly and notably, this development kit was not designed from the outset for reliability in the kind of harsh environments of the road for trucks or for the kind of redundancy, failover mechanisms, self-health monitoring that's required to operate without a human fallback. That's this phase two. I'm excited to note that over the last several months, the team has made substantial progress in the development of this driverless-ready hardware kit. What I mean by this is by incorporating both the functional safety systems, the health checks, the error checking, the failover mechanisms, and even the redundancy throughout the system, whether it's in the computer, the sensors, the electrical systems, to allow it to operate without that human fallback.
This is actually rolled out in almost two dozen vehicles that we've designed, developed, produced, and introduced to our fleet over the last several months. This is actually in operation today in those fleets. The final step, I recognize now it's a little hard to see at this resolution, is what we're calling the hardened driverless hardware. What I mean by this is taking that driverless-ready hardware that we've just integrated into our fleet and now hardening it. What I mean by that is preparing it for both manufacturability but also high levels of reliability that it requires to operate in these networks at high uptimes so these trucks are performant for our vehicle, for our logistics customers.
Along the way, the team has not only developed driverless capability, but they've also made significant progress on the hardening of that capability, and they've also realized several, I'll call them surprise improvements to some of the performance of these systems that have been really meaningful. I'll show you a few examples of where that's happened. To start, though, before I show you those examples, I just wanna orient you physically as to what we're talking about when we say the Aurora Driver hardware. What you see here is a truck rendering effectively integrated with the hardware called out in blue from the sensor modules.
This is everything from radars to lidar to camera to IMU to GPS and a variety of other systems required to perceive both the world around it, but also keep track of the health and safety of the system itself. The computer, the networking systems, the electrical systems required to tie all of this together. The computer that we've rolled out, you'll see here on my right, your left, has been designed to, in these trucks, allow both safe operation with a human fallback and also to withstand the harsh conditions the trucks it operates will experience.
To achieve this driverless capability, this redesign introduced error checking, self-health monitoring required for the computer to know when a failure has occurred, as well as key redundancies and failover mechanisms to fall back to in the event that one does happen. In addition to this, the team has actually and we joke about this computer looking relatively bomb-proof, but the team has invested heavily in the robustification or the hardening of this computer so that it can operate per the demanding, exacting automotive standards stipulated in ISO 16750 set of guidelines.
We'll talk a little bit about some of the tests and development that went into doing that, but it's really, really important for the kind of high uptime environments for a highly performant computer like this, to operate, that it is designed for that ruggedness, for that reliability. That's what we mean when we talk about that final stage of hardening. In the computer already operating in our trucks, it's gone through much of that. The team has made tremendous progress there. My apologies. I'm gonna show you on the left here another example of what's happened here in preparation of this driverless-ready hardware. This is specifically the camera system.
The team has also made substantial progress on the development of our cameras to both quadruple their resolution, but also to introduce our proprietary image processing pipeline that's allowed us to realize substantially better dynamic range and performance out of these systems. What I mean by dynamic range is effectively the ability to resolve high differences in brightness between different elements of the scene. What you see here is a couple of examples. The imager on the left is a very common one in the automotive space. It's a two-megapixel imager, run through an image processing pipeline provided by some suppliers. This is an image that the Aurora Driver would have seen through that imager.
On the right, you see the imagers that are running on the Aurora-powered trucks. This is incorporated into the hardware that's in our vehicles operating today. In fact, the vehicles that you'll ride in today have these. What you'll notice is a couple of things. First, kind of obviously tone mapping and things get a little better. Dynamic range gets substantially better. Your ability to resolve both kind of the darkness of the tunnel and also the brightness of what's outside of it is a really important element of that progress. Finally, you'll see that kind of that much better resolution obviously translates to better performance of a perception system that's based on it. Our proprietary FirstLight lidar, I'm gonna point you to the rightmost screen now.
Yeah, we'll kind of do this dance back and forth. You can watch the left one if you want. It's designed also for this ruggedness, also to ISO 16750 standards. It's introduced a number of other things, both the kind of fault handling and error checking required for that driverless ready capability, but also getting ahead of this robustness in extreme operating environments. Up to and including its integrated liquid cooling, self-health monitoring, but also integrated cleaning systems. The sensor is able to keep itself clean in the event that it's operating in inclement weather conditions. Crickets are a thing here in Texas right now as you may have observed, walking in.
Crickets, bugs, other issues that would otherwise obscure a sensor, this integrated cooling system has been designed to help us deal with. A final note here, this is one of those kind of surprising moments that we realized as the team developed this, is the priority here was make this system redundant, make it capable of driverless operation, and make it rugged. It was not, "Hey, increase our lead. Increase the lead and performance that this sensor gives us." If you'll recall, this sensor, Aurora's FirstLight, is based on a novel approach to lidar to the use of light in detection and ranging, which is called frequency modulated continuous wave, or you may hear it referred to as FMCW.
The benefits of FMCW by virtue of the way that it modulates light and the way that it receives and measures it are manifold. Among them, though, is this ability to perceive at much longer ranges than traditional pulse modulating units can do. In fact, a year ago, we showed an example juxtaposing what the FirstLight lidar sees relative to what a traditional pulse modulator lidar unit sees. If you'll recall, you're welcome to look at old materials, but that juxtaposition showed a full seven seconds of additional time beyond what a traditional unit would have seen, that the FirstLight lidar can actually see, resolve, detect, and prepare us to respond to an actor, a full, at highway speeds, the full two football fields further along the road.
As the team developed this driverless capability and kind of this robustification of the sensor, one of the things they came back with was, "Oh, hey, by the way, we've increased our lead." We're no longer looking at a seven-second incremental lead time to a traditional sensor. It's now about 8.5 second. At highway speeds, we're now pushing 280-ish meters, so nearly three football fields. That's not three football fields total. That's three football fields in addition to what a traditional system based on pulse-modulated lidar would have seen. What you'll see in the trucks today is a set of effectively range markers, and I want you to watch those.
What you'll see is even before this lidar sensor, you'll probably see a lot of tracks of vehicles that we're detecting out to about 500 meters. You look at those as kind of those blue boxes. That'll give you a sense for the kind of perception ranges that are so significant, not only to the safe operation of these trucks, but also the comfort of that operation as it relates to how similar they are to a human in terms of the way they respond to things that are significantly down the road.
