Okay. We are back here for our last and final presentation on the transports track, sticking with the freight tech side of things. Very happy to have Aurora here with us, CEO and Founder Chris Urmson, who, whom we spoke with for quite some time. One of the leaders in this space, as you all know. So I'm just gonna turn it over to Chris. I guess one of the members of the team here as well, Richard and Stacy. In terms of, I think it'd be good to have an update. You've got some slides here. Clear there's been a lot going on in the broader industry, but company still seems to be, you know, more or less just keeping to what you said you were gonna do and following that timeline.
Look forward to putting it all out together. If you have questions in the room, raise your hand, we will get you a mic. With that, let me turn it over to Chris.
Great. Well, thank you, Brian. Appreciate the chance to be here. Thanks for everyone joining us today. Yeah, it is, I think the industry is dealing with some challenges, but as a team, we feel like we've been able to keep our heads down and execute and do what we said we're gonna do. Honestly, I'm more optimistic than ever about our position. Good morning, everyone. Before we jump in, the lawyers, of course, asked me to put up our safe harbor statement, we're gonna be giving you a little bit of an update and answering some Q&A. Hopefully, the lawyers are happy. Okay. Doesn't seem like the clicker is working. There we go. Thank you. Okay.
We're gonna talk to you a little bit about the business, you know, but before we jump into that, just about the promise. This is our company's mission, is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly and broadly. We see the opportunity to fundamentally transform transportation, both on the logistics side and in the longer term, on the personal mobility and local goods delivery side. This means, leads to an increase in safety, increased access, easier to move goods through the world, and the opportunity to transform logistics. What we're building at the company is the Aurora Driver. It's the capability for all kinds of vehicles to move safely through the world. It's a combination of software, hardware, and of course, the off-board and onboard data services that enable those vehicles to drive.
It'll drive, the same software and hardware, drives big trucks, drives light passenger vehicles, and ultimately, will drive delivery vehicles as well. The market we're going after first is trucking. It is a gigantic opportunity. In the U.S., the trucking market is somewhere between $700 billion and $800 billion, and globally it's about $4 trillion. The technology, as I mentioned, we're developing also works for light vehicles, we ultimately will expect to operate in that space as well, where personal mobility can be a trillion-dollar market in the U.S. Local goods delivery driven, of course, by e-commerce, is also a major opportunity. As we enter the trucking market first, it's great that we have some cool technology, but let's make sure that it actually does something useful.
As we talk to our partners, these are the key pain points that we see our technology addressing for them. They have a massive shortage of drivers. This is not just a recent thing. This has been a trend that's been building for decades. We can provide to them a scalable, stable source of drivers. Trucks today are limited in their ability to generate revenue by how long the driver can be behind the wheel, which is 11 hours in the United States. We have an opportunity to double a core metric of their business, which is revenue per truck, because the Aurora Driver won't be limited by 11 hours a day. We can reduce fuel costs, which is about 30% of the cost structure of moving goods through the world.
We expect to be able to reduce that by about 10%. Of course, insurance is one of the rising costs in the industry. We both expect the trucks to be safer because the driver's always attentive, has got 360 degree vision. In addition to that, we'll have better data to adjudicate these events to help manage claims through that process. Today, we are primarily focused on getting the technology to market. We have worked closely with partners to spring load the company to be able to deploy and scale. Today, we work with PACCAR and Volvo Trucks. Together, they make up about half the trucks sold in the U.S. market. Of course, we work with Toyota, the world's leading car manufacturer.
We have a number of partners on the trucking freight. Today, notably, we are hauling loads today with our trucks operating autonomously for these partners. We currently still have an operator on board those trucks, but we're actually driving the driving the trucks autonomously, hauling the freight for them. We work with Uber, a major shareholder and partner, obviously the world's largest ride-hailing network. We recently added the partnership with Ryder to allow us to provide fleet services to our customers and to our vehicles. The technology that we're building uses a multimodal sensor approach. That means we don't just rely on cameras for example. We use a combination of our proprietary lidar and other lidars, camera and radar data to be able to see the world robustly around the vehicle so that we can operate safely.
