My name is Glenn Schein. I work with Josh Beck on the internet and autonomous research. Today, we have David Maday here, CFO and SVP of Aurora Innovation, we're excited to listen to his company presentation. From there, we're just gonna go down into Cordova Five for a breakout. With that, David.
Awesome. Thanks. Appreciate you guys having me here today. I will try to keep it lively. I know we're getting towards the end of three long days, let's have a little fun. For those, again, who don't know me, my name's Dave Maday. I am Aurora's Chief Financial Officer. I'm super excited to be here today to talk about the progress that we're making as a company. You know, again, the picture kinda tells it all for us. Again, we are the only self-driving trucking company operating driverless on public roads today. We're gonna tell a little bit about the progress we made in 2025 and why we're so excited about 2026. With that, let me get us started.
Before we go too far, this is to keep me out of trouble, keep my lawyers happy. If you can just take a quick glance at the forward-looking statements, we will talk about some things that are projections into the future. Okay. With that, let me just... There's probably some of you who haven't heard of or don't know the Aurora story very well, which is surprising. You know, we have 80,000-pound tractor trailers driving on the roads down in the south, you should get down there and take a look. Let me give you a little bit about the company. Aurora is a mission-driven company. Our mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, broadly. It guides everything that we do. Okay.
As I mentioned, we are operating commercially, driverless operations on public roads today. You know, we couldn't be more excited about the progress we've made this year. You know, from the start of the year when we launched in April, until today, you know, we're now operating in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. We started out in day. We've added night, rain, and fog to our driving capabilities. We operate for multiple customers. Since April through January, we've already traveled more than 250,000 driverless miles without any incidents. We're excited about the progress.
I think a little bit of what makes us maybe even more excited is if you think about our technology and the enhancements of our technology, this is what really I think excites us about the future. Really we think that each of these technology advancements, and I'll talk about a little of them, are very impressive. Combined together, it is really what we hope is the dawn of superhuman freight transportation. You know, with the Aurora Driver, what are we doing? We're focusing on driving a system that has perception and awareness that is unmatched. We can see everywhere in every direction instantaneously. We operate with amazing stamina. We never get fatigued. We can operate 24/7 and never get tired.
We're not restricted by the clock, we can make life-saving decisions in milliseconds, right? Each of these, again, in isolation is impressive. Collectively together, we really think this is gonna help redefine safety in the logistics area. Let me talk a little bit about our product just to catch a couple people up. Our core product is the Aurora Driver. It is a combination of, you know, cutting-edge technology hardware, our Verifiable AI software, and associated data services. You know, our company started a little over 8 years ago. We built this as a common core platform, we could deploy it across multiple vehicle platforms and multiple use cases. Trucking is our first market that we're going to operate in, I'll talk a little bit more about that element.
First, let me just talk a little bit of, you know, kind of we feel a responsibility, a leadership responsibility, and we feel we're in a pole position when it comes to leading autonomous technology. Why do I say that, right? Again, we've launched driverless operations. We've been building that since April of 2025. Our first market is trucking. That's where our focus is. It's a massive market that can unlock tremendous value. I'll talk a little bit more about that. We have an unmatched partner ecosystem. We were not established to get that first driverless run. We've already done that. We are a company that's focused on our mission, and that is to commercialize at scale, right? We had a solid financial position.
We exited the end of last year with roughly $1.5 billion in liquidity. That will extend our runway until we reach a point of positive free cash flow, which we expect in 2028. We have a driver-as-a-service business model, which is both capital efficient and also leverages the best of total cost of ownership for our customers, which will create long-term shareholder value for both us and our customers. From a competitive landscape perspective, like, we believe we are the leader. We are investing to build upon that competitive moat. I mentioned the ecosystem, I'll just briefly touch on a couple of these. Obviously, to scale a business, you are going to need partners. To scale it to tens of thousands of trucks, operating billions of miles each year, you need partners. We have several OEM partners, including PACCAR and Volvo, who are building autonomously enabled platforms that will take line side integration of the Aurora Driver. Those represent about 50% of the market. We're also partnering with International, where we upfit their base trucks to be deployed driverlessly. That launch will actually happen in the 2Q of this year. We have a partnership with Continental
It traverses more than 200 billion vehicle miles today, and the Aurora Driver can deliver tremendous value, and that's the focus where you're matching up the total cost of ownership values that we can provide along with the market opportunity, and that will support mass adoption. Today, we have more than tripled our driverless network even from the last quarter. We are now operating on 10 lanes or routes, and that's an addressable market of 3.6 billion vehicle miles traveled today. We operate across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The intent is that we will expand to the Sun Belt this year, right? That's a really important factor for us.
If you think about the start of the year, we operated on one route, Dallas to Houston, you know, in daytime sunny conditions. Now we operate in all weather conditions, day and night, rain, fog, et cetera. We're now operating everywhere. We're gonna take that same approach, those same driving skills that we've developed for this past year, and we're able to apply them throughout the Sun Belt, given the self-similarity of the driving requirements across the Sun Belt. You combine that with our approach to mapping, which we think is both important, you know, from a safety perspective, but from an efficiency perspective for the Aurora Driver.
You know, when I say safety, I say it as the Aurora Driver drives better when it knows the world around it and where it's intending to go. Just like you and I, when we get in the car and we go somewhere that we're unfamiliar with, drive better if we know where we're going. Again, we believe the Aurora Driver now is sufficiently generalized for us to operate throughout the Sun Belt in 2026. We also think it's important to start the pivot. Like, 2025 was a lot about demonstrating the technology promise, making sure we could operate in the vast majority of weather and environmental conditions that are required to provide a reliable service. We also need to go where our customers want us to go. When we launch, we operated between two Aurora terminals.
