All right, everyone, let's kick it off. Chris McNally, head of global automotive and mobility here at Evercore ISI. David Maday, CFO of Aurora. David, let's kick it off with just a little brief overview of Aurora. You've had a very busy week.
Great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for inviting me. This is an impressive forum with an impressive group of leaders and companies doing great things in the industry. I am very excited to be here. First and foremost, maybe I'll spend a little bit of time before the Q&A just talking about Aurora for those that maybe aren't quite as familiar. As Chris outlined in his earlier material, there's a lot of debate on technology and what types of modeling and end-to-end and frontier models and mapping and things like that. You'll get a lot of that later. You're not going to get any of that from me. I'm going to talk about the business. That's the stage that we're at, and that's what we're going to focus in on today. Plus, I'm really not good at answering those questions, so let's get started.
Before I do, I am going to be providing some forward-looking statements, so please take a moment to read our forward-looking statements disclosure so I don't get in trouble. Okay. We just had our analyst and investor day. For those that might have seen this, we're going to repeat some of this stuff. I think the thing for us is really we are at this inflection point where we believe that all the investments that we've made today have put us in a position to be highly successful. Today, we are, in fact, the only company that is operating driverless on public roads. This is driverless. Nobody behind the wheel, no safety drivers. This is not a pilot. This is everyday operations, and it has its own challenges, of course, of everyday operations, but this is where we're headed. This is this inflection point.
If you talk to Chris Urmson, our founder, he would tell you, and he does a lot of comparisons of, it takes a long time and a lot of investment to get to this point. For him, it's about 20 years of it. Aurora's been around since 2017. We've made major investments to get ourself into this position. Earlier this summer, we launched what we call Aurora Driver 2. This is our second version, a major leap forward. Again, it's built on our Verifiable AI software. It has our second-generation hardware. This is the hardware that actually will allow us to start to scale our commercial business. Obviously, you need all the tools and services. We really do feel we're at a commercial inflection point with the business.
But at the same time, we also want to remind ourselves that there are some things we are really good at, and there are some things where we believe the best approach is a partnership approach. We have been pretty proud of our partnership approach. I came to Aurora in 2020 specifically to work on building up a lot of these partnerships. Many of them on the board today are a result of our strategy to do what we do really well and rely upon others to do what they do very well. We are proud to be partnering with some of the very best OEMs in the U.S. market. We are proud to be partnering with many of our industry-leading logistics partners. Some of these people we started working with back in 2021. Some of them are in the room.
Some of them have been with us along the way and will continue to support us. Some of them are our harshest critics. They want to see the very best from Aurora, and they help us, and they guide us in that pursuit. Then we obviously have a lot of pioneering hardware partners that support our strategy going forward. We are really excited about the commitment that we have from each of them, all aligned on this long-term vision that we have, which is it is a match with our vision, and it is to create tremendous value. Now, I had said that we started back in 2017. We have made tremendous progress. We have also made significant investment to get us to this point. We truly believe we have all of the elements in place to start to scale and have meaningful value in the market.
Whether it is our Verifiable AI software, whether it is our hardware, we are the only company that not only has our second-generation hardware, which is a complete redesign from the first generation, which is manufactured by Fabrinet, but we also have our third-generation hardware in development, actually starting to test on roads today from AUMOVIO. These are significant investments towards scaling a business. On the supply side, we are working with multiple OEM partners. Our goal is that our logistics customers can choose the truck that they want with the Aurora Driver, not the Aurora Driver with the truck that they have to take. Then finally, from a demand perspective, we continue to make great progress with our customers in filling out the demand. Obviously, we are fully allocated for 2026. We have got tremendous potential in 2027.
I would say we are 2 to 3x where we need to be in terms of the allocation that we can deliver. We are very excited about the opportunities that are in front of us. But of course, to be successful with the Aurora Driver, we have to deliver value, and we truly believe that this is transformational from the freight industry. I think any other AV trucking company that comes up here is going to agree with this and probably say the same damn thing. We are going to be safer. You talked about the numbers. There are roughly 5,000 deaths on the U.S. highways from trucking accidents. That is too many. Our ability to have scalable, flexible demand for drivers is super important. There are driver shortages, there is turnover. There are all the things that make it challenging for logistics customers to run their business.