I mentioned a few examples in the last few pages of in the computer, in the cameras, in the lidar, where the team has made substantial progress in terms of kind of the ruggedization and hardening of our system, but it goes beyond that. In fact, across the Aurora Driver system, our hardware team has been developing for several months now in an environment that replicates the harsh conditions of the road. This is everything from vibration testing to thermal testing to water ingress testing to combination tests. Shake and bake, we call them. Or the things where effectively it is exposing and giving our engineers the opportunity to make small changes and refinements to the hardware that make it operate highly reliably on these roads.
This, the result of this, I'm... I know I'm saying these words like reliability and ruggedness a lot. It matters. The value to our customers and our partners is that the Aurora Driver is able to operate at high uptime. It can operate without these hours of service limitations, but it can only do these, and our customers are really gonna care about this, if it can do so reliably. If it can operate for years on end in a highly reliable way. That's the significance of some of the development that the team has made over the last couple of quarters. That's on the vehicle's hardware side.
Now, as it comes to kind of the relationship between the hardware and the platform, what we've also been doing is begun the work with our OEM partners in preparing this hardware and this integration for launch. I'll talk in a minute about the platform development that we're doing. Along the way, what we've also done is built up a fairly sizable operation in Pittsburgh. As I mentioned just over the last couple of months, it's nearly 24 trucks that we built, brought up, and integrated with the fleet.
We've done it through this operation that's allowed us to prototype, pilot, and test everything from the creation of these harnesses at much more rapid speeds than the industry would otherwise be able to do to the development and integration and build of these trucks equipped with this hardware. This video shows. I think we may have looped once, so I'll advance, but it shows some examples of where that's happening. I should note that work is solely in preparation for that launch. As Kendra will mention here in a minute, as it relates to our operations, as it relates to our hardware development, there are many of these things that we do internally now to move faster, to develop a more performant system.
We don't intend to do them long term, but what it allows us to do is bring in our OEM partners and say, "This is how we've approached this. We've worked through these kinks, bring in their manufacturing experts." And it makes for a far more seamless introduction into their production lines and processes than we could otherwise do were we to just kind of cut straight over without that ramp up. Final element of the roadmap that I'm gonna highlight before I'll pass it off and we can talk about kind of the service delivery is the truck platform. I'll share kind of a little bit about the evolution of these platforms. Again, the roadmap calls out a few different phases. First is kind of the autonomy development truck platform.
That's what you've seen to date. That's what you'll ride in today. These are effectively stock trucks that have been upfitted with a set of changes required to allow them to operate with a self-driving system, but not necessarily operate without a human fallback. A pre-launch truck platform that we're phasing into will start to introduce some of the platform changes required to operate that safely without a driver. Finally, the scalable autonomy-enabled truck will form the basis for the launch platform, and I'll talk about what each of these means. Before I do, I do need to call out the couple of OEM partners that we're working with on this in a tightly integrated co-development, not only of the technical side and the engineering of these trucks, but also on the commercial side.
Sasko is here from Volvo. He runs some of that for them, the business side, the deployment, the servicing, and even the manufacturing. This is a wide-ranging development that we're doing together, specifically designed to meet the needs of the Aurora system. As Chris mentioned, Volvo and PACCAR are two of the top three truck manufacturers in North America. Both partners have deeply experienced development teams, sizable support operations. They've got extensive history and relationships with customers that matter. Feel free to ask Eric later if he cares, but I think if you're a carrier, it matters that the OEM is willing to stand behind the product that they've provided to you, and this is something that this tight integration is allowing us to support.
Now to be capable of driverless operation, it's not sufficient that we simply take these effectively today stock trucks off the line, upfit them, and deploy them for a couple of reasons. Primarily, they need a set of changes to control interfaces, thermal systems, electrical architecture, cybersecurity architecture, steering and braking systems to introduce the kind of redundancies, failover mechanisms, and other systems that are required to operate these safely at large scale in a driverless capable way. What that looks like then is, as I mentioned, you'll see out here in the trucks you'll ride in are these autonomy development platforms built basically on stock trucks. What we've developed over the last several months.
We've developed since beginning and even before these partnerships were officially announced early last year. We've been developing with PACCAR and Volvo the set of changes required for this pre-launch platform. Now, one of the most significant areas of risk for these platforms when we commenced them, and one of the conversations that I had with leaders of these companies was our. We have to secure, award, commit to a timeline, key suppliers for key systems. Some of these key systems include the steering system. They include the braking system. That was widely recognized and acknowledged as one of the key risks for the program when we started.
We were pleased to announce in August that we've retired that risk through the awarding of the suppliers for these major components that we were initially concerned about. Not only that, I'm pleased to report today that over the last month, we've actually produced a set of vehicles with one of these systems integrated by the OEM from the supplier, and it's begun its testing in the preparation of these trucks for that driverless capability that's required ultimately for commercial launch.
Now, when we talk about the pre-launch platform, that's effectively what this is, think of it as a transition platform that allows us to integrate many of these systems, whether it's redundant braking, whether it's a variety of other systems required for that launch platform in a phased way, and it's being done in conjunction with our partners at PACCAR and Volvo, as well as with the suppliers that provide those systems. Ultimately, that will result in what I've shown here is a scalable autonomy-enabled truck. Now, you'll notice that it's got a couple of holes in it. This truck initially on production will have been built with all of these systems that we've developed with these OEMs, all of the interfaces as well for the Aurora Driver hardware. This is thermal hookups.
This is electrical systems interfaces. This is logical systems, such that effectively the Aurora Driver's sensor modules will be integratable directly with that truck. The computer will drop right in, and the truck will be ready for business. In the long term post-commercial launch, we will be working with our OEM partners not only on the kind of scale production of these trucks that are prepared to receive the Aurora Driver, but actually we'll start to line side the computer, the sensors, and the rest of the system such that it rolls directly off the line and into the hands of customers who have purchased those trucks. That's not actually even shown on that roadmap, but that's where that goes post that initial commercial launch. With that, I'm gonna introduce Kendra Phillips.
Kendra has joined us, if you don't mind, I'll brag about you for a minute as you come up. Kendra has joined us from Ryder about seven months ago, where she served as a general manager of a $200 million book of transportation business. She subsequently served as the Chief Technology Officer for Ryder's supply chain logistics business. She also led their venture capital work. We're super excited to have Kendra. She's deeply experienced in what it takes to deliver a valuable service to our customers based on these platforms, and she'll talk to you a little bit more about what that entails.
