Please read every section. Wow.
Report disclosures, please.
I think people would have be familiar with this by now. It's in red. It says, "Please read every section." Like,
Cannot say I didn't see it.
If they made it in bold and red, then...
They should have just printed it on this.
Mm-hmm. Actually, that seems like the obvious right answer. Let's still give it a minute.
Pretty decent crowd for the last session.
We are cutting into lunchtime.
Say what?
We're cutting into lunchtime.
Yeah. Getting boxed then.
Yeah.
Great. Maybe we can start. Thanks everyone for joining. I'm Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley's freight transportation, airlines, and autonomous trucking analyst. We have literally saved the best for last. We are very happy to have with us, Aurora Innovation and CEO, Chris Urmson. Chris, thank you for coming back to the TMT conference.
Thanks for having me.
Great.
Love to be here.
Before we start, as you pointed out, I have to tell you that for important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley's research disclosure website, morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures, and please read these disclosures. Chris, it's probably been the most important and successful 12 months in Aurora history. You guys have cleared a lot of milestones over the last 12 months. For those less familiar with the story, can you just give us a really quick recap of what's happened over the last year?
Yeah.
what catalyst we can look forward to, in 2026?
Yeah. It has been a heck of a year, and 2026 is shaping up to be even better. We focus on delivering the benefit of self-driving technology safely, quickly, broadly in trucking. In 2025, we launched the first driverless trucks operating daily in the U.S. We're the only company operating them regularly every day. It's exciting to have them on the road. Over the course of the year, we went from operating in daylight conditions on a particular route in good weather to now operating day and night across a variety of routes in the rain and, you know, in more wind and that kind of thing. 2026 is gonna be even more exciting for us. At this point, we're running kind of a handful of trucks on a daily basis, driverlessly.
By the end of the year, we'll be running a couple of hundred trucks driverlessly. In Q2, we're gonna launch our second-generation hardware on our newest truck platform from International and have that operating, again, driverlessly, nobody on board, serving customers. We're gonna grow across the Southern US over this course of this year, demonstrating our ability to take this generalizable, Verifiable AI technology that we have and apply it in ways that really meet customer need. It's gonna be very exciting on that front. Those couple of hundred trucks, we expect to end the year, using those to generate $80 million revenue run rate, which is gonna be a nice nice step forward for us on the revenue front. We continue to make great progress with our partners.
With Volvo at the end of last year, we had the first trucks come off the assembly line, where they had taken our hardware integrated in the factory, and had it roll out. It was a big step because we're not just working on the technology and making the technology talk to each other.
Actually working with their manufacturing teams so that they can actually produce these things at scale. We've put in place a capability to upfit trucks with by-wire and the Aurora Driver that's gonna allow us in the back half of this year to be producing 20 trucks a week, allowing us really to grow aggressively to meet that customer demand. Imovio, our partner for our third-generation hardware, continues to make strong progress so that we'll be in place with the capability to build tens of thousands of trucks, coming in 2027. Really just gonna be a whole lot of fun this year.
Got it. Maybe just to take a step back here, there's a lot of focus, when people talk about autonomous, they think of robotaxi, not as much on the trucking side. It almost feels like trucking is a better use case, a better application for autonomous maybe to begin with, and that is why you guys chose trucking over robotaxi, which you will eventually plan to get into. Can you just walk us through your vision of how autonomous trucking rolls out? How does it, you know, impact the economics of trucking, and what share of the market do you think Aurora can ultimately capture?
Yep. You're right. We think of trucking as the right first market. It's a very hard market. Actually operating these 70,000 pound things on the freeway at 70 miles an hour is extremely challenging to make sure you can do that with conviction and the safety and safe operation of the vehicle. The great news is we've cracked that.
We expect over the course of the next several years, where it basically gets the point for customers where if they're not operating our system, they're really not going to be competitive. The economic opportunity for them is really profound. We can take the asset, the truck, that's their, you know, one of the biggest parts of their cost structure and double the utilization of that, moving from 11 hours a day, which is what you're limited to with a person driving a vehicle to, you know, approaching 24 hours a day. Similarly, one of the big challenges that operators have is a combination of high turnover in their driver pool and the fact that over the next decade, we expect to need 1 million more drivers, and we just don't know where they're going to come from.