This is an example, just to hammer home the value of this technology we've been developing in-house. It's called frequency modulated continuous wave lidar. The advantages of it are that we can see dramatically further than others can, and we also can measure the speed of the thing we're seeing instantaneously. What you're gonna see here is on the left, data from one of our trucks showing what we get from our conventional lidar, state-of-the-art lidar. On the right, you're gonna see what we get from the Aurora FirstLight Lidar and how that allows us to react earlier. The vehicle's gonna be driving along in the right lane of a freeway in Texas, and we're to come across a work vehicle on the side of the road.
I'm gonna hit play here. As we start moving in a moment now, we get four little dots you can see in the bottom right from the FirstLight Lidar. That's enough for us to know that there is something parked on the side of the road. As a good road user, we're gonna slide to the left a little bit, create some space, and make sure we're not overly, you know, kinda creating danger for those folks on the side of the road. Now, we'll play the video forward here. If you will wait. As you can see, the Aurora Driver is already reacting and making a lane change to get over. It takes about nine seconds before the conventional lidar is able to get anything from that target.
In that time, we have already moved over and gotten out of harm's way and reduced the risk of the road users. This is the difference, right? That nine seconds is something like approaching three football fields of length that we're able to move, or detect things beforehand, right? That nine seconds is the difference between a demo that works most of the time and a real safe, compelling, actual product to market, right? This is what you need to actually be able to ship something in this space, and this is a technology that is ours, and we believe we're the only folks that can do it. Some examples of the Aurora Driver operating, and these are sped up, just so we can kinda keep things moving here. Here we're operating on surface streets, pulling out of a depot.
We're gonna make this Texas U-turn, which is this lovely bit of road geometry where they allow you to make change directions on surface streets without actually having to stop. The truck has to navigate the merges, and then, of course, gets onto the freeway here and deals with traffic. This is the kind of thing you need to do to be able to deliver a product that actually is useful for a customer. Go to the next slide here. Obviously, the world is constantly under improvement. Here, we're navigating various construction scenarios, dealing with lane closures and shifting over. Again, our ability to perceive things at range allows us to react to these in a safe and predictable way.
Of course, when people are putting down cones, they're not really careful about making sure they're exactly in the right place. They shift over, the driver has to be able to adapt to that. This is the kind of thing that you would all do intuitively, but it turns out, you know, takes a little bit of effort to do well as a vehicle or as an automated driving vehicle. Finally, the roads, of course, are not pristine. There's debris in the road. Here, as we're driving along, we're able to detect. In a moment here, you'll see it pop up. A little bit of debris on the road. This is a tire carcass, I think. We then nudge around it, saving the wheels, saving the underbelly of the vehicle from whatever damage.
For added degree of difficulty here, it turns out there's a vehicle stopped on the side of the road. We again see that early enough. We make a lane change over. You can see us detecting all the little warning cones behind that vehicle as well. These type of driving behaviors are necessary for the vehicle to be able to operate robustly again in the real world. About a year and a quarter ago, maybe about a year ago, we shared our first roadmap for how we were gonna get from where we were then through to commercially launching the product. I'm really proud of the way the team's been executing. We've just been delivering. We've said what we're gonna do. We've gone out and done it and, you know, done it on time and on schedule.
In Q1, we have a major milestone for coming up, and we expect to accomplish being Feature Complete. At that point, the Aurora Driver is basically doing everything we think it needs to do to be a commercial product. It doesn't yet know it well enough that we're confident in the safety of it to release it, but everything is in place. Now we're at, like, the really fun part, right, that engineers love, that you get into just kind of burning down the list of things, right? Once you get to a discrete list of things, it's just execution and go. From there, by the end of the year, we intend to get to Aurora Driver Ready.