In 2026, our primary mode of operation for where we're gonna deliver goods is going to be between customer endpoints. We've started to do autonomous freight delivery. Right now it's supervised. It will be driverless shortly. When we launch our second-generation fleet, we'll start to roll this out driverlessly. We are delivering for 3 examples is Detmar between their facilities, our frack sand hauler, Hirschbach between Dallas and Laredo to support berry deliveries, and then one of the leading US carriers we're delivering to their endpoint. This will be the mode going forward. We go to where the customers need us. It creates the most value for our customers. Okay, just really quickly, we also have what I think is a compelling business model. Our long-term business model is a driver-as-a-service business model.
What does that mean from a compelling standpoint? First off, it's the desired end state. It's what customers wanna do. What that means is that customers buy trucks equipped with the Aurora Driver. They then operate those trucks driverless by subscribing to the Aurora Driver. It's a subscription-based model. That we're paid a per mile fee, and then we basically perform the role of a driver. Okay? This is highly capital efficient. It's the desired end state for our customers, and it will create, you know, better shareholder value, again, by the capital efficiency, but also by just the fact that we can scale much faster 'cause we don't need a lot of expenses to scale into new markets. Let me just dig a little bit deeper.
The finance guy, so let me dig a little bit deeper into the numbers as well. Right. If you think about the opportunity that's in front of us today, if we look at use ATRI, and they publish, you know, the cost of transport every year. The average cost was $2.26, and that was a human driver plus base pay plus benefits was roughly $1 per mile. That's how it equates to on average. I know every individual trucker, trucking carrier will say, "That's not me," but on average, it is actually everybody. Some people are a little bit higher, some people are a little bit more, but it's $1 per mile. That's the opportunity that we are replacing with our driver-as-a-service business model. Why is this compelling, right?
If you think about driver costs and you look back over the last 10, 12 years, the cost of driving by the human driver is going up substantially, right? We've already reached roughly $1 per mile and this is cost plus benefits. The trend is heading to the right and higher. Okay. If you look at where we plan on operating, indicatively, we're gonna price at about $0.85 a mile. You say, why would we do that? We believe that we can do two things. Number one, we can at $0.85 or so plus a mile, we will have really attractive margins and an attractive business. Additionally, we will create a total cost of ownership benefit for our customers, right? That will support really aggressive adoption overall. We're really excited about the opportunity.
It's not just that. If you think about the total cost of ownership, there's the direct costs plus benefits of a human driver, but there's also the indirect costs. We think this is another $0.15. You don't have to source, you don't have turnover costs, you reduce costs associated with workers' compensation, you reduce your training costs, et cetera. We think there's about another $0.15 here that's built into that framework for total cost of ownership. Those two things combined create very significant cost of ownership. If you think about trucking is a hard business. I have a lot of respect for carriers. It's an incredibly hard business, and for them to squeeze margins is really hard.
Technologies like the Aurora Driver are things that can unlock this, you know, this major opportunity to reshape the industry and the margins that you have available to them. I don't think there's been anything like it that I can recall in my lifetime that has a substantial to reduce the cost so substantially as what we're gonna offer with the Aurora Driver. It's not just those costs. There's other things on here that we do as well. Obviously, there's the variable and specific cost of the driver, but we have the ability to unlock massive incremental utilization per truck, revenue per truck per day, per week, because we are not limited by Hours of Service limitations. I think the industry average is between 100,000 and 125,000 miles per year if you're efficient.
These trucks can operate 250,000 miles plus a year, right? There are no Hours of Service limitations, and we can do it safely, right? We have improved fuel efficiency. The trucks that we operate on today, driverless, are already yielding 15% fuel efficiency, right? Working with OEMs, there's a potential to increase that to 30%. Those are meaningful total cost of ownership differences for our carriers. We're really excited about that. Also, with reduced frequency and severity of incidents, by definition, you will reduce your overall insurance costs. We're really excited about what we can provide from a total cost of ownership benefit. This is a interesting chart which just basically throws it all together, and maybe I should have started with this. Basically, if you took Fort Worth to Phoenix, that's a roughly a 1,000-mile route today.
you know, if you look at the revenue that you can get by a human driver who has Hours of Service limitations versus the Aurora Driver, the Aurora Driver is substantially more. If you just factor in a very nominal cost difference between the two, and I think we have way more opportunity than just that, the margin that they receive is exponentially higher. We think this is a great opportunity to deliver value for our customers. All right. With that, what I would tell you is we are very excited about where we're headed. 2025 again was about proving the technology promise. Can the Aurora Driver do what we said we think it can do to be a reliable product for our customers? 2026 is gonna be a hell of a year.
It's gonna be about unlocking the commercial value. In the second quarter of this year, we will introduce our second fleet, commercial fleet. This one will be International-based trucks that we've upfitted with our drive-by-wire system. They will be driverless with no need for a ride observer, and we will scale that business, okay? We expect to end the year with over 200 trucks operating throughout the Sun Belt. Next year, if you haven't seen one of our trucks and you've been down in the Sun Belt, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to take a poll or something 'cause I'm gonna be really surprised. What does this translate to? This is the year of remember commercial progress, the promise. This unlocks $80 million of aggregate run rate just on those 200+ trucks, okay?
The opportunity is endless for us. We have all the enablers in place to scale a commercial business, you know, this is gonna be a great year for us, and we're really excited. You know, we like to say the era of the superhuman logistics and Aurora driving it is here, really excited about our future. I look forward to seeing all of you guys in the Q&A as well. With that, thank you very much for your time.