We believe we'll have 2 times the utilization as the human-driven fleet today. We're seeing that today with customers on the road with our driverless trucks right now. Some of our customers even tell you the examples, and you can go listen to some of them, but it's super important. Then from a total cost of ownership, this is the thing that I think separates trucking from ride hailing, to be frank. In the ride hailing, which is awesome, really cool, going to be safe. They're cool looking vehicles. The cost structure isn't there to drive down the cost. Today, the economics in trucking allow us to provide value to trucking customers right now in the total cost of ownership. They do in our initial customer adoption launch model, which is our Transportation as a Service business.
But when we shift over to our Driver as a Service business, they get even more leverage to create real value. We can deliver value on all four of these right now. That's really what we're excited about. That's why we truly believe the Aurora Driver will be transformational. I mentioned a little bit about cost. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on here. Let me just talk about three things. The total cost of ownership is a real issue in the trucking industry. Their cost structure is growing on all levels. Driver costs are growing, insurance costs are growing. Fuel is really high right now, and growing. These operating ratios that they work on, they're tough. They're challenging. This is a tough business. For us, we can drive down the cost for the driver. This is American Transportation Research Institute data on the left.
It's got a $1.03 plus indirect of $1.15. We have Aurora's pricing. Everybody has their own pricing. This is real value that we're delivering to customers today. In addition, we believe I'm just going to talk about three of these, by the way. In addition, we're going to talk about fuel. Obviously, fuel is really high. We're experiencing 10% fuel efficiency today. We believe that number is going to go to 15% and probably, with working with OEMs, has the potential to go up to even 30%, but it's a real value today. Then from an insurance market, we strongly believe that you're going to continue to see two things happen. Number one, the cost of insuring in the human-driven fleet is going to continue to grow and creep up, and the cost of driving an autonomously driven fleet is going to continue to reduce.
And so those three things by themselves give us a 20% reduction. So we're really excited about this. How does this translate to a customer? Today, this is a really simple graph. This is on our Fort Worth to Phoenix lane that we operate on. Today, there's two things that are happening. Number one, a truck can operate at double the utilization. So it can make a round trip in a day, which it could not make in the normal world. So you're doubling the revenue side of the equation, and then from a margin perspective, you're getting 6x the value because of the 20% reduction overall. So it is a really good value equation. And you might hear people say, "Hey, we got to work on the pricing." Even some of our customers push us on our pricing and things like this. There's a lot of potential here.
They understand the value, and we know that this is going to be tremendously important for our customers going forward. Finally, this is a chart we use at our investor and analyst day. It got a lot of excitement. We talked about it. We really believe we're at this commercial inflection point. Again, 200 trucks operating by the end of 2026. We expect more than 1,000 trucks operating by the end of 2027. We truly believe that this is just a starting point. We expect over 30,000 trucks operating by 2030. We are really at this point. We have all the enablers in place, both from the technology standpoint, from the supply side, and from the demand side, to really start to spur transformational growth. When we talk about what this means to Aurora, we are really expecting to see substantial growth in our revenue.
Obviously, for the last several years, not a big revenue story for us. This has all been about the technology. I told you I'm not going to talk about technology today. I'm going to talk about our business outlook. Our business outlook is going to also be transformational. We are going to achieve a positive gross margin in roughly $200 million in 2027. When you look forward to 2030, we expect this number with the 30,000 trucks to be over $5 billion in revenue, exceeding 60% margins, really on our path of a 70% margin. In 2028, we continue to expect that we will achieve positive free cash flow on a run rate basis. All the enablers are in place to support this. We're really excited about where we're headed. I guess I'll just close with this.
It's going to be a tremendously exciting few years for the industry. There are a lot of players out there that are going to do and create some great things. We believe that we are in a leadership position today because of the investments that we've made, because of our strategy to really focus in on scaling the commercial business. If you look at where we stand in terms of our partnerships, in terms of the fact that we have a scalable hardware supply for our Aurora Driver kit with our Hardware as a Service partnership with AUMOVIO, when you look at the progress we've made thus far, we're really excited about what the future's going to hold.
With that, I think we're at our commercial inflection point, and maybe we'll go over to questions.
Perfect. Maybe we can start some of our industry views, and then we can work it back into your analyst day. We came to visit in March. We did an AV truck tour. We saw yourself, Kodiak, Waabi, Einride. We came away with this idea that the software was ready, but we talked about the bottleneck of the four parties involved being the actual physical truck itself with essentially, we all know Volvo may be in 2027, the only OEM to produce an on-the-line truck. Everyone else is using upfitters as you discussed. Why do you think the OEM has been this choke point thus far? Because then it gives us an idea about how that gets unlocked for the supply side over the years to come.