At that point, we'll have validated and refined the system to the point where we would be confident to operate on the road without a person on board. In 2024 is when we expect to commercially launch the system, where we'll be able to marry that Driver up with a vehicle from one of our OEM partners to start hauling loads with nobody on board for our customers. The technical development program is going about as well as we could hope. On the operations side of it, again, the business is going very well. We had hoped to get to about 30 loads per week in Q4, and we exceeded that. Q1, we had hoped to get to 40 loads a week, and we exceeded that in the first month of the year.
Again, seeing reasonably good demand for the product. We're in pilot phase. We're learning, our customers are learning, but that's moving very well. We continue to engage closely with our truck OEM partners, folks that we're engaging with on a daily basis, bringing those platforms into place, so they'll be ready to marry up with the Aurora Driver and actually deliver customer value. For us, the launch bar is really having a closed safety case, and we've been kinda consistent about this over the years. We're not about doing a demo here or a demo there. We're about actually having a product that's useful and that's safe to be on the road. The way we do that is by closing what we call a safety case.
This is a description of a kind of a structured argument that explains why you could trust it. The top level in this is that it's proficient, that the Aurora Driver is capable of operating on the road in a safe way, that it's fail-safe, so if something breaks, we can detect that, react to it, mitigate the risk from it, that we're continuously improving, so we're learning from what isn't working. We're making that better, and we're taking the things that are working and making them better as well. We're resilient, so we can deal with things like cyberattacks and defend the vehicle from that. Trustworthy is that we have a culture at the company that basically fosters safety, that we have, you know, a just culture so people can raise concerns.
We can recognize that. There's nothing punitive that's done there. When we think about deploying the technology, of course, one of the questions that's top of mind for folks is the regulatory environment. The great news is that in the vast majority of the United States, if we had a truck that we were confident in the safety of, we could put it on the road today. As you can see in this illustration here, there's just a couple of states in the Northeast where we wouldn't be able to operate the vehicles autonomously. In California, for us, is actually one of the primary focuses. There we're allowed to operate light vehicles, but not heavy vehicles.
There's progress now with the Department of Motor Vehicles moving to enable heavy trucks because back in 2011, I think, the legislature approved both light and heavy trucks operating in autonomy. We had a major regulatory win over the last six months, where Pennsylvania previously had been a state that allowed testing, but not deployment without operators. The Pennsylvania legislature passed regulation, passed a law that enabled us to operate without people on board. Really good progress there as well. One more slide. Finally, we continue to see Aurora positioned to succeed. That, you know, we've been steady and, you know, executed consistently against the roadmap we've said. We look at the landscape around us, and we see the field clearing in trucking.
You know, some of our competitors are dealing with inner turmoil, some are shutting down, some are backing away from trucking. When we look at this incredible landscape, you know, opportunity, this $700 billion market space, having the technology, the team, the, you know, the partnerships to go and take it, we're incredibly excited about that. We continue to execute. We expect to have Feature Complete, meet that milestone at the end of the quarter, and then continue to be, we believe, on track for Aurora Driver Ready by the end of the year. I can say, you know, I was talking with somebody earlier this morning about the Gartner Hype Cycle and feeling like we're kind of in the Trough of Disillusionment.
As with many things, the media and the narrative is a little bit out of phase with reality. From where I sit, I've never been more optimistic about our prospects and the opportunity to have a transformational impact in the world. It's just an incredibly exciting time for us and I think for the industry broadly. With that.
Okay.
happy to jump to Q&A.
Great. Well, if you do have a question, raise your hand. We have some mics we can get to you, but clearly a lot to cover. Maybe just to start where you one of the spots you ended, which is the field consolidating and, you know, certainly investor interest in pre-revenue companies has come down as interest rates have gone up, of course. When we do see however this consolidation unfolds, are there opportunities to look at, oh, that technology can fit on board? I mean, of course, the people are.