The Aurora Driver will provide a way to complement the people that have driving trucks today. This basically a safe, scalable pool of drivers. On the economic side, on the, you know, on the bottom line, we expect to have some huge benefits to customers. Today, the cost of a person driving truck is about $0.995 per mile, plus another $0.15-0.20 of indirect costs. We expect to price at $0.85+ per mile. That in and of itself is a significant economic benefit. You add to that the fuel economy benefits. We expect between 40% and 34% improvement in fuel economy, which is huge when you think of fuel as one of the big three costs for these drivers or for these companies. Of course, the safety benefit of this is real.
You won't talk to a trucking company who doesn't lead with safety as the most important element. The combination of the Aurora Driver's superhuman capability to be paying attention 360 degrees, be able to see further at night than a person can, be able to react, without ever being distracted, it's just gonna be profound.
Got it. Understood. Just looking at the autonomous trucking space, like you said, you guys are leaders, kind of you're the only ones doing what you're doing right now. There are a handful of other companies who are trying to attack similar or adjacent parts of the business. Can you just talk about what makes Aurora unique? You know, is it a tech stack? Is it OEM relationships? Is it you and your genius? Kind of what really sets the company apart?
Let's not have it be the last one.
Okay.
Yeah. That'll be-
The highest multiple.
That'll be a short call, shortfall. I think, these are like all of what you mentioned.
except for the last. But the, you know, the fact that we have Verifiable AI, the fact we're the only company running this stuff for real on the road today, that our verifiable approach, Verifiable AI approach is just critical when you think about we're the tip of the spear for this Physical AI revolution that's happening, right? Making sure that we don't just have a thing that we think works, but that we know works and have conviction in that. When we talk about the OEM partnerships, the fact that we work with 3 of the 4 OEMs in the USA, no one else can say that, right? Obviously, you can't have a driverless truck without there being a truck.
When we look at our hardware supply chain, our second-generation hardware will be produced by Fabrinet, that'll take us up to about 1,500 units. The partnership we have with Imovio is a huge competitive advantage. As we look from the hardware we have in vehicles today to our second-generation hardware, we expect the cost of those components to drop in half and the durability of those components to triple. As we move to the Imovio hardware, we expect that cost to come down by another factor of 2. At that point, we really can not just scale because we have the quantity, but scale because we actually can have the price performance that we want, the cost of goods sold.
to build a hell of a business. The relationships we've been building with customers are deep. you know, these folks have been with us for several years. I'm a big believer that they care about safety. They care about that this will help them build their business. Once we start working with these customers, once we are able to have a strong partnership and build value with them, it's gonna be very hard for someone else to come in and play, right? Do you really wanna put the safety and risk your business when you have something that's working well, with somebody who might come in late with some other offering?
Got it. Understood. Just one follow-up there. Kind of you mentioned AI, obviously a huge theme of this conference for the last three days.
Really?
It's come up a couple times.
Yeah.
Can you just talk about your view of how AI plays in the development of this technology? You guys have been around since 2017. You've been one of the first time I've heard of simulation and saw what you can do. It kind of blew my mind kind of several years ago. At the same time, you also have had actual rubber on road and are testing in the real world as well. What is the right balance between simulation and real-world testing in your view?
You need to use the right tool for the right job, right? First and foremost, simulation is great, but actually a simulated test is actually what you want. You need to not just be able to kinda make the world move forward in some simulated way. You need to know whether it was good or not. That's actually turns out to be quite hard and another step beyond just simulation. For us, it's also important that that simulation is not just pretty pictures, but it's actually grounded in reality. When you get a return back from an object in the world, from your lidar simulator, is it actually coming back at the right probability? Does it have the right intensity, right?
These are things that, you know, if you don't put attention to, you get something that looks pretty, maybe looks to the human eye as representative, but has a meaningful difference in statistics of it that are gonna cause problems when you actually see, you know, compare the performance relative to what you see online.
For us, we, you know, we've been a believer from day one that it is less about the quantity of data, it's about the quality of data that you have. We target collections where we need to. We have a variety of test tracks we'll go out to to gather data, but then we can amplify that data. We can create scenarios that we wouldn't otherwise be able to safely generate in the real world through simulation.