Yeah. It's a great question. It's a very common question. Certainly, supply of OEM platforms has been a constraint for a lot of folks. I don't know that I would describe it as a choke point. I think you have to remember where we are as a stage in our industry of AVs and where the OEMs are in their industry. Today, not a lot of us, everybody's making great progress, doing all kinds of cool things, but there are very few people that have been at a commercial inflection point. They run a business where they're building 250,000 trucks in the U.S. a year. They have that main business to invest in. They have mandates with fuel economy. They have competitive situations that they need to do. They have drivers and customers that they need to satisfy every day. Our market today is all about the promise.
This is why I've been so excited about where we're changing this from about the promise to actually a commercial inflection point where they can start to see tangible, real value. There's a difference between saying you're going to be somewhere in the future and actually showing them that today. I think the excitement level of our OEM partners, at least for us, the excitement of our OEM partners seeing the Aurora Driver operate on the road with nobody behind the wheel has really energized them. I think Volvo is all in.
Right? They've really made a commitment in terms of that, and they're going to start to scale. But every OEM partner, when they do a line side installation, that's a significant capital investment and impacts their entire production line, their takt time and everything. For them to do it for a handful of trucks, it doesn't make any sense.
Yeah. The chicken and egg.
Right. For them, they really need to see the promise and be able to capitalize on that scaling. Maybe for us, we should've been a little bit more realistic as an industry. But for us, I know one of the things that was exciting at Aurora is this upfit option with Roush and putting this drive-by-wire system in the International. It really was a big enabler to build excitement for the OEMs. I got to say, we have a lot of conversations with the OEMs today and their C-suite. We host all of them. Their excitement level has never been higher.
Because they can see the product. Yep.
Yeah.
Let's play that through to the analyst day comment about the inflection point from now to 30,000 trucks in 2030. Is it fair to just assume that by 2030, to get to that 30,000, that basically all of the major OEMs will have a production-fit AV, meaning over the next 3 to 4 years, we can expect that to happen?
Yeah. I think if you ask every OEM, they would tell you that they will have a production level line side install of an AV on their lines. I think for us, we have a very clear path of where everybody's at and how we're going to get there. I think Volvo has been the most outspoken about it in terms of their path. I think Daimler, who we're not currently partners with today, also has a path.
International is very excited about the trucks operating on the road. Our interest level or their interest level with the Aurora Driver has never been higher. PACCAR, while maybe a little bit more conservative on what they like to announce, continues to be a strong supporter. They were at our event. They talked about the opportunity, so I think we're still well-positioned. I think it's taken a little bit longer than some people want, but by 2030
Yep
not really a concern. I'd also say that 30,000 trucks sounds like a lot, and for the AV industry, it probably is a lot. For the trucking market, eh. Not that much.
You're talking order of magnitude for those in the room, if you're adding 10,000 trucks per year to get to a fleet of that, you're talking about 3%-4% of annual builds. Just to go back to the Volvo comment, just triangulating industry data points. So 30,000 is a cumulative fleet you're expecting by 2030. Volvo, kind of less, typically considered the AV bull here in this space thus far. They gave a number that was about 25,000 for the units in 2031. Can you talk a little bit about triangulating some of the, because you've probably seen the VAS projections. How do we think about triangulating the two data points?
I think they have their own business to run. We have our own business to run, so we do not talk a lot about how they build up their commercial side of that. I think we focus in on the production allocation that we are going to achieve over the next several years and how we are going to place those. We have an idea of how many trucks they would like to be operated by the Aurora Driver, and it is a substantial amount. But we do not have as much insight into their commercial piece. We think that Volvo Autonomous Solutions and however they choose to do it, I think Cesco was on our event and mentioned, they like the Volvo Autonomous Solutions, but they are going to meet the customer where they need to be. That might include different business models and selling
They are starting that business from scratch as well.
I think what we see is a really solid outlook for all OEMs. Once they start to line side install, they have really good growth aspirations. For us, we like to match it up with the fact that we also have an AUMOVIO partnership, and we have a build schedule to actually build the Aurora Driver kits. It is going to be impossible to achieve any of these numbers if you did not have a partner that would be able to actually build that kind of hardware, and I think we are in a unique position in that regard.