Great. Thank you, Sterling. Good morning, everyone. As Sterling said, I have a extensive background in logistics and transportation. I also am fortunate enough to have an extensive background in bringing emerging technology into logistics and transportation. In my time doing so, I've learned there's two key elements to success. First is a compelling value prop for your customer, which as you heard earlier from Chris, Aurora absolutely has. Second, the thing that often gets overlooked is your product has to fit into your customers' networks in the way they operate today, and that's what I get to help Aurora build. With a service delivery team, we're designing, building, and implementing the technology and processes that we'll need to bring the Aurora Driver to our customers to enable them to operate it at commercial launch. Let's talk about what we're doing.
First, today we have pilots with some very impressive names in the industry. We're running autonomously from Dallas to Houston and Fort Worth to El Paso every day with these customers. You can see it's FedEx, Werner, Schneider, and Uber Freight. The benefit of these pilots is it allows Aurora and it allows our customers to learn how we can operate successfully together in their networks that they have today. We've had a lot of great lessons learned out of these pilots, and I'll share a few. First, our customers' trailers don't always come to our terminals in perfect working condition. This happens in transportation. One of the things we're gonna be building is on-site maintenance facilities at our terminals.
The value of this is it will allow us to provide maintenance and repair our customers' trailers so that we can get them out on the road, complete their load, and ideally do so on time. The additional benefit of having maintenance at our facilities is around the Aurora Driver tractor. If we can do preventative maintenance and repairs to the Aurora Driver tractors here, it'll allow us to drive a higher uptime, which really enables that utilization target we wanna bring to our customers. Second, you can see that Aurora has been very thoughtful in the types of companies that they've partnered with. We have companies of all different modes of transportation, less than truckload, parcel, and brokerage. By doing so, we've learned not only how these customers operate, but how these modes operate, and that's been great for us.
What we've seen is that some of these modes are very heavy in the middle of the night and early morning, while others are running more traditional transportation times. What that means for us is it's important that we have a diversity of customers across different modes so that we can work to level load our days and level load our weeks to really push that throughput through our networks. As you can see, we're also really proud of what we've accomplished thus far with our partners. 550 loads delivered, over 150,000 mi driven, and we've done so 100% on time and with zero cancellations. What you're gonna hear from us is we're looking to grow these pilot partnerships in the future.
We're looking to really ensure that we get our lessons learned, and we're building a product that works for our customers at launch. What we're operating today is our terminal-to-terminal network, and this is a high-level view of how that will work. By the time we're operating commercially, both Aurora and our customers will have complete understanding and confidence in our ability to deliver and to deliver so in a way that works for our partners. During the pilot and early commercialization phases, we're operating this model so we get it solidified, and then we're able to handle it to our customers to operate in their networks while Aurora transitions to Driver-as-a-Service. Today, the way it works, our partners bring their trailers from their facility to our terminal. They drop their trailers at our terminal, and the Aurora Driver takes over.
The Aurora Driver moves autonomously from the origin terminal to the destination terminal. It then drops the customer's trailer at the destination terminal, and the customer comes and takes it and brings it to the next location. Let's talk about the services we're building to enable us to get to launch with this product. We're gonna zoom in on different components of this. The first thing that happens or will be happening is the customers will send us a request electronically. We're building out the Aurora Beacon technology. That technology will be integrated with our customers' systems to enable all this functionality. We can integrate with our customers' ERPs, their transportation management systems, or their order management systems, whatever they may prefer. The customer will send us a load request electronically, Aurora Beacon will receive that, and we'll manage that through Aurora Beacon's scheduling application.
We'll look to make sure we have available capacity on the lane at that day and time, and ideally, we'll accept that load. The customer will bring their trailer to our terminal as they do today. They'll drop that trailer, and ideally, they'll pick up another trailer that has completed its autonomous mission and drive that back to their facility. Now that their trailer's at our terminal, it's time for us to take over and get it on the road. We're gonna be doing that a few different ways. First, we'll do traditional things you see in transportation, such as a pre-trip inspection, weighing, and fueling, all to be done here at our terminals. We'll also do things for autonomy, such as calibrating our sensors and ensuring our operating domain is safe.
Once that truck is ready, we will have our terminal operator drive it over to our launching zone, excuse me. They'll enable autonomy, and they'll send it on the road. Here's where the fun stuff happens. The Aurora Driver takes over, and it brings that truck from the origin terminal to the destination terminal. The goal of this model is to enable our customer to focus on the local hauls while the Aurora Driver focuses on the longer-haul routes, driving efficiency in both networks. Now while those trucks are on the road, I mentioned earlier we have a Beacon suite of technology. We will have a command center staffed with personnel who are using this technology to monitor the trucks every step of the way. I mentioned our Aurora Beacon scheduling application. That's used initially.
Once it's on the road, we'll be monitoring via Aurora Beacon Fleet Monitoring and also Aurora Assist. Let's talk about what both of these do. Aurora Beacon Fleet Monitoring allows us to see all of our trucks that are on the road and the status of all those trucks. We'll know if they're on time or running late, and we'll have forewarning systems to see if they could potentially run into issues with weather or traffic conditions. This will also be integrated to our customer systems. We'll be sending them lat-longs and ETAs, so they know where the truck is and when it will arrive at the terminal. Aurora Assist, the best way to think of this is like an extra set of eyes and ears for the Aurora Driver. Let me give you an example.
The Aurora Driver's going down the highway and knows the speed limit's 65 mi per hour, but it encounters a new construction site, one we haven't seen before, and there's a temporary speed limit sign that says 50 mi per hour. At this point, the Aurora Driver will trigger a session to our operator back in the command center and ask for validation. The operator will look at the scenario and give the appropriate input. The great news is we actually have all of this technology here for you guys to see later, so please stop by and see it. It's live. You'll see it in action. All right. Our Aurora Driver has done its job, and we're bringing that load into our destination terminal. The Aurora Driver will pull in autonomously and park in the landing zone.
At this point, we'll disengage autonomy, and the terminal operator will perform the post-trip inspection, go and drop the trailer in the yard, and then our goal will be to have our standard operating procedures to enable that tractor to be turned as quickly as possible and really ensure we're getting the utilization we want out of our equipment. Then at the same time as that's happening, Aurora Beacon will be sending information to our customers, letting them know that the truck has arrived and it's ready for them to come pick up. Once the customer picks up the trailer at the terminal and exits the terminal, the load is complete. As you can see from what I've shared, we're thinking about this business not just from the view of autonomy, but how we seamlessly integrate into our customers' operations as they exist today.
We have a focused team developing this work, and we'll be really excited to share it with you as we continue to mature our product. When we transition to our Driver-as-a-Service model, we'll have confidence, and our customers will have confidence that our product will be able to effectively integrate into their existing networks and drive the value we all want from autonomy. With that, I'll hand it back to Chris.