Got it. Just to close the loop on the tech side, not everyone's using the same tech stack, in the industry as you would expect.
I hope not.
Uh, I think-
They took our stuff.
Fair enough. Do you think it's kind of there's gonna be one singular approach to this, or do you think there's gonna be four or five different players with four or five different technology solutions kind of but all of them really work? I think the biggest, I don't wanna say controversy in the industry, but kind of the question mark is around the need for HD maps or not. What's your answer to the mapping question? What's your answer to.
Yeah.
lidar versus vision only?
Yeah.
Do you think all of them work?
I guess my answer is that we need to deliver a safe system, and we need to deliver it quickly, right? That's kind of the start of our mission statement.
When I think about maps, what are computers really good at? They're really good at storing and recalling information. We should lean into that. Turns out it's a hard engineering problem, but done well, you can actually leverage it. I also think that when I drive near my home, I'm a much better driver than when I drive in some other part of the country. Not because I lose my skills in another place, but because I have less understanding about the world when I'm reacting in real time rather than being able to kind of have a cached model of what's there and be able to use that and exploit that in making my decisions.
It seems fairly obvious that being able to know what's coming in the future rather than having to figure it out instantaneously is the right answer, assuming you can do the engineering to make that happen. Turns out we've been able to do that, and our ability to build maps is now really an operational problem. It's not a technology problem.
When I say problem, it's just, it's a thing we have to do. We know how to do it. We're not at all concerned about the ability to scale those maps. When it comes to the sensor suite, we have strong believers in multimodal sensing. We believe that because they have different failure modes and benefits. Cameras have higher resolution but don't see depth directly, can get obscured by things. Radar will punch through things, but is lower resolution and doesn't see color. Our FirstLight lidar can see further than anyone else can and allows us to get, you know, geometry at a range that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. We see that complementary set of capabilities as really important.
We see that play out in practice when we're driving through weather, when we're driving through dust storms, when we're driving at night. The question really is not, you know, is why wouldn't you use these things?
industrialize them, bring them to a point where they don't impact the cost, you know, as negatively and make it work. If you ask anyone working in AI, would they like more data or less data? You know, they're gonna say more.
Right.
This gives us this complementary set of data. Yeah, we're big believers in multimodal sensing.
Got it. Maybe a follow-on question is, we were discussing this before the start of this session that, when I speak with investors on your story, the goalposts keep moving, which is a very good thing because it shows that you guys are moving-.
Yeah.
-through the goalposts. In the most recent one, or where we are right now is, it's gone from does this work
Yeah.
Which people are now convinced about, to can this scale, right?
Yeah.
One of the questions we're getting is, does the need for mapping constrain-
Yeah.
your ability to scale, right? Can you address your confidence in scaling both in 2026 and as well as when you start commercial production next year from the perspective of routes and operations and kind of where the truck can work?
Yeah.
Also scaling from a volume perspective and kind of getting up to 100 or 200 trucks and then 1,000 and then 10,000.
Yeah. On the map scaling side, literally no concerns.
Okay.
Right? This is a thing where we have built the technology, we know how to roll it out. You know, we were able to open up 10 lanes, go from one lane to four lanes to now 10 lanes very quickly. It's really gonna be driven by customer demand and scale of vehicles.
Turns out if you have, you know, a handful of vehicles that you can operate driverlessly, opening up 20 lanes is not useful because you don't have any trucks to put on them.
Yep.
For us, you know, we'll continue to advance and improve the efficiency of that process, but this will not be a limiter for us as we scale and build the businesses here. We've also unlocked the ability to get 200 trucks on the road.
We now have a partnership with ROUSH, where we'll be taking these International trucks. They'll take in our by-wire overlay. We'll be taking our Aurora Driver second-generation hardware kit and installing them. It turns out upfitting is a very common practice in trucking, so we'll be using this as an upfit facility. These trucks will be deployed in the market, like I said, in the back half of this year at 20 trucks a week. So far, we're getting very positive signal from customers. They're excited for this. As we start to unlock these long lanes like Fort Worth to Phoenix, which is 1,000 miles, no human can drive that in a day.