Let us talk a little bit about the unit economics, right, which you have shown before. I think the proposition is clearly there. Everyone knows the $2.50 per mile, numbers like $0.85 for your Driver as a Service, software, and hardware. Can we talk a little bit, sort of to my intro point about the messy between now and then. If you were pitching to the Werner, the Knight CTO, CCO, what are some of the startup costs that they have to put in to get this up and running? We are moving away from drayage. We are going to customer facilities. What other things do they have to put in on cost on their side to start to get ready for autonomous? What prep do they have to think about when they are considering the size of their launches over the next couple of years?
I think in the near term, there is not much they have to do at all, right? We are going to be going to customer endpoints. That will be the predominant delivery model by the end of the year. We are already starting to do that today. The drayage thing was super useful if you were running commercial and development at the same time, and you were just operating predominantly as development, and you wanted to take advantage of what the commercial market looked like. We are kind of beyond that point. We still do development, but now we have separate commercial operations. We will just go to customer endpoint. There is no drayage that they have to do. If you drop off at a customer site, or if you land at a customer site, you essentially need Wi-Fi.
They will have an Aurora terminal app that will allow them to launch and land trucks. We will have to train them and have standard operating procedures on how to do that. They will need somebody dedicated there to actually receive those trucks.
Yeah.
If you talk to customers, most every customer in a shipping yard has somebody to do that role already today. Most everything else, we're going to try to eliminate. As an example, if we need to fuel, we will go to truck stops and fuel with our fueling partners. If we need to scale the vehicles, we will go to our truck stops and scale the vehicles. We're going to do as much as we can with a partnership approach and try to make it as seamless as possible. It's the near term. When we first launch with every customer site, they want to be handheld. We're going to put people on site at the yards, making sure that everything goes seamless. The issue for our customers is not, are we driving extra costs? The issue with our customers is, are we reliable?
Because if we're not reliable, then they will lose the business that they have, and they will not want to use driverless trucking. It is more about operational excellence than it is are we adding anything specific to there. In the long term, it's going to be super seamless. We're going to be adding new endpoints. The time that it takes to do it to a new endpoint, it's going to be less than a week. It's going to be really easy. They're going to already have the standard operating procedures. We'll have launch teams that go out and set up every group really quickly. I think in the long term, what you're going to see is carriers are going to take advantage of the unique abilities of the Aurora Driver to operate 24/7, to kind of go wherever. \
Every carrier is going to try to optimize their network to them. They're not going to broadcast it to the world because they're going to look at this as a competitive advantage. How can I optimize my network? How can I improve my efficiency? They're really good at it. They got a lot of models. They figure out where to go. In my opinion, their focus is going to be, how do I optimize? I actually think that the total cost of ownership story in 3 years is so much better for them because they're going to take advantage of their inefficiencies, and they'll know them a hell of a lot better than we will.
Can we talk about some of the 24/7? I think from maybe some of the best examples of what you have been running so far. I think in our minds, we all thought this was going to be 15-hour journeys, one single long haul. But I am hearing more about these 2-hour high efficiency back and forth. What are we seeing in terms of an uptime per day in some of your best runs?
Yeah. It really depends. Detmar was the example where basically they do basically two trips a day and we are doing six now. They are basically doubling, tripling their utilization of the trucks. Part of this has been limited on where we drive today, but there is a world in the not too distant future, like by the end of this year, where you are going to see people going across the country. They are going to be going from Atlanta to Phoenix to L.A., whatever the case is. They are going to go from Phoenix to Houston. These are all trips that you can just run throughout the day. And to be honest, trucks are slightly more efficient when they are operating at longer cycles.
Yep.
Where they get inefficient and where they get a lot of wear is this constant stopping and starting or cycling back up or getting cold and then trying to go run again. So a truck is really efficient when it is operating in its normal mode. So you are going to start to see this more. Most of our customers see a lot of value if you are like an FTL at this 500-plus mile range, and they would like to get to 1,000 and 1,500 pretty quick. The Detmar and some of the other examples, and that is what I talked about with network optimization. Everybody is going to optimize their network to work for them. I would not have anticipated Detmar to be the greatest use case when we first thought about it. It is actually a great use case for them.
You have to meet the customer where they are at, and you have to understand their business challenges.
Let's stay on the customer. I think when we think about fleet demand, logically, I would've thought the larger fleets are the ones that can invest, can think larger about TCO. But so far in some of the announcements, it's been some of the smaller fleets. What do you think is the last thing to bring the FedEx. Obviously we've seen announcements, but the FedExes of this world, the Walmart. What's when we get these big headlines? Is it just complicated contracts? What brings the largest fleets to bring this to scale?