Thanks, Kendra. I'm just gonna take just a couple of minutes to revisit what the regulatory landscape looks like. In the U.S., regulation is divided between federal, state, and local governments. The federal government regulates, in general, the safety of the vehicle itself, and through FMCSA basically puts in place minimum safety requirements for motor carriers. The state governments regulate the safe operation of vehicles on their roads, so driver licensing, for example. Then, of course, local government regulates access to streets, and permission to operate within those regions. At Aurora, we've known from day one that this kind of ecosystem of people are, well, they're part of the ecosystem, right? That we have to engage with them. We have to build trust with them.
We have to help them understand the promise and opportunities and also the challenges with the technology, so they can be informed in generating policy. The good news is that today, if we had a truck that we were confident in the safety of, we could operate in the vast majority of the U.S. The blue, the dark blue states here are states where we could go and take a vehicle and operate either because there's explicitly a law that allows it or there's no law preventing the driverless operation of trucks on the road. The light blue states allow us to do testing, and today we're working, for example, with Pennsylvania, working with the state DOT, working with other partners in the state to try and move that from just a testing regime to a regime that will allow safe operation of driverless vehicles as well.
California is the outlier here. California is a place where you're allowed to operate light vehicles without drivers, but not yet heavy vehicles. That's a state where we, again, have obviously one of our headquarters in California. We have a large amount of our team there. The technology's been developing there. We've been building relationships with California DMV and DOT, and we're starting to see them move to implement the second part of regulations. The history here is that while the law was passed, I think 2015, to enable driverless vehicles, the DMV bifurcated between heavy vehicles and light vehicles. They put all the regulations they need for light vehicles, but not heavy.
We see that progressing again now, which is great news because California's obviously an important state for freight in the U.S. We'll continue to engage with these folks. We don't need regulations to change. We do anticipate that there will be regulatory action over time. But by being actively engaged with them, by being trusted voice, by being transparent in the way we have, we think we can help ensure that any regulation that does happen over, you know, kinda the next decade timeframe, will end up in a place that is supportive of safety on the roads and enabling of this product in the market. With that, just to sum up, we're in a really exciting moment for Aurora. We have an incredible group of leaders that you get a chance to spend time with today.
We have this technology that between the way we're using machine learning on the vehicle, the way that we're using amazing sensor technology like FirstLight that allows us to see the road, the way we're thinking about how we harden this so that it can actually be a viable product. I think that's an incredibly powerful technology footprint that we have. We have these incredible partners, right? We are spring-loaded that as we deliver on our part of the technology, they'll be able to come to the market with two of the top three truck manufacturers in the U.S., an incredible set of customers who are ready to embrace this and see the benefits for their business, roll out.
We have a launch plan that makes sense, and of course, we are leading with trucking, but then we'll come back and pick up the light vehicle work over time. I think with that, I'll invite Sterling and Richard to come join me up here, and we'll turn to Q&A. Please.
Chris, just how has the chip shortage kind of stalled any development? Or maybe you can talk about the availability to upgrade How long does it take today to upgrade a truck? You talked about getting 20 trucks. How long does that take to upgrade today?
Yeah. Maybe Sandor, I ask you to come up answer. Sandor leads our vehicle integration hardware programs. Do we have a microphone? Cool.
Thanks. That was a multi-part question. I'm not sure. I can answer the part on the chip first.
Sure.
So we're actively sourcing chips for both fortunately and unfortunately, our scale is quite small, so we are able to secure the supply we need. That being said, it's a constant thing that our supply chain team is working very closely with key providers to make sure that we have what we need. We haven't been impacted to date.
Okay. There's a question around upfits, I think was the second part of that.
I'm sorry. Could you repeat the question?
How long today does it take to upgrade a truck? Are you getting them just blank from a manufacturer or are you..? [inaudible] I think Sterling-
Right.
Some things are prebuilt or not?
The pre-built pieces are coming later. Right now we're using standard vehicles, and we're using a standard Peterbilt truck today. The upfit takes about three weeks per vehicle. But we are able to do, as you saw in the video, multiple vehicles at the same time. We banged out the almost two dozen in about two months once we had worked through the designs.
Yeah. Cool. Notably, that is for, like, current purposes of development. Our expectation and what we're working towards with these OEM partners is to pop them off the line. Kind of, that's the whole idea of this series production scalable truck is to be able to produce them at much higher rates.
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe we'll start back over here.
Great. Thanks. Chris, two questions for you. When you talk to your partner customers and other prospective customers, and you show them the, your vision of how the network works, i.e., the long haul is done autonomously and then they do the last effectively intermodal for the road, what is their response to that? Do they accept that? Like, "Hey, I need to completely uproot my supply chain," sort of. How are they reacting to that? And the second question, completely unrelated, is, on the hardware side, how close are you to commercial grade hardware production? Obviously, you're doing FirstLight yourself, but for other hardware products, kind of is that a bottleneck that that kind of could prevent your, timeline to commercial launch? Thanks.
Maybe, Sterling, do you wanna take the second question, and we'll get Dave to come up and talk about the partner engagement and the intermodal. Can I get the.... Thanks.
All right. Let me handle the first one. I think it's a great question. It's important to recognize this is why we have pilot partners and launch partners. We've selected partners who have a like vision with us, right? If you think about delivering the benefits of self-driving technology, it's a long runway of how we're going to roll this out. We've selected companies that understand that starting off in a terminal-to-terminal operations may not be the ideal solution for every use case. It still creates enormous value overall, and our partners are willing to work with us to actually build out that deployment model until the technology matures to a point where we can go, as Chris showed you before, where we eventually get from warehouse to warehouse.
In depot to store. That's part of the reason why you select like-minded partners who have a vision of rolling out the autonomy in the future. Every one of them is a little bit different in terms of the deployment model and how to benefit it together. We work with each of our partners to develop that strategy. That's how they think about it. Ultimately, end-to-end will be the ideal at the end of the day, but there's a great value for terminals for a lot of reasons, flow through volumes and things like that. There's enormous opportunity to redo the network to a more efficient utilization overall. Hope that answers that.
Yeah. If I can add just a couple of things to what Dave said. One of those is the terminal-terminal model is not only an opportune introduction phase for a self-driving system, it's also for our partners. A couple of things. First, many of our partners are wrestling with this idea of, okay, how do I intermix autonomous systems with our drivers, right? We were just talking with Eric about this last night. Effectively, what this allows them to do is start to transition their human drivers to more regional hauls that they prefer anyway.