At least not legally. right? you know, the fact that we can start to unlock real value for customers over the course of this year is gonna be a, you know, we see this kind of supply that we will now have get absorbed.
Got it. Just to clarify for the audience, kind of when you say scaling up to get to commercial production, like, eventually in 27 when you have the full launch, you're not actually going to make anything. There's no CapEx cliff, kind of there's no.
No.
all made by you.
No, we don't see a CapEx cliff, right?
Yeah.
We work in partnership with others. You know, the hardware that we're putting on the vehicles this year is our Gen Two hardware. Next year as we as the Imovio hardware is produced, we have this phenomenal partnership with Imovio. It's an incredible team, incredible company. We're working together to deliver that Third-generation hardware. The Imovio folks have invested and are investing, you know, roughly $350 million to allow us to do the engineering work together, to put in place the manufacturing. Ultimately, they finance the hardware, and we pay them based on the utilization of that hardware. This is actually one of the most lovely bits of partner alignment that you can imagine. Our customers get paid more the more their truck drives.
We get paid more the more that customer drives the truck. Imovio gets paid more the more that we drive that truck for a customer. Through this stack, we have this complete incentive alignment of we want that truck out there operating effectively and serving ultimately, you know, our customers' customer, the shippers.
Got it. Just to close the loop on the topic of scaling, you guys did your first driver out run on a public road end of April. You just crossed 250,000 miles with just a few trucks in your fleet.
Yep.
That was pretty good scaling right there. Obviously, no reported incidents or any issues there. What have your biggest learnings been? Like, has this been, like, exactly as you expected? Like, what have been the biggest surprises, positive or negative?
Yeah. It rains a lot in Texas. Like, you know...
Wouldn't have thought that.
You know, you can look at the weather, and you can see, like, here's, you know, the rain.
It turns out somewhere around 40% of the days, this last year we weren't able to operate because of, you know, various weather conditions.
Right.
You know, it's kind of entertaining or it is what it is. We now have the ability to operate in rain, and we'll continue to enhance the kind of the level of rain that we can operate and the level of environmental conditions we can operate over the course of this year. You know, taking that off of out of play is a big deal for serving customers. You know, you don't wanna be, you know, Hirschbach and say, "Sorry, the berries can't get to the store today because it's raining out." You know, that's a big step for us. I think like there's this thing that when...
You know, you have to have belief when you're building a company or building technology that you're gonna get there, and you're like, "Yeah, we're doing the things. I believe we're doing the things. This is going to work." Then there's this moment where you actually did it, and you see how it played out. I think in terms of the process we use for releasing and how we've made that repeatable, we can push new releases on a regular basis. The fact that, you know, the performance fee on the road, for the most part aligns up with what we expect, right? Like, that's actually been a big deal.
... because it gives us continued confidence that we're kind of on the right path, and this will scale, right? The, you know, if we kind of test one hypothesis, and that, you know, succeeds, then kind of the extension of that hypothesis becomes more likely to succeed, and that's where kind of this place we're in right now.
Got it. Maybe switching gears a bit and talk about a few numbers. You referenced the $80 million revenue run rate for 2026. Can you just talk about the big moving parts there and kind of what will get you up to that level, obviously scaling up the fleet?
Yeah
... but also give us a few more details on the Detmar partnership that you guys announced.
Wonderful. Yeah. We get paid on a utilization basis. We drive for customers. Today, we own and operate the trucks. We effectively operate like a trucking company, but we do it under the flag of our partners. That's reflective of miles we expect to drive, heavily weighted in the back half of the year. The Detmar partnership is one of these really wonderful ones where we were not thinking about this as an application.
This customer saw the progress we were making. They'd seen some of the press about what we were doing.
Right.
They reached out and said, "Hey, we're moving sand between this mine and this distribution center. We need to drive on freeways. Nobody else seems to be able to do it. Can you?" Of course, we looked into it. They basically wanna create a virtual, you know, not treadmill, basically a virtual conveyor belt.
Sure.
... with trucks. The more the trucks drive, the more sand they can move, the happier they are because their customer has basically an insatiable demand for this.
This has been one of those places where just by, you know, somewhat by happenstance, customer reached out to us, and this will become an incredibly interesting bit of business, and we expect to be able to grow that dramatically.
Got it. Just to follow on from there, what have the customer conversations been like? This is historically viewed as a fairly conservative industry where people are somewhat skeptical about technology. At the same time, if you can give them technology that will actually save them money, improve their productivity, people are all in on it because math is the only thing that matters in this industry, right? Have the customer conversations ramped up after you've demonstrated or got past these gates-
Yeah
These goalposts, or are people waiting for a final launch to kind of fully roll out?
I'd say first, there's a distribution of customers.
Right? There's no one kind of persona. There's different flavors of risk and appetite. What we have seen is that ability to move from the hypothetical of what this could mean to your business to the practical of, "No, this is real. It's operating driverlessly. It's about to start scaling out to places you care about," really has changed the tenor of conversation.
At this point, you know, we effectively have more demand than we can possibly supply in the next little while here. That's just a very exciting place to be as a business. What's been even more exciting is that the conversations have changed, particularly with folks who've been with us for a while, from, "I'd like to get access to," to, "I'd like to get access to and ensure that I have priority on this. I don't want someone else to come in." Right? You know, they ask, "Can we get exclusivity?" The answer, of course, is no. For folks who've been with us for years, we wanna reward them. We wanna say like, "Thank you for making the bet with us.
We'll help you grow and build your business, and then, you know, we'll expand out from there as well.
Got it. Maybe moving through some of the capability of the truck itself. Obviously, you referenced that you can now drive through rain and fog as well. Kind of, you noted how often it rains in Texas. Obviously, snow has been always kind of a big question a lot of people have had. Just talk about the kind of capability of the truck and when do you get to a point where you can cover the entire country, and to what extent does that unlock more of the market for you?
Yeah. you know, obviously, being able to drive more places just intrinsically unlocks more market, right?
Yeah.
You know, if you can't go the place the goods need to go, it's not helpful. What we expect is over the course of 2026 is we'll unlock the Sun Belt, we'll start to push north from there. I expect this will actually move very quickly.
Today, like as you said, we operate in a certain set of weather and environmental conditions, but we're already doing the work to start pushing, you know, towards snow. Turns out it doesn't snow in the summer, so we've got trucks out gathering data in the Rockies right now.
... chasing snow to make sure we've got datasets that we need. You know, we look at this, we don't really see this as like, there's a thing made of it. It's not really a big thing.
Okay.
Right? Like, people talk about it because, you know, early on, we wanna get something on the road that's useful to you places, and then we'll kind of add capabilities in. At some point, we'll get snow in there. I think we're planning to do light snow certainly by the end of this year.
Got it. Sounds good. I'll open it up, see if any questions in the audience. No, if not, we can keep going. kind of you.
Hi. Yeah. I know it's smaller private. Can you speak to Gatik as a competitor and how they are going to market versus you? Thanks.
I don't know a whole lot about Gatik. They have been working on box trucks. It's, it's hard to tell exactly what's happening. First and foremost, though, I look at this space, and it is gigantic. We believe we have a multi-year lead on folks. We welcome competition. We'll continue to execute. I don't have any particular insight into that company. Anything else? Come back in a second. You referenced the way you're building up revenues over the course of the year.
Yeah.
The margin trajectory, I think, is mostly tied to, the second-generation, eventually a third-generation of the kit.
Yeah.
How much visibility do you guys have into the max there and the cost reduction?
Yeah. On the cost of the hardware, we have very good visibility into that. You know, the hardware that we're building for gen two, we're manufacturing that today.
We understand what the cost is. We have the supply agreements in place, so we know what that cost is. We feel confident in that cost structure. When we talk about the gen three, if anything, I'm more confident in that. One of the reasons you work with a company like Imovio is their superpower is the process of manufacturing and the supply chain management. You know, on a weekly basis, we're looking at the bill of materials cost, we understand the assembly cost, and we understand what the full kit cost is. We feel very confident about where we expect to end with those components.
Got it. Any particular concerns around supply chain or other issues? Like, because lidar was a huge thing for a while.
Yeah
Can you source them and such?