Well, in fairness, the larger fleets have the largest amount of bureaucracy. But they also have the largest risk, right? Today, it's kind of a risk reward for them. If I can only provide them 50 trucks this year. They operate 10,000 trucks, the risk reward ratio, they've got to be careful with that, right? Because you still need a whole bunch of people to deliver every day, and they are concerned about that, despite the fact that all the data will continue to support that if you're a driver today, or if you want to be a driver, you can retire a driver. That's still clear today. There's going to be roles for drivers, and actually there's going to be better roles in the futures when AV is broadly deployed. But there's a near-term psychological impact that people have.
Some customers, especially the bigger ones, are much more excited about the potential when you can give me 1,000 trucks. So then I can go in and make a statement and it doesn't look like a pilot. If you took FedEx as an example, 50 trucks with FedEx is a pilot, right? That's not really scaling their business. But I would say that bureaucracy is one of them, I think risk reward is another. I think the third thing is there are some leaders. These are the early adopters, and there's going to be a lot more fast followers than what I think people think. And I think you'll start to see bigger trucking fleets start to lean into this more. The more we can deliver value, the more you'll see customers come on board.
The more customers come on board, the more questions are going to be to those carriers that aren't operating with AVs. Why aren't you? Because it looks like this is a pretty substantial cost advantage.
In that regard, that is where the upfitting becomes a bridge to get the supply, to get it rolling, so a fleet can get their first 100 because they know the 500 supply is coming a year from now aligned with the OEMs.
That is exactly right. It was an enormous unlock for Aurora. We knew that the technology was going to create value. We were confident in the safety of the technology. We knew there would be operational complexities associated with it. But if you do not have enough trucks to put on the road, kind of does not matter.
Yeah.
Truck supply was really important. This was our bridge until the OEM line side came about, and we are really excited about it. Frankly, it has been great. It has been energizing for the company, but the customers have had a chance to come and see this without waiting for the OEM. So they now know this is a safe product that can happen. So they are starting to put pressure on the OEMs as well. So it has been really valuable.
Let us move, and I am not going to put you on the spot, but I caught the quote in the TechCrunch article on, look at the very ambitious 2030 guide. I think you gave a very confident answer that you see Aurora hitting that target. That it is not just an ambition. Could you talk about some of the internal metrics qualitatively? Is this customer conversations? Is this when you see a customer that you have not a signed contract, but this is the realm of trucks that they are asking for the next couple of years? Just a little bit of color to some of that confidence.
Yeah. It is not an ambition. It is our target, right? And we are moving towards that. I do not want to say it is 50/50 because it is kind of hard to say what is 50/50 out in 2030, but it is a realistic number. I know it sounds like a lot. I said this before, but it is not relative to the industry overall. We do a couple of ways when we approach, when we are establishing our targets and the resources that we need to deploy them. We kind of look at the top-down approach. What is the market size? What is the TAM? All kinds of different metrics. What are outside public things? What is our capacity situation look like? We do that, and then we also do a ground-up build up, right? We do it. So we have a business development team. They have a list of customers that is ever-growing.
We just had a partner summit the day after the Analyst Investor Day. I think the first year we did this, we had 6 or 7 companies that participated. The folks in the back will tell me if I am wrong, but it was 3 or 4x at this time. So the amount of growth and interest has been really high. And we have had some really, including senior-level folks at very big conservative companies, right? And so it is really starting to catch fire. And so the business development team, they look at where we are headed, and we do a roadmap with each of these customers and say, "All right, what does '27 look like when we are operating here?" And we try to build up a roadmap for each partner based on each geographic area that we unlock.
Remember, in 2030, we expect to be operating in 150 billion VMT out of the total 200 billion VMT market. That is a lot different than where we are today. We are at 4 billion today. But we truly feel we are sufficiently generalized to be able to achieve that. And when you are operating in three-quarters plus of the continental U.S., you have now created an entire autonomous network for people to take advantage of, as opposed to a southeast or southwest corridor, or maybe one additional lane. So we are now actually enabling it to operate and transform all of their businesses. And so when we look at the ground-up estimates and the top-down, that is what gives us a lot of confidence in the approach.
Excellent. We have about 5 to 7 minutes. We try to keep at the end of every session for Q&A. Any questions from those in the audience? Do not be shy.
All right, I have to go.
I have a question.
Uh-oh.
The AUMOVIO third-gen hardware started production, I think, second half of. AUMOVIO's third-gen hardware started production is expected for the second half of 2027, and that will actually support the production of tens of thousands of trucks. Does production for the third-gen hardware kit need to be fully ramped for an OEM like PACCAR to be confident in initiating lines of production?