Yeah.
The huge assets. That's probably a given. Is there, because, you know, the models have been different for a while now, which one's gonna be the one you choose, whether it's the best car and the freight together and lidar versus camera? I don't know.
Yeah.
If there's really a, you know, horizontal consolidation here, or is it just, like, picking up more people and talent?
We've been pretty consistent for the, you know, about the model, right? The model is, we're gonna deliver trucking first. We're gonna build a technology base that applies, a platform that works for both, trucking is our focus. We've also been clear that our business model is one where we have no intention of competing with our customers, that that channel conflict just seems like a fundamentally bad idea. Why go and, you know, figure out how to become FedEx or Werner? They do that pretty darn well themselves. Let's help them build their business and that will help us accelerate into market and scale and grow as a company. We feel very good about that. In terms of consolidation, you know, at this point, we've, you know, we went through a major consolidation as a company.
We acquired Uber's self-driving car assets, that's turned out wonderfully for us. We're well through the pain of that at this point. The team is just executing in a way that I couldn't be prouder of. We feel like we have the team, we've got the tech. You know, at this point, it would mostly be a distraction to acquire something else. You know, we'll of course, take every situation as it comes up and assess it. Right now, we just need to execute, and we're doing that.
One of the other things I think is interesting in this dynamic now is some of the supply chains and the timelines get pushed out. There's a push to maybe try to monetize something different or pivot a little bit differently, and we've seen that in a couple different areas. I'm just thinking of the Aurora offering and the technologies. Is there anything that would sort of fit that for, you know, in your mind, clearly, you've got the roadmap you just saw and you're.
Yeah.
marching along toward it, but something, I guess, like for FirstLight.
Sure.
lidar. Could that be monetized in some way? Could you do licensing of it? Could it be maybe not sold off, but, you know, anything else in the portfolio.
Yeah.
-do you think you could kind of add on as you continue on the, on the roadmap? Clearly, supply chains haven't been cooperative, so maybe you
Yeah.
to plan a little bit differently.
For us, the supply chain has not been a major challenge.
Okay.
Right? The things are working along, we certainly manage that. There is a broader impact, but today, the scale of what we do is small enough that we have been able to be dynamic and find paths and access to what we need. We certainly, you know, broadly, it'd be wonderful if the world were in an incrementally better place, but that's not hindering us. There's certainly additional opportunities to monetize the technology we have. We look at our perception system. We look at, you know, as you point out, FirstLight. We see long-term an opportunity to see that technology brought to the ADAS marketplace. We've been very clear about our roadmap. We're executing that roadmap, and we see that as the right opportunity.
You know, trying to compete with a tier one who has the, all of the inventory management, all the supply chain processes, that just doesn't feel like a game that we're well equipped to go win at. Let's again find the right partners. Let's see paths perhaps for that technology to come in. You know, we look at the landscape, we see how well our system is executing and how well our team is executing. Let's play to win, and that's what we're doing.
Can we get a microphone over to Chris there, please?
I actually had a couple of questions on the proprietary lidar.
I'm not sure if the microphone is working.
Hello. Yeah.
There we go.
Follow-up questions on the, on the lidar. It kind of struck me as I saw the video, maybe why Tesla vehicles tend to slam into parked cars in, on the, on the shoulder.
We're-
or emergency vehicles. Well, it's like looking at the video, you can see that it's hard to tell from far away what lane-
Yeah
... that vehicle's in, and if it kinda locks in on it as, oh, I'm following that vehicle, and then it's too late when it realizes. Anyway, the questions are, I guess first, is there also some software aspect to that and mapping aspect to be able to perform the maneuver that you showed where it knows that it's a curve? 'Cause the curve thing.
Yeah
is tricky, right? Like, when you're approaching a toll booth, you don't know, am I in lane 10 or 11, right? How does it know that that's on the shoulder?
Yeah.
Is that also part of being able to see farther?