Yeah. We, you know, we continue to pay attention. Given that we're building something as advanced as we are, there are certain kind of single source risks that we have in the supply chain.
You know, I think, most of the companies at this conference probably have some kind of supply chain risk with NVIDIA as a single source. You know, of course, we use their DRIVE Thor SoC. We're one of the lead customers for that. No, we look at this, and again, part of the advantage you have with working with an Imovio is that's what they do.
Right.
Right? They make sure they have a whole team that we would never be able to hire, that handles supply chain management, make sure the suppliers are credible and have alternatives lined up where it can be.
Got it. 2026 will be when you launch the Volvo program. You'll take the observer out of the PACCAR truck, and you have the upfit on the International program as well.
We haven't said any of that.
Maybe. Okay.
Sorry. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
That was pretty clever of you there. I tried. Sorry.
Yeah.
If all of these happens, right?
Yes.
When do we get to a point where, you know, a driverless truck is the only Aurora truck that's running on roads? Kind of at what point does that happen?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We will be running trucks with operators on board indefinitely because we will always be developing and improving the system. That will become a very small minority of-
Okay.
the trucks. By the end of 2026, my expectation is we are already at a small minority of the trucks that are on the road.
Okay.
Right? As we think about just scaling to hundreds of trucks out there, we can't have 500, 700 drivers sat by hoping to, you know, or hoping they don't need to go drive that day. Our expectation is later this year, a vast majority of trucks that are operating are driverless.
Got it. Sounds good.
Yeah.
Just on that point, right? Again, you guys have been hitting all of your catalysts and your key milestones, some of them ahead of schedule. It still feels like there is some level of conservatism on the OEM side, kind of going back to the need for an observer kind of offer you pull the driver out. What is the risk that, you know, you guys do everything you have to, but maybe some of the OEM side or maybe the carrier side moves slower than you would like in terms of adopting this technology?
Yeah. There's risk in everything. If any company here tells you there's no risk in their business, I wouldn't buy that stock. What we can do to mitigate this, one, is we continue to have good, strong working relationships with them. With the partnership we have or the relationship we have with International, where we're buying stock trucks, upfitting them, we've basically taken that kind of schedule risk from the OEM.
Right
Taken that as one that we can control on our side of the ledger. We think that's an important way to kind of help mitigate that risk. I think the biggest thing, though, is getting these trucks in the hands of customers at scale. There's nothing that motivates a company more than their customers saying, "If I can't get the thing I need from you, I'm gonna go buy it from your competitor.
While we have enthusiastic partners, they're working well, I think as the reality of this is in the market, people are using it, they're demanding it, becomes a thing, I think that will just help provide, you know, a virtuous feedback loop through our partners.
Got it. Sounds good. Last call for any questions from the audience. Maybe just a couple, a few minutes left here. Kind of just to hit on numbers again. You're targeting breakeven gross margin on run rate basis exiting 2026, and positive free cash flow in 2028. Can you just talk about the balance sheet and kind of the cash-
Yeah
-use and liquidity, until you kinda wrap up?
Yeah. We feel like we're in a very good place. At the end of the year, we had $1 and a half billion in the bank. You know, that's a really enviable position to be in. As we look at and how we expect the business to roll out over the next couple of years, we think that will carry us through to that run rate free cash flow or free cash flow on a run rate basis.
Yep.
You know, the provisos on that are that we will use our ATM to fund the tax obligation on our RSUs, and we'll likely use it to cover the cost of our bonuses for employees.
Modulo that, we feel good about the capital we have. At some point, we're gonna wanna make sure that we, you know, have a responsible amount of capital on the balance sheet. We'll find the right time when, you know, basically when the catalysts have been reflected in the stock and find the right time to put a little more capital on the balance sheet. We feel very good about that. It's a great position to be in, where it's like, "Yes, we just execute. This is all gonna work.
Got it. Speaking of medium to long term, kind of, you guys obviously have the partnership. Uber kind of has a historical stake in the company. You initially started out as doing both-
Yep
... commercial trucking and robotaxis, ride-hailing.
Yeah.
When do you think? I know you guys are going full speed ahead.
Yep
... on launching commercial truck, but what's the time horizon for ride-hailing and maybe kind of local delivery as well?
Yeah, I think this is a really important idea. The capability we're building is not just an ability to drive trucks, but it's a generalized driving capability. Even more broadly than that, we're developing the process and tools that allow you to launch a safety-critical Physical AI system, right? Something where, you know, if you do it wrong, people get hurt, and we wanna make sure that we do it right.
Yep.
That travels. Today, if you ask me if I could spend another dollar anywhere, I would spend it on our trucking business because the lead we have is profound. The opportunity is great. Just the more we can get that to happen, the better. Within the next couple of years, that business is going to be going, right? We're gonna be, you know, there's gonna be execution to perform, but it'll be off and running, and folks will start to recognize that that's kind of on escape velocity. That's the point where I wanna start looking, okay, where is the next best opportunity or the greatest to ROI for us to take the competence we have and point it at it.
you know, today, it's not clear to me whether that is other elements of the logistics space and stay in that vertical-.
... or whether it's to start to look at ride-hailing and start to enter, you know, that competition and personal mobility. Do that fighting downhill, though, because we will already have scale in the system, which will help us drive the cost out of the Aurora Driver, allow us to enter that market in a more competitive way, which is great. You know, there's also agriculture and mining, truck drones. There's lots of places where we can take that competence that we have, that physical intelligence, that Verifiable AI approach, and deploy it. It's gonna get really fun. Like, it's gonna be a hell of a lot of fun building this truck business.
As we start to send kind of green shoots out to go after some of these other adjacent areas, it's going to be very, very exciting.
Can you just expand on that a little bit? If you go back 10 years, the early days of autonomous driving, there was some skepticism that you could take a system off of a car and put it in a truck or vice versa.
Yep.
Does AI now let you do that kind of much easier than it could have before?
I wouldn't say it's AI, but what I would say it's the architecture and design of the system.
Okay.
Up until a couple years ago, maybe even 2 years ago, we were running our Aurora Driver on both Toyota minivans and big trucks.
Yep.
We have thought hard about how do we architect this system so that it can be applied. Frankly, when we go from moving a big bendy truck down the road to driving a little passenger car, it's easier.
Okay.
When we think about, again, moving from Class 8 tractor-trailers to Class 6 box trucks, like, that's just gonna go. Right? It'll, you know, we're very excited about going to take on those markets, to serve customers in those markets, to deliver the value there. Every dollar I can spend now on trucking is gonna have a higher ROI than any of that. Let's go do that first.
Got it. I think one of the most common questions we still get in the space, is on the regulatory side.
Yeah.
It feels like there has been a lot of positive traction in that area. Can you just go over how you see that?
Yeah
... as you kind of on cusp of launching commercial operations?
Yeah. We do not see regulations as a barrier for us to build a business today, period. If you look across the United States, the vast majority of the states today, you can operate driverless vehicles in them, driverless trucks, certainly across the whole southern corridor. We expect what we've unlocked in 2027 to be, you know, roughly a $50 billion SAM or 50 billion mile SAM. Lots of opportunity there. We continue to have very positive support at state levels. We're starting to have conversations in more states, just to kind of broaden that in preparation for us to start expanding out of the southern corridor. At a federal level, we continue to see support. The regulations that we have both from FMCSA and NHTSA support the technology we're deploying, the product we're deploying.
We continue to have strong relations there. We are seeing this administration, at least so far, communicate very positively about the importance to the American economy and American competitiveness of automated vehicles, and that's from the vice president through to the secretary of transportation and, you know, various others in the administration.
Got it. Chris, take us home by telling us what you're most excited about in 2026 and what we can look forward to in terms of catalysts?
Yeah. I am just jazzed, right? This is gonna be a year where we get a new truck on the road, second-generation hardware. We're gonna be able to do that at scale. It's gonna be like I've been working this field for twenty-something years at this point, and we made a big step forward last year where we could put trucks on the road and nobody in them. By the end of this year, if you are taking a road trip across the Southern U.S., you can't help but see our truck. Right? They're gonna be out there serving customers, and it's just the first step to what will be an even more exciting 2027. Getting to that point where we get to see this really take off and really go, it's gonna be a lot of fun.
Great. We're very excited to see how that develops as well. Chris, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you.