You just need to achieve SOP and full PPAP, which we have planned to do by the end of 2027. OEMs care about have you PPAP'd the parts? Are you at your full production line? They do not want to scale line side with a B-sample or a C-sample. They want to do a full production kits.
Can we just follow on AUMOVIO? It has come up over and over again, obviously, both in trucking and robo. The idea of Hardware as a Service, this is a pretty revolutionary kind of agreement. Can you just talk about a little bit how it came about? Because I talk about this, almost everyone who would benefit from the alignment of your revenue and your costs, right, for suppliers. Just a little bit on the relationship that is obviously a year or two old.
Yeah. For those who don't know, my background is actually in automotive, so I was at an OEM for 20-plus years. This is the first agreement that I am aware of in the automotive hardware tier 1 industry that is kind of like this, where AUMOVIO, we are co-developing, co-designing. They are doing all of the engineering, all of the manufacturing, the financing of the kits, as well as the service and maintenance of the kits. In traditional OEM land, a part comes into the assembly warehouse. Typically, the OEM pays for that part. In this particular case, that part is just consigned inside. It is not paid for by the OEM. It is not paid for by the freight customer. It is financed by AUMOVIO, and we pay them cents per mile for every mile delivered.
So it is the only business model I have seen where the shipper, the carrier, the Aurora Driver, the hardware supplier, are all compensated the exact same way, which is on actual usage. Both companies carry risk in terms of that, but there is a lot of upside. They do it for a different reason, and every reason has their own, and I would ask you to talk to them a little bit. At a high level, this is a way to have recurring revenue that is more predictable, that allows them to better capital plan going forward, and they are really excited about the opportunity. For us, we got a major tier 1 to commit to build tens of thousands of kits per year, do all the financing, all the activities that matched our capital-light business model.
It came to fruition because we were very clear up front with what our expectations were, what our mission was, what we were trying to do. We talked to many tier ones. This was the one that was the most aligned with our vision, and that's really important to us because you've got to have an aligned vision with your partners. It is super unique. I don't know that anybody else has it. I haven't seen one since.
Can you remind us, is there any exclusivity on a period on either side or?
There are some levels of exclusivity, but I don't want to talk through all the details of the contract.
Anyone else? Can we do a real quick one on regulations? Obviously, the positive momentum in California, I think, is a huge part of that VMT unlock. Regulation has not been prohibitive here, but obviously, there's a cost without having national regs. How much is the California progress a part of unlocking the VMTs for some of these larger routes?
Yeah, of course. California is a huge market. We had always expected California to come in at some point. It's just faster than maybe what we thought a year ago. There's still some hurdles that you have to clear, right? It's a permitting process. So we're making our plans to do that, and we're kind of well on its way. It wouldn't have impacted any of our near-term business. Actually, we don't have any trucks allocated there this year. I don't know that we'll have any allocated there next year. If we do, it'll be a few, because we're a driverless trucking company. So we have to make sure that that gets opened up. Once it gets opened up, we'll take full advantage of it. There are plenty of customers that want to go there.
I'd say most of the momentum, and I will knock on wood here, most of the momentum regulatory has been very favorable for the industry thus far. In really the last two years. I think with the new administration, there's kind of a renewed vigor to support technology adoption, eliminate roadblocks, use a little bit more common sense, and try to provide a framework. So there's been stuff at the federal level, there's been positive momentum at the state level. So we believe that it is really headed in the right direction. Now, some things can always change, but I think this is good for the industry. This isn't good for Aurora. This is good for the industry as a whole. When I say the industry, I'm not talking just the AV industry, I'm talking the freight industry.
To be able to unlock technology for customers across the U.S. is an important milestone for the industry, generally speaking.
Excellent. Last minute, I always try to end on some version of what's next. You've laid out now the four- or five-year plan. What's your focus? Next three to six months gets in the mind of Dave. What is really the next three months, the major things that are going to be most important?
It's kind of twofold. I think in the next couple of months, it's all about execution of the plan. We have all the enablers in place. We're building trucks. We've got our Aurora Driver kits coming in. We've got our customer contracts. It is ensuring that we have operational excellence for our customers, and that's the focus on execution. In the next three months, that's my single biggest one. Outside of that, I'm excited about the opportunities, not just in the U.S., but maybe we'll explore things in other areas as well. But that's for a later day.
Okay. Excellent. Everyone, Aurora, a round of applause.
Excellent.
I like that.