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. We're, so one, we've talked in the past, we didn't highlight it today, about our mapping technology. We do build high-resolution maps. We would have loved to buy them from other people. We were not able to find ones that met the requirements of the space, and so we deploy and build them. The point you make about the necessity of software here is really on target, right? People often talk about the urban driving problem as being more challenging than the freeway one. I consistently told them, it's different, right?
We don't think it scales as easily as the freeway driving, but it turns out that if you're trying to locate something 450 meters, 500 meters plus that down the road, that's a lot harder than doing it 150 meters. 150 meters, you can just kinda like, oh, that's where it says it is. That's good enough. At 450, you know, you got a little bit of error, you're a lane or two over and game's over. I think we just shared a blog post yesterday about some of our approach here with automatic recalibration on the freeway and not calibration tuning.
Yeah, there's some very interesting machine learning work that we've done, to take that raw superpower we have with FirstLight and really be able to deploy it well, you know, on the vehicle. This again, one of the messages we've been saying for a while, bringing that sensor technology in-house allows us to co-mingle, right, the smart people that we have on the software side of the house doing perception with these brilliant physicist-type people that are building the lidar. Like, "Hey, what do we need to make this really go?" It's a lot of fun to see.
On the sensor itself, can you give an idea of kind of the price point? I'm just thinking about to Brian's question of the broader application.
Yeah
other vehicles. I mean, lidar has traditionally been really expensive-
Yeah
... which is why people like Elon really haven't used them.
Yeah, right. Elon, it's a business model problem, right? For, rather than anything else, as far as I can tell, it's that, you know, they wanna put the sensors on the car so they can harvest the data from it. It just turns out that, you know, cameras are basically free and lidar is not. One, there's nothing fundamentally expensive about a lidar, right? That, you know, it's all stuff that when it will go down the industrialization scale curve or price curve because of scale, it's just gonna happen, right? There's no reason this technology can't be, you know, sub $1,000, and ultimately, you know, less than that. For us, we're investing in integrated photonics, silicon photonics.
Today, the inside of the FirstLight lidar has got a bunch of discrete optical components that makes it relatively expensive. The team we're developing is these basically, you know, little optical chips, right? That we put together that will dramatically, like order of magnitude, reduce the cost of the sensor, right? Like anything else, if you take discrete electric components and compare the cost of assembly and the reliability it means to that versus electric components on a chip, it's again, order of magnitude difference. We're seeing really good progress with that. Again, we've shared, some of the progress there, I think, in our last business review update.
We've done an early integration of some of the early optical chips, and we initially expected the performance of the FirstLight Lidar with them to be degraded, and we'd have to do some work to bring it up. Turns out it, in a number of ways, it performed better than the discrete components. We don't see that intercepting in the, you know, in the very near term, but that is a way that we are set up to bring the cost out of that.
Are there any moving parts in it or is it all solid state?
No, there are moving parts. If you in a lidar, you can think of, there's two core, there's a variety of core technologies. For this moment, we'll talk about the, basically the range measurement engine and then where you put the light, all right? The steering. For us, you know, there's actually two moving parts today on the beam steering side. Ultimately, we expect that will come down to one. You know, it turns out there's lots of moving parts in a truck and a car. You know, in particular with us, we use a rotating polygon. Just spinning a thing in a circle, I think we've got that.
Thank you.
Just on the roadmap, going back to the Feature Complete, we've seen, you know, the different capabilities, including the one we're just talking about with the finding nine seconds before, which is pretty substantial.
Yep. I think when I was here a year ago, I think it's a smaller number. I think it was seven. We've, you know, pushed that out, which is exciting too.
In those terms, like, what's next? I know you don't have to drive in snow and all this other stuff 'cause that's not the ODD. What else are you looking to specifically get to test? I know you said when you get to that point, you're not, like, ready to go. It's just at that point-
Yep.
-where you know you can do it, now you just have to prove that you can do it and prove to others perhaps. What's left from a technical capability standpoint?