The other thing that allows us to do is convert these highly valuable assets that can run nearly 24 hours a day into very high utilization drop and hook operations that you simply can't do if you're going to endpoints and doing live loading and waiting around in turnarounds at warehouses. You just can't do that. It allows much higher utilization of the asset. It is a little different, but there are also benefits to that phase-in for each of these customers. I would also note one of our pilot customers right now, we were talking about this last night, one of our pilot customers is actually like, this isn't actually unique for them on one end of the load, right? We do one of these routes, and on one end they were already using local dray. It is unique on the other end, but they're fairly accustomed to this kind of a model in some cases.
Cool.
I think there's a second question.
Oh, second question about scalability.
Commercial grade for hardware.
Scalability of c ommercial grade hardware other than FirstLight.
Sorry, I mean, the cost of making the hardware commercial grade, you know, how much of a bottleneck is that right now outside of FirstLight units?
Not one. I think what should have been apparent that I guess wasn't is as we've gone through the preparation of driverless capability, we've simultaneously been doing a lot of the ruggedization and hardening already. While we called that out as a separate phase of the roadmap, the computer that's in our trucks today has already been developed relative to this ISO standard 16750, as well as, and as we roll in kind of the FirstLight lidar and some other things, those have also been developed with respect to that. I expect that is not going to be a bottleneck for us.
Over time, we will continue to iterate these generations of hardware, reducing the cost, improving manufacturability, and doing that appropriately with the scale of the fleet that we're operating. Right Sterling?
Right.
Over here first? Yeah.
I Googled how much a truck driver could possibly work hours in a year. It's about 30% out of all the hours in a year they could be on the road, but they're going, you know, every day. They're working really hard. My question is following up on this with two respects. The first is, in 2024, 2025, 2026, as a percentage of hours in the year, what do you think your utilization rates will be per truck? And then second is, with respect to how much you increase utilization rate, how do you think about risk? Like, you know, the more you utilize these trucks, the more potential there could be wear and tear over what I mean is and, you know, there could be more opportunity for a catastrophe.
Yeah. Do you wanna speak?
I can speak at a high level.
Sure
As it relates to kinda what's been modeled or whatever in the forecast. That's a richer question. At a high level, our expectation for the kind of utilization uptime of these trucks is that it improves over time. We are holding a bar internally for their launch as it relates to the reliability. I don't think we've published publicly. But our expectation is there is this upper bound. Much of the 70% downtime that you just referenced is specific to human drivers and their limitations. The unique limitations of a self-driving system are far fewer in nature. Kendra mentioned a few of the steps that are taken at the launch and landing of each of our trucks to include, you know, these pre-trip inspections.
We expect, and we've already seen in some of our pilot partners, that those are catching issues that contribute to that downtime in current operations that we wouldn't see, right? When it turns out you actually check a trailer, as per FMCSA direction, you're actually catching these things that would otherwise leave you stranded on the side of the road. We expect incrementally fewer of those on account of that more rigorous inspection process that we're going through with these trucks and trailers. The downtime attributed not to the human causes, but to the kind of base platform and trailer causes, we expect to decline. Now, as it relates to that, the final piece, which is okay, certainly how much incremental downtime do you expect to see on account of the Aurora Driver?
Again, not a number that we have, kind of highly refined right now or certainly not published. It is something that we expect that many of these improvements that we've made to the hardening of that hardware will lead us to not particularly dissimilar downtime to what any other mechanical system would encounter, on that truck in the long term.
Yeah. I think a lot of time when you think about risk, you normalize it based on operating hours or on a per hour basis. We, you know, our expectation is that we're not creating unreasonable risk on the road. Front row. Yeah.
Thank you. Chris, I thought it was a great point you made, which is we're gonna start terminal to terminal and move beyond. I think there's a perception that when you launch commercially, that's it, right?
Yeah.
That's the capabilities of the system. Can you talk a little bit about what gen one of launch technology won't be able to do, and maybe as you build out your strategic roadmap over the years that follow, what gen two will be able to do, what gen three will be able to do? Just help us understand that.
Yeah. Maybe it's worth bifurcating between hardware and software. On the hardware side, there we've engineered the hardware stack to be able to operate across the range of capabilities. All the way from the freeway driving we're doing to urban driving and we've kind of built that experience early on, and we've helped set the requirements there. The hardware will really be moving down a cost reduction curve, where there'll be discrete steps as we you know kind of change through design or you know componentry in that system. Of course, we'll pick up volume benefits along the way. On the software side, we expect this to be more continuous, that we'll be adding incremental features.
At launch, we'll be driving from our terminals, we'll be driving on the roads, we'll on the surface roads, merging out of the freeway, driving down the freeway, getting off the freeway, and then coming to a terminal. We expect that we'll have to deal with construction. We'll have to deal with emergency vehicles on the road. We'll have to deal with other drivers behaving in ways that are semi-erratic. We'll do that through a combination of the onboard Aurora Driver and then input from Aurora Beacon. Now, it's important to know Aurora Beacon is not somebody behind a steering wheel, you know, driving the vehicle down the road. They're providing input. They're. Think of it like a dispatcher, right?
Where, as Kendra mentioned, you know, we might have the thing on the road notice the reduced speed limit sign and then say, "Hey, are you sure that was a reduced speed limit? Let me just make sure so that I'm not creating, you know, something, a moving chicane on the freeway." So that'll be kind of the launch package, and from there, we would expect it to expand to more surface-type engagements. As we would think of, perhaps in the initial places, we wouldn't have to do a U-turn on the road.
Back into a dock. You know, back into a dock. Maybe initially we're turning across two lanes of traffic but not four. You could imagine us expanding those, and those will be driven, those features will be driven by the economic expansion model that we have. As we move on to new lanes, we'll look at the delta between capabilities and add just those to unlock the next lane. Again, we expect one of the benefits of operating in the freight domain is we expect much more similarity and much more scalability from the core technology.
Cool. Maybe the back of the aisle.
Hi. Three questions on commercial, on the commercialization of everything. First of all, has anything changed in terms of the driver as a service unit economics?
We're still talking to customers. Obviously, pricing isn't finalized yet. I think our expectations are that what we said in the model are still supported. If you think about something like the pricing of the product, for example, we still think that this technology is gonna come into the market slowly, and it's just gonna be a small share. Our real competition is gonna be human drivers, and we don't expect that human driver rates are gonna go down significantly over time. In fact, they might increase.
We feel like our initial unit economic thoughts are still supported. You'll also see some of the competitors who started off through their kind of going public process, suggesting that they would be doing discounts against human drivers, and you start to see over time them bring in their expectations back closer to where we always were.
Okay.
