Autonomous vehicles are here to stay and I would agree with that comment that a lot of the human drivers are pretty bad drivers. The industry is moving quickly to redefine transportation. Our next guest is one of the leaders bringing this technology to a road near you to discuss the future of AVs. Please welcome, in conversation with Fox Business's Susan Lee, CEO of Aurora, Chris Urmson. A big round of applause.
Hello. Good evening to you and thank you so much for joining us to celebrate innovation technology in this wonderful, wonderful country of Canada. And from a Toronto girl, Trenton boy, we are so happy to see so many bright, shiny, very inspiring faces tonight in the audience. And so I have the easy job because I just have to interview the godfather of self-driving tech. A man that really, I think you encapsulate, you're emblematic of the wonderful talent, technical talent that this country develops, nurtures, and breathes and then sets off into the world to make great things. Because without Chris, and he's a very humble Canadian. He's, I would say you're very Canadian because he will not brag for himself. So, I'll do it for him because without Chris and his technological knowledge, there would be no self-driving. There would be no Waymo. And now we're starting with Aurora Innovation, which is self-driving trucks that will go end to end and drive your products across the country and around the continent. So, Chris, you grew up in Trenton, Manitoba. Your parents are from Saskatoon, Victoria.
When you look at the crowd tonight and all these wonderful, innovative Canadians, what are you thinking?
I'm thinking it's kind of fun to be back in Canada. I live in the States.
But you're here off to Saskatoon tomorrow.
Yeah. Off to Saskatoon on Thursday. So it's nice to be back and really appreciate the opportunity to be here and chat a little with you and with the audience.
Yeah. And everybody wants, of course, me to ask you, how does this next wonderful next generation crop of great Canadian entrepreneurs become the next Chris Urmson and build an 11 billion dollar company?
Yeah. I'm sure they can do better. I think for me I've had the privilege of working with amazing people for my career. I stumbled into something that was both technically really interesting and complicated and then also super useful. And so trying to find a thing that's a passion and trying to make sure that the people, it always sounds trite when people say this but the people around you matter so much when you're building a company, it's going to be incredibly difficult and if you can't count on your teammates and your co-founders then it's going to be a disaster. So really the people matters the most.
Okay. But take us through your history because you grew up as I said across the country, went to the University of Manitoba.
Met your beautiful wife at the University of Manitoba and then you went to Carnegie Mellon for your PhD and then you won the DARPA prize in 2007 and that's where Google plucked you. So can you start this for us?
Yeah. So I grew up in Canada, was a science fair nerd, Quinte Regional Science Fair for anyone from the area. University of Manitoba, did computer engineering, went to Carnegie Mellon, they made a mistake and let me in. I got a chance to work on cool robots, right? And that for me was the decision in grad school, was I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I saw this poster of a robot crawling out of a volcano. I thought that looks awesome. Let me go do that. And then as I was there worked on a variety of different things and they announced this DARPA Grand Challenge, this was 2003, 2004, yeah three, and the idea was let's get a robot to drive across the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and do that faster than anyone's ever done it before. And I had just spent a month in the Atacama desert walking around behind a robot at the speed that your grandmother walks with a walker. And that just sounded awesome. And so got involved with that, worked at Carnegie Mellon, became a faculty member briefly. For my introductory lecture I said, 'Loved my time at Carnegie Mellon. I am going to take a leave and go work at Google.'
Come on, let's be honest. Google backed up the truck and said, 'We'll give you a ton of money if you build this for us.'
Correct. It was a different time. Like, I will tell you, it felt like a ton of money. Well, like for a rational person, it was a ton of money. By today's standards in tech, it was not a ton of money.
Yeah. But that was 2007, 2008 when Sergey and Larry said, 'We're going to pour a ton of money into this, this unknown tech at the time.'
This is one of the things I will be forever grateful and hopefully can emulate at some point. Larry and Sergey built Google and, you know, maybe it's not true, but Larry apparently said at some point he's deciding between digital library and automated highways and he felt like he made the wrong choice and so wanted to bring Google's engineering resources to do other interesting things and the place they wanted to go first was self-driving vehicles and this was out of seeing what happened with the DARPA Grand Challenges. So, I got invited to come and help lead the team and founded what's now Waymo. Built that for 7 and a half years. And we had a bunch of world's firsts. We had the first time a self-driving car got pulled over by the police. So, that was awesome. He just, like, he claimed that it was because it was driving too slowly and blocking traffic. We had the data. It was not. He was just interested.
That's your story. Your side of the story.