Yeah.
'Cause it looks like it's getting filled in pretty well, but I'm sure there's always something else.
Yeah.
you wanna get full, you know, full confidence on.
For sure. That's what Feature Complete is about, is to get to the point where we do all the things we need to launch on the route in Texas, right? Begin to build out. You know, for a long time in the future we're gonna be adding features and capabilities and improving things, right? Much like, you know, Henry Ford rolled the first Model T off the line in, what was it, 1912. It turns out we didn't fire all the engineers the next day, that then, you know, the engineering in automotive has increased over time. I expect we will continue to do work there for the next century.
Between now and Feature Complete, which I think is about two weeks away, what we're working towards, right, things that we expect to come online are, an example, despite our best efforts, our vehicles will be in collisions.
Mm-hmm.
We need to understand that that happened and then take some kind of action in response to it. Our vehicles won't initially want to operate in very inclement weather, so we need to be able to have a methodology to understand that the weather is worse than we expected or worse than we allow the vehicle to operate in, and then take a response to that, whether that's slow down or pull to the side of the road or just not launch. Right? There's a variety of these kind of what we call off-nominal situations because it's not fair to say that. Again, maybe we'll get a little geeky for a moment here. You said ODD, maybe not everybody knows what that means. That means operational design domain. That's what did you design the system for.
Mm-hmm.
It turns out if you're in the real world, you can't say that we're not gonna have heavy rain in Texas, even if most of the time it doesn't, right? Like 98%. Your truck might be on the road and weather forecasting is still not perfect, and it might really rain heavily. We can't just say we're not gonna deal with that 'cause that would be unsafe. We don't intend the vehicle to operate in that. This is what we would call an off-nominal situation. We wanna detect the rain is heavier than we expect to drive safely in. Let's now slow down, pull to the side of the road. There's a variety of those things the team has been putting in place.
It's stuff that doesn't show up most days, some of them very rarely, for example, the collision situation. That you actually have to do if you're going to launch a product. It's, it's the not sexy, not glamorous part of what we do.
Right. You don't have to solve everything all at once, just what you're going to.
Right.
need to tackle on that.
Even in Texas, it snows. Right?
It does.
I actually happened to be there when it was snowing. We have to have some way to mitigate that risk, right? It turns out that we've been very thoughtful about this, where, you know, people talk about the long tail of problems that you have to drive in self-driving. Well, it turns out, if you think about it, there's a lot of them that kind of coalesce the same mitigations, right? We've been thoughtful about that and have been building and, you know, doing that analysis for some time. Now we're getting to the point where we're implementing those mitigations. Again, you know, we're feeling very good about our prospects of meeting Feature Complete.
Well, it seems like the, even though the freight markets are softer, and trucks aren't as expensive to hire, it seems like there's still a lot of interest, you know, in the product. Maybe you can just talk through the partners, the willingness to look long-term, which I assume, you know, most of them still are because.
Yeah.
They got into that to begin with.
Yep.
It seems like also the partnership ecosystem is pretty well filled out as well. Maybe you can just give us a quick update in terms of, you know, if there's anything else to add along those lines and, you know, if there's still a lot of interest, even if there even if we are in that disillusionment part of the hype curve.
Certainly. I, you know, everyone reads the press, right? I, it's I think much like everybody else, our partners are incrementally less enthusiastic than they were two years ago, right, or one year ago. At the same time, the premise of why we're doing this has not changed at all. There continues to be a shortage of drivers, and there continues to be. Again, I look at an industry where we have the opportunity to double the core metric of their business, right? Like, that doesn't come along very often. That just on its face is profound. Then when you add to that the safety benefits, when you add to that all the rest of what we can do for them, it's very clear that they're enthusiastic about it.
It's, you know, they want, much like everybody else, they wanna see it work for real. We look forward to demonstrating that.
One of the things I would like to see work for real would be California move after, what, 2011 you said?