We're pretty confident that the unit economics are around the same, that we thought of. Again, hardware is a cost factor. We still expect that to kinda come down over time as we scale. There's no unobtainium, as Chris likes to say, in this. As we increase the scale, it will just go down a normal hardware cost life cycle. We expect the economics to be about the same as what we've said previously.
Okay. The second and third one is, given the advantages you have around lidar and some of the other AI and ML, why not commercialize that either through licensing, looking at other tangible markets outside of trucking now as opposed to waiting? Just while I have the mic, the third question would be, why not just focus on one route and fill it up as much as you can and maybe hit the S-curve a little quicker than you currently think? Thanks.
Yeah. On the commercialization, in the long term, we would love to drive everything and anything and look at adjacent fields, but we think there's a real value in getting a product on the road, getting it out the door, and building a business. We are convinced that freight is that right, incredible opportunity. Do you wanna take that?
Yeah. As it relates to kind of growth of volume, our model, Chris alluded earlier to the model that we've used effectively for that kind of lane expansion. We're working on this closely with each of our customer, pilot customers that we're working with. But the key consideration here is you look at effectively the return on any kind of given investment tends to scale with the number and complexity of endpoints. If you're having to deal with more novel things, your investment in terms of kind of incremental development rises, and you need to believe that you can pick up the kind of volume to warrant that.
As we look at major freight lines, we look at the kind of volume that we could realize with these partners at each of these locations, and we say, "Okay, what is that kind of, like, ROI S-curve look like in terms of kind of the return, in terms of number of loads, relative to that investment." You're right, there are areas, for instance, like a Dallas-Houston lane where, what is it? 8,500 trucks a day. I don't even remember if that's round trip or one way, but it's significant. It's a heavy lane, right? There are other lanes like Fort Worth, El Paso. If you get onto Phoenix and get onto L.A., it's one of the biggest freight corridors in the country. There's no.
You saw the kind of lane, notional lane expansion rollout. It's not an accident that these heavy lanes are prioritized. Once we turn them on, the opportunity to scale up volume does come at a significant discount relative to incremental development of new endpoints.
I think.
Oh, go, please.
I might have been gonna say the same thing, but I think it's important to remember, like, that we wanna do both, right? Like, we wanna have a really big business. There's a massive opportunity, so we wanna scale, you know, breadth-wise, but also depth-wise on the lanes that we can do. That, the mix of that, I think, will vary depending on what lane it is and what the partners want and what the customers want. You wanna take full advantage of the opportunity that's there to go breadth-wise and not just kinda get stuck going depth-wise straight away.
I guess just maybe just to say that another way, like, I very much look forward to the day when every truck here on I-45 is driven by Aurora. But as we build the business, we're gonna look for what's kind of the easiest way to expand and grow volume. Is that kind of exploiting the lane we have, or at that point, is customer acquisition challenging enough that it's time to push to another lane and grow out? That's part of what the business team is gonna be constantly evaluating is, like, you know, is it realistic for us to go from whatever% to whatever% on this lane or do we now need to be expanding somewhere else? Maybe in the back.
Sorry. Chris, Sterling. Hey, Ken Hoexter from Bank of America. Just, the last time we were here, there was a lot of discussion about mapping and digital maps and Aurora's vision and the like, and it was kind of different than some of the other autonomous companies and it was. If I remember, Sterling, your presentation, you were talking about constant learning. Maybe you can just refresh us. How is the structure of the mapping and the ability to get new lanes from Aurora? Cause I think it was different than most of the other companies, which I think it was-
Okay. Do you wanna take it?
Sure. I'll start and then you can jump in.
Happy to.
Or, Carl, if you want. On the mapping front, you can develop a more robust system more rapidly if you bake fixed features of the environment into the map. This is everything from, you know, what are the traversable pathways through a particular intersection allowed by this light versus that one? To do otherwise is to require that the system is constantly attempting to infer at every point in time not just kind of what should I do, but what's around me? What can I do? What does the law allow? It allows for a much more robust, rapid introduction of the technology. Now, that map bakes in notably fixed features in the environment, not the dynamic ones.
What it allows you to do is focus when operating on stuff that's moving, on stuff that you care about and you have to kind of actively negotiate with. What you guys will see on your rides today is you get onto the highway and it is an active negotiation when you're merging, particularly, hopefully some of you see heavy traffic and you see how kind of the Aurora Driver navigates that. But it allows you to focus on those things. It allows for a much more performant system. Now, the world changes. Construction changes the world. Some of these other things change the world. One of the key elements of our architecture that we probably talked about a year ago, I don't remember.
We did.
At this point. It is the fragmentation of our maps into a set of, we call them shards or effectively locally consistent tiles that we can rapidly update and turn around in hours to ultimately near real time, as opposed to a globally consistent one that's historically been more the purview of I think some of these many of these companies that use maps that requires them a large scale optimization that takes on the order of weeks to update.
In addition to that, one of the things you probably saw on our roadmap. I don't remember if we talked about it. We didn't talk about kind of detect lane lines, but there's also this kind of real-time element of, hey, even before we send back the data and update the map and every vehicle in the fleet learns kind of what the new structure of the world looks like. If anything changes real time, you need to be able to detect and respond to that.
The team, what the team has developed over the last quarter and is continuing to mature is the ability to online real time detect where the lane lines are, even if they've shifted, and allow the truck to actually deal with things like construction barriers and other things that would cause us to diverge from the, what the map might otherwise have suggested. At the end of the day, this ability to both have an understanding of what the world should look like, the ability to deviate from that as necessary, but the ability in particular for the fleet to learn from the collective experience that every vehicle has really comes down to maps, right? That's the secret of, you know, people talk about fleet learning. The primary kind of core central element of fleet learning is maps. It's every vehicle knowing what happened to the other vehicles at a particular location in space.
Yeah. It's really, like maybe if I take it up a level, like think about what computers are really good at. They're good at storing and accessing information, so let's use that. There's kind of, you can think of three schools of thought, right? One is no map or absolutely minimal map. You know, if you're just driving on a freeway, maybe you can get away with that because there's an awful lot of structure there. We think there's advantages to doing more than that. There's kind of this monolithic map, right? So one big map, think of it like a, you know, a Giant Wall Atlas.
The challenges with that is it has to be globally consistent for it to make sense, and it turns out that whatever you're using to measure the world is gonna have error in it, and so that error gets baked in somewhere. When you go to update the map, it becomes very complicated to re-optimize to make that error fit. Finally, there's the approach that we're doing, and we think, we don't know that anyone else is doing this, which is much more like a road atlas, a set of pages as, or shards, as Sterling said, where each local area is consistent, and that area is about a couple 100 meters across, and then it's linked to the next one.