The data backed it up. Oh, yeah. Okay. But he was just curious. He didn't understand it. And that was a really good lesson for me about the importance of engaging with all stakeholders. When you're doing something as impactful as driving vehicles on the road, you have to bring people along with you. Kind of the Silicon Valley mentality of give everyone the Heisman and then hope you can run faster than them doesn't work for some applications like the kind of things I've been working on.
That's right. So you left Waymo in 2017 or so 2016, 2017, you left Google and then you started Aurora Innovation. So we've got the wonderful cozy cuddly history out of the way. Let's talk about cutthroat competition because Waymo has now driven, they said, a hundred million self-driving miles.
You have driven how many?
Uh, three, three million. So first, I helped build the team and so it is just awesome like as a parent or as somebody who's ever built anything, seeing it survive you and thrive after you leave is like the thing that you want most in the world. And so it's just been awesome to see what Dimmitri Dendra and that whole team at Waymo have built. And if you're ever in San Francisco, you will not be able to miss the self-driving cars because you stand on a corner and three of them will go by and you owe it to yourself to go take a ride in one because they're just phenomenal. At Aurora, we've been focused on trucks. We started a bunch of time after the Waymo folks did. We feel like we've been doing really good progress. We've built incredible set of partnerships to deploy the technology and now we have trucks driving down the freeway 70 miles an hour, 75 miles an hour with no one driving them other than the Aurora Driver. We've done three and a half million tests that we put the thing through to have conviction that it was actually safe to put out on the road as part of our safety case. And now within the first four months of running the thing on the road, it's driven 50,000 miles completely driverlessly. And overall we've done about 3 million miles of testing on trucks. Actually that's not testing, that's commercial loads where people have paid us to haul goods with one of our trucks.
Right. But operational in Texas right now. But you can and possibly expand to other states.
That's right. So today we run between Dallas and Houston and by the end of the year we expect to operate between Dallas and Houston but also Fort Worth to El Paso and El Paso to Phoenix and Fort Worth to Phoenix. And then next year we expect to expand across the Sun Belt. And the Sun Belt is this, it looks like a smile across the southern United States and it's where a lot of the freight moves because truck drivers don't like driving in the snow. Turns out it's hard to drive a truck. It's harder to drive it when it's snowing. And so a lot of freight moves down there. And so that's where we expect to be operating.
And it's really exciting because the technology isn't just technology for technology's sake. It's solving real problems. In America, we have 500,000 traffic accidents involved in trucks. 5,000 people killed every year on the US roads with trucks involved. And we think we can drive that down dramatically. We think we can improve the fuel economy of these trucks by between 14 and 34%. Like that is an astronomical improvement in greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability of this and then say nothing of the fact that over the next decade we expect to need another million people to drive trucks and there aren't a million people to drive trucks or that want to drive trucks. The average age of a truck driver in the US is 55 years old. And they're retiring out. And if you look around this beautiful theater and you look around any room you're in, everything in that room at one point moved on a truck. Our whole economy, our whole way of life is dependent on that. And so as a company there, we can bring a technology to make it safer, make it more sustainable, make it more efficient. And really reinforce the economy in our society. It's just an incredible opportunity.
But obviously because for me every day, every day we have viewers writing in, the number one question I get asked when it comes to artificial intelligence and AI and this next generation of tech is, will robots and the next generation of AI take my job eventually? And aren't you doing that for truck drivers across the country?
Yeah, I think so. The challenge is we don't have enough people who want to drive trucks. And I will tell you, if you are a truck driver today, you will be able to retire a truck driver. And if you don't want to be a truck driver, you're going to be able to take all kinds of new jobs that will spring up around this. There's this kind of paradox that happens that when we make something more efficient and lower cost, we actually use more of it and that grows the economy and the business around it. So, no, I expect that there actually will be more jobs in an economy that's powered by automation in the trucking space. I think the jobs will evolve. I do think that 25 years from now, there won't be people driving heavy trucks. And I think that's actually a good thing. Right, that it turns out in America that you are 10 times as likely to die on the job if you're a truck driver than the average American. And yet we need these people to do the job, right? And I am thankful for everyone who's willing to do that job. But much like coal mining was horrendously unsafe and continues to be and it was an important part of how we have the standard of living we have today, it's actually a really good thing we don't need as many people to mine coal today.
Well, okay. So everyone was a little taken aback when you heard the head of Anthropic, the founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, who you know I'm sure in Silicon Valley, said that 75% to 80% of jobs will be wiped out because of artificial intelligence and AI.
Yeah. I don't know if I'm an optimist or a pessimist, but I don't believe that.