Yeah.
It seems like every time we talk, it's still, like, moving a little bit forward or maybe-
Yeah.
it's supposed to move forward, but it sounds maybe I'm being too optimistic, but it sounds like maybe you actually are, moving a little bit closer to it.
Yep.
We can get a quick update on the regulatory front. Not that you're launching there to begin with, certainly you open up the full I-10 quarter, that'd be pretty meaningful.
It would be. We'd be very excited about it, right? You know, the wheels of government turn slowly. We found an engaged audience for us as a company and as, you know, as a, as a resident of California, it's embarrassing to me that, you know, we're, you know, major footprint there. The technology certainly feels like it was birthed in California. The fact that the state is not taking advantage of that and the economic growth that'll come from it is sad. As a company, we see a lot of opportunity. Obviously, in California, we see that as a, an important market in the long term. If, you know, if California doesn't play, there's a lot of other trucking that happens in the U.S.
While we may have to get up to the California border and, you know, stop there, you know, it turns out all the way to, you know, Atlanta to Florida, you know, to the East Coast. It'll get itself figured out. At some point, again, it is obvious this is the right thing to do from a societal point of view, from an economic point of view. I have confidence in the long term we figure that stuff out and it works itself out.
On that point, from all the safety aspects of it, you guys have had the safety case and the framework out there for a while now. You know, the question always comes up like, when do you know that it's safe?
Yeah.
How many people do you have to prove to that? I'd be interested in hearing a little bit more on that. Also with, you know, one of, one of your, one of your competitors having an accident that, got a lot of press and just went through the FMCSA review. You know, how are your interactions with...
Yeah.
With the regulators, you know, post that accident, then also since then, as you continue to progress on this timeline?
Yeah. Bunch of different questions in there. I'll try and piece them back together. The safety case is really this explanation for why you can trust the Aurora Driver on the road. What we have shared is that we expect after meeting Feature Complete, we'll begin to share with the market the Autonomy Performance Indicator, the Autonomy Readiness Measure. Sorry, we have two. I'll get better at that. The Autonomy Readiness Measure, which is how complete that safety case is, right? That's effectively, think of that as how much work did we have to do between Feature Complete and Aurora Driver Ready. We look forward to sharing that, and you'll be able to kind of see the progress there concretely.
We actually, because of the regulatory environment in the United States, we don't actually have to prove to regulators that the vehicle is safe. We have to have confidence in it. They have a number of sticks they can use if they don't have confidence that we have confidence, right? We demonstrate that we're not meeting those their safety expectations. You know, we're able to deploy the product. We don't have to go through a regulatory review process. At the same time, we have taken the stance and the approach that the regulatory folks are partners in this, right? We are trying to do something transformational for this industry. It would be naive to think that you can do that without actually engaging with the regulators.
You know, I was one of the very first people back when I was at Google to go and spend time with the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the California Department of Transportation, and help them understand, and what the opportunities were, what the challenges were. We've been able to continue to build that relationship and that trust over the last, good Lord, how long has it been? Decade plus. I think that the, you know, we have a very good relationship with them. We've had, you know, senior members of U.S. Department of Transportation down in Texas in the trucks, and we continue to engage with them.
I think there is a complexity of understanding that not everyone in the industry is the same, and that I think we have done a good job of building trust and demonstrating why that trust is, you know, why we're worthy of that trust through our actions and communication with them over time.
Any, one more question. Any other learnings, feedback or from other incidents that have come out to the rest of the industry in terms of your interaction? Do they feel more comfortable? Do they worry when that happens or are they not, you know, as focused industry-wide, it's just more company-specific?
I think they obviously have questions, right? They, you know, kind of did that happen to them. Could it happen to you? No. Right, at least not that. I know, like, we will have a bad day, right? That our trucks are on the road, something will happen. We're doing everything we can to minimize, you know, to kind of keep reasonable risk here. We've got a team of humans, right? At some point, there's gonna be some kind of thing that is an issue, but we'll be able to address that, and it'll benefit the whole fleet when we fix it. We feel very good about that. When we talk with regulators, they seem to appreciate our approach. They appreciate our transparency.