When something changes in the world, we just take out one of those pages, put back in the next one, and again, allows us to maintain it more quickly. It gives us that kind of benefit that you have when you drive near your house versus when you drive, you know, kind of somewhere else randomly in the country.
Can I just, I think maybe another part of the question you were potentially asking is, we don't actually believe that it's particularly resource intensive in terms of either time or, like, vehicles in order to kinda expand that map out over into another domain.
Yeah, that's a good point.
It's effectively self-maintaining as well. It's built by the very vehicles and sensors that are used just for autonomous operation. When any vehicle detects a change to the world, that change will trigger a map update if required. It's not like there's a giant dedicated mapping fleet, it's the very vehicles that are doing commercial operation.
Cool.
All right. Thanks. Brian from JPMorgan. I just wanted to ask you know, talking about percent of miles and autonomy, you know, why did you go that route? What did you consider? I mean, we all talk about disengagements, but you have a different policy than others. Why did you go that route? What did you not consider, and why? Then also, when do you think you're gonna be able to talk more about cost per mile? Because as you mentioned, the competition is human. Obviously, it's quite high right now. You've got a couple milestones laid out, but when do you feel like you'll be able to talk about that and then the steps to get to something that's competitive and reliable?
Yeah. When we thought about that measure, we were trying to find something that was objectively measuring what does the product have. How do you know whether we're performing in kind of the direction of the product, right? The Autonomy Readiness Measure is we're good to go. That is the thing that is the bar. When that gets to 100%, we're confident in the safety of the vehicle, we can be out on the road. We understand that that is a little more abstract, right? We want something to be able to share that's indicative of performance on the road. We looked at things like miles per disengagement or intervention. When we think about that, it's really subjective, and it can create this perverse incentive that I'm concerned about for our operators, right?
That when they are driving, if they have to think, "Is this going to change our performance this quarter versus keep someone safe?" We just don't want that in the measure. We expect that there will always be some form of remote support that's enabled and obviously some form of on-site support that's enabled. Over the long term, when we think about cost, right, we expect that there'll be the cost of the vehicle driving without any support, then there's gonna be some amount of cost that's associated with remote support, and then there's, you know, a more meaningful cost associated with on-site support. In the long term, we expect thinking that that'll be something that will be important drivers of business that we would care about. This feels like it bleeds into that over time.
For us today, as we think about the phases of our business, you know. As we talk internally about this, the first risk is getting to the point where the Aurora Driver operates without a driver, right? That is fundamental to business, and so that is what the whole team is focused on. Over time, you're right, the economics are going to matter. I think that most people in this room would believe that if we can get to the point where the thing is actually operating autonomously in a commercially relevant way, that we're gonna be able to bring the cost down on that. We'll share that as it makes sense and as that becomes the priority for the company.
We're already engineering, you know, the future generations of hardware that see those discrete costs. Part of the benefit of operating in freight is that the unit economics are so much stronger than they are in ride hailing, and so that opportunity to start to build volume and have positive unit economics is much closer. At the back?
Okay, at the very back there. Sorry.
Yeah. I was gonna add something to a question about unit economics that was asked a minute ago. As a matter of context, I'm Matt McLelland, VP of Sustainability and Innovation at Covenant Logistics. We're an operator, we're a customer, one of the partners that are working with in the program. In my role, I spend all day looking at this and electrification and hydrogen, but right now, Aurora is an area where we're putting a lot of time. With the question about unit economics, one thing I wanted to add, in fact, I almost jumped in but didn't, was that we keep two things. One is, one of the biggest problems we have with our drivers is they don't tell us when something's wrong.
Their goal is to get as many miles as they can. They wanna get paid. They wanna make sure that their lives aren't disrupted. If they don't tell us that an error code came up, if they don't tell us there's a clunk in the left wheel, we don't know and end up the repair for that truck ends up being much more expensive. With the Aurora Driver, it will tell us small codes, big codes, things that we need to start doing to route the truck back to where it can be repaired. I just wanted to add that because.
Yeah.
You know, we feel like the unit economics is gonna be improved greatly because the driver's taken out of it. Again, not to marginalize our drivers, but it's just. You know, Eric here is an operator. He can tell you, drivers don't always tell us what we need to know.
Yeah.
The second thing I wanted to add is because drivers, we keep our trucks about 400,000 mi, so about 2.6 years is when we flip it. We do that for two reasons. The biggest one is because we need to keep drivers in new trucks, clean trucks. I know that including our friends up here in the front, you haven't seen some of the trucks that come into our terminals after two years. These things are disgusting.
Yeah.
You just can't clean them good enough. Part of the way to keep drivers interested, part of the way is to minimize driver turnover, is to give them a new truck. At 400,000 mi, we tend to turn it. When you don't have a driver, it doesn't get dirty, and we can keep it longer. We can keep it on the road longer. Now maybe something we keep for 2.4 years or 400,000 mi, maybe we take that to five or six or seven. I mean, these things were built to run. It's not uncommon to see trucks with millions of miles on the road. The unit economics for these two reasons is one of the things that is part of the value proposition that we're to, to bake into our model.
Thank you. Maybe at the back over here and then.
Hey, David Vernon from Bernstein. Thanks, guys, for having us down here, and thanks to the broader team for coming out. I had a question for you around the 2023, I guess, definition of commercial launch. Could you help put some meat on the bones around the geographies that are involved in that, the number of trucks that'll be running, maybe a broad range of revenue that might be coming on an annualized basis as you get there? Then as you think about taking it from the narrower lanes that you seem to be focusing on now and then branching that out and reaching some sort of S-curve point, what are the incremental investments after you get to that point of commercialization that you're gonna need to do to really kind of accelerate the reach of the technology?
Is it investments in new terminals, facilities? Is it dealing with the regulators and trying to get through the interstate issues? Can you just kinda talk broadly around kinda what you're seeing as the key issues that'll affect your ability to scale beyond the initial sort of lanes of launch focus? Thank you.
Cool. There's a lot baked into that, so we'll see what we can do. Keep us honest if we don't get all of it. I think when we intend to launch in 2023, what we've shared previously is we're thinking roughly order of magnitude 20 vehicles, and it'll be in Texas, right in 2024.
You're talking about commercial launch?
Sorry, commercial launch 2024.
Aurora Driver Ready, 2023?
Sorry, I misunderstood the question then. I'm sorry.
Wait, were you talking about Aurora Driver Ready? 'Cause you said 2023. That's the Aurora Driver Ready milestone.
Commercial launch at the end of 2024.
End of 2024. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I am answering the right question now?
Yeah. 2024.
Cool. When we think about the commercial launch, there we're thinking scale of 20 vehicles. It'll be here in Texas. We're focusing right now on Dallas-Houston and Dallas-El Paso. We'll see, you know, exactly which of those make sense as we get to launch time. That's where we're thinking. I've now lost the rest of the question.
Yeah. I think we're not giving revenue guidance, so we're not gonna give any suggestions about what revenue might look like on a kind of that basis or an annualized basis at this point. I think the next question is around the...
Incremental investments. Yeah
... sort of the investments on, across the spectrum in terms of being able to scale after that?
Yeah. We'll continue to. You know, one of the things that will enable scale is the engagement we have with our OEM partners. They're today building vehicle platforms that we expect to be scalable. The next will be our hardware, and our initial hardware platform from the Aurora Driver side is something that we expect to have at relatively small scale. But then we have generations that we're already architecting and developing that will bring that scale further up, and, you know, we look forward to sharing more about that at some future time. Then on the software side, again, it'll be very much, okay, what is the small delta between this lane and that lane? Let's validate that case.
If we would expect to be able to turn, if we're turning across two lanes of traffic, we'd expect turning across three lanes of traffic to work. Let's put the validation work in place and then have confidence, that's ready to go. There will be some investment in terminals early on, is our expectation, and that's baked into our financial models. Over time, we will move to depot to depot or partner terminal to partner terminal as the economics make sense for that.
Yeah. There's a period of time as well whereby, you know, we might like this terminal that's kind of ours, right? We own and operate it. Even as we expand out to terminals, we would fully expect to find somebody who's good at operating terminals and thus be able to kinda pay them similar to kinda like how airlines pay airports, so it's not kind of coming onto our balance sheet.
Right. Oh.
I think we have time for one last question.
Okay. Looks like you're
Great. Great. Thanks. Tom White, D.A. Davidson. Just a follow-up on the trucking platform. You know, I think you expressed that you were encouraged that some of the component and kinda supplier contracts had been kinda locked in. Maybe this is a question for your partners who are here in the audience. How are you feeling generally confidence-wise about, you know, your ability to, or their ability to kinda get that done? How can you guys kinda keep that on track?
Yeah.
Would you ever consider, I don't know, helping them, kinda co-investing to kinda, you know, get things across the line sooner?
Yeah. I you know, I feel incredibly excited about where we are with our partners. These are amazing companies. They understand how to deliver product. They understand how to deliver product on time. As Sterling mentioned, kind of we, as we looked at the program, we saw, and I think they would share this if you talk with them, right? Some of the biggest risk in those programs is supplier selection, requirement development, all of the business and technical wrestling that happens prior to unlocking that. Once those commitments are made, you know, suppliers, again, are very good at doing the thing they said they would on time, on schedule. You know, we feel privileged to work with these amazing companies and really excited about the prospects of that.
I'll add to the last part of that question. Do you consider jumping in and just working together on something? Yes. In fact, with both programs, and Matt Cullum's here, chief engineer for the PACCAR programs. You can ask him some of these questions. In specific areas where we have expertise or preexisting hardware that can be brought to bear to satisfy a need. Our engineers are right there to help provide it and work through it. Our engineering teams are very tightly coordinated in the development of these systems.
Yeah, this is very much not a kind of fire and forget. You know, we're working together on a daily basis, so. One more? Okay. We answered that more quickly? Okay. Stacy will keep us on schedule.
Great. Maybe this is a good place to wrap. Chris, you said earlier in the Q&A that your vision is, at some point, you know, every truck on the highway is an Aurora truck. I think you were being facetious. If-
No, totally. I hope for that. That'd be great.
Well, there you go. Maybe if I can just push you on that, right? What is your vision of what the trucking industry looks like, you know, 10, 15, 20 years from now? Are you the dominant player or do you think there are two or three other credible guys and the market's divided two, three, four ways? Is this a private truck fleet industry? Is it a for-hire industry? Does trucking take share from rail? Kind of what does the world look like 15 years from now?
Yes, you know, we're obviously working to be the dominant provider of automated vehicle technology in the marketplace and, you know, we're working hard for that. I do not expect we will be the sole provider, right? That this is just $700 billion space. I think our customers would want options. I think the government would push for options, right? I think that there will be multiple players in the space, but it's not gonna be dozens. It's going to be a small number. As we look at the landscape, we think we're incredibly well positioned to be one of those and if not be, you know, the dominant in them.
Yes, I think there's an incredible opportunity for change in this space that I think about, you know, the transformation of the logistics networks where today, you know, the number of warehouses that are needed so that you can service the U.S. within 24 hours is large. As you're able to push the utilization of trucks to closer to 24 hours and you don't have that hours of service limitation, that drops down to two or three warehouses. That fundamentally changes things. We will be able to over time, you know, displace air, for example. Again, because, you know, we use air for rapid shipments of high-value things. Well, we'll be able to compete with that with trucking, so I think that'll be interesting. I think again, rail, I think also ultimately we start to steal share from as well.
I do think that trucking will grow. That's just in the U.S., right? We think that as I think about Korea, I think about Japan, you know, these are economies that need this technology. They don't have the workforce to support it. Ultimately, you know, Europe is going to be a very interesting market as well for us. Yeah, there's a lot to come. It's one of these things where you think about over the arc of history when there's been fundamental changes, whether it's in communication or transportation, right? Going from, you know, walking to the horse, to the wagon, to the internal combustion engine. This is kind of the next big step in ground transportation. Thank you.
That'll be the end for our Q&A, but certainly not the end of the morning. Thank you everyone for being here and thank you for everyone who joined on the webcast. Just before we break, I do wanna introduce a few of the people we have around the room here, and maybe they can identify themselves. These are some of the amazing folks at Aurora. You met Sandor already, leads our Hardware team. Alan over here, leads our Corporate Strategy work. Yanbing at the back, leads our Software team. Carl further at the back, leads the Autonomy team here. I saw Veer somewhere. Veer's our product leader, for the driver. Gerardo leads, our Regulatory Engagement government affairs. You've met Kendra, you've met Nat, you've met Dr. Runge. Dave Maday leads Business Development.
I think I got it. Is there anyone that I missed? Oh, and Leah leads operations. I'm sorry. Too clear in the front here. Please, they're around here. I think they're great people. We'd love for you to meet them, ask them questions. They can give you much more depth on things where appropriate than I can. Thank you all and please enjoy the day. Thank you.