We've been, you know, a leader both publicly and with the regulatory folks in being transparent in how we approach and think about these things.
Thanks. Maybe the tougher question or the more important question is not how do you convince the regulators it's ready? How do you convince the customers and shippers...
Yeah.
That it's ready because they're kind of ultimately taking the risk of deployment, right?
Absolutely.
How do you think about that?
Yeah. It's really about engagement, right? I say this a lot, and I know some people use it as a soundbite, but we think of our customers and our OEM partners as partners. Just yesterday, actually, Sterling, our Chief Product Officer, was on stage at South by Southwest with one of our customers and one of our OEM partners. You know, one of them, unprompted, said, "We're the gold standard in safety." All right? I think they get, through our education with them, why the approach we're taking. They understand how seriously we take it, and we keep them updated on a lot of the kind of performance statistics that they're looking for on that.
Do you get the sense that there's some sort of metric or a bogey that a FedEx or a U.S. X is thinking like, "Okay, I need to see them do X before I'm ready to put this on the road on my truck?
I think one of the biggest things is really having the opportunity to experience it with their experienced drivers, right? One of the things we look forward to doing in the coming months and years. Right now, we do pilots for them where it's our operators in the trucks hauling loads. We look forward to doing kind of field operational trials with them, where their operators get to see the behavior and, you know, in the vehicles.
I wanted to come back to one other thing. You showed before the TAM of the $800 billion.
Yeah.
Actually, this is something Brian and I talked about a week or so ago. Like, what do you think is sort of the real addressable market? You know, there's a lot of short haul stuff in there.
Yeah.
that wouldn't make a lot of sense for someone to deploy a complicated system like this. What if you sort of distill down to...
Yeah.
you know, routes over 500 miles or whatever you think they're focused on in lanes that are kinda straightforward.
Yeah.
better parts of the country, like, what's sort of the subset of that that's sort of really appropriate?
Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't have that number off the top of my head. You know, we can certainly find that out and get you, get you a concrete answer. In the long term, I expect we will do all of it, right? I think it will take time to get there, but the strategy we have is to build out the interstate network first, which is, you know, I wanna say the majority of the miles. Again, we'll get you a concrete number there. Then move into the more capillary-type movements. You know, the opportunity is pretty profound either way. Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have the number off the top of my head.
Just one last quick one, excuse me. Following up on just the safety component, another stakeholder would be the public.
Yep.
Do you feel that it's still, you know, this is superhuman driver, this is Optimus Prime, whatever you wanna call it, that has to perform, you know, perfectly?
Yep.
to get that license to operate? I mean, we spend a lot of time, obviously, with the statistics and.
Yep.
-with you, so we get the idea as the regulators would. What about where do you think the public is in that?
I think particularly in trucking, most people won't notice, right? There, there's a big truck driving down the road. It's driving well and safely. It'll be there, right? Of course, you know, you look for it. You'll see that it's got extra stuff on it than a normal truck doesn't. Right, what you'll see is a more courteous, in many cases, driver that's out in the road taking care of, other folks. What my impression is that, you know, there's been an OEM that's had a product to market that we think is not truly what we're doing, but they're gonna market like that. They've had a variety of incidents, and that really hasn't dampened enthusiasm, you know, really.
Surprisingly.
Right. I think that You know, I think it's as you say, we live in a world of statistics. We always try to recognize that each of those statistics is a person, right? You know, as I think about bringing this to market, I wanna make sure that if my kids are on the road, my parents are on the road, that I would feel confident that they could be around it, and we certainly will.
Understood. Okay. With that, we are out of time, but thank you very much, Chris, for coming and giving us the update, and we look forward to seeing what's next.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks.