I'm super excited to be joined today by Chris Urmson. Chris Urmson is one of the legends of autonomous driving. He famously led the Google self-driving car project in some of its most formative periods. He is of course the founder and the CEO of Aurora. Chris, welcome to the stage. So good to see you.
So you know, we've been — I've been following this space for about 10 years now. You have been — and we don't have to count the number of years — but you've been around this space for some time. You know, I think there's constant change but I think there's so much that gets learned through experience. And so I just kind of want to kick things off today by asking you — and forgive me —
How old are you?
No, that was — listen, I'm over 40, I can indulge in this. No, I just want to — is there a lesson, you know, there's been so many ups and downs? I mean, just in the 10 years I've been watching, so many ups and downs. Is there a lesson that you take away that you'd like to share with us today to get things going?
Yeah, I guess so. I think one of the big things is industrialization is hard, right? And you know, anyone who's worked in industry and tried taking something from the lab to production would know this and it's kind of obvious, but I think that has been a part of what has been the story of autonomy for the last, call it, 15 years where we had really promising technology. You know, if I'd taken you in a ride in San Francisco in 2011 it would have been, wow, this is great, ship it, right? It works.
I've seen the video. I've seen the video on Lombard Street in 2011 and —
It's better than stuff that I've seen much more recently.
No comment. No comment. My own personal — and I think that the strength of the industry was that we didn't know how hard it was because I think if we knew how hard it was, nobody would have played.
Right. So there's this kind of ignorance is bliss or ignorance is a superpower. And then we've been through the whole Gartner hype curve over the last 10 years, right? I remember 2015, problem is solved, everyone's going to have a self-driving car in the garage next year.
Um, and what had happened at that moment is people had seen what we had been doing at Google with Chauffeur, what's now Waymo, and it's like, oh, if they can do it, we can do it. And then there was a lot of money lit on fire. And we kind of went through the trough of disillusionment. And what you're starting to see now is it's come out into what I think they call the plateau of enlightenment or something like that.
Plateau of enlightenment. Yeah.
Because the products are working, right? That whether it's standing on the street corner here and watching three or four Waymos go by in a minute, or coming to Texas and seeing our trucks on the road, we've actually kind of crossed the chasm. Boy, I'm drawing like all business metaphors in the first minute here.
When you're right, you're right, though.
Yeah. We're on this other side of it where now it works and it is now really about how do we build it, manufacture it, and this is where, you know, as a company, we've kind of set ourselves up for that, and we're excited about the years ahead.
It's interesting you mentioned that because I covered the auto industry before this and my focus was on manufacturing and it's been really interesting to understand those commonalities because it's both talking about really complex systems that are all about — it's not about getting 80% or 90% of the way, it's all about driving out that 2, 2.5, 4.3, 0.2. So talk about — do you see those commonalities between the development of the driving software and then getting things working on the industrialized side?
100%. If it doesn't all work, none of it works, right? And you can get to these very compelling demonstrations and very compelling experiences, but then you know, you go and put it with a customer and you get punched in the face. Right? Like, oh, you thought it's okay for it to take 15 minutes for you to get this thing ready to go out the store. No, like we just need to make it work. You know, the product was going to just drive on. No, of course we need to go through weigh scales and you know, there's all of this stuff that doesn't sound compelling and doesn't make a nice headline of we had this AI breakthrough thing here or there, that is like, no, that's the real grind of turning it from a product that is safe and performant to one that is actually useful and you know, results in kind of customer value.
Yeah. So I want to — I don't want to jump too far ahead here but an example of this — I think one of the things I love about this technology is you learn about other things. So like trucking, you know, I don't know anything about trucking and the idea of like going from a depot to depot versus actually being able to do customer loads. I know this is something that Aurora was a benchmark for you that you were able to clear. Help us understand for those of us who are not immersed in trucking, what that distinction is and what it takes to kind of get across that line.
Yeah. So trucking — what we love about trucking as a business is it is a pure TCO business, total cost of ownership. That if we can safely get stuff from where our customer needs it — where they make it to where they need it, and we can do that at lower costs than what they can otherwise be able to move that stuff, they're going to adopt it. And what we see with our business, you know, being a robot guy playing in trucking, as I happily tell the trucking people, is that we're going to drive down the collision and injury rates with these vehicles dramatically. There's 500,000 collisions with heavy trucks in the US every year, and we think we can drive that towards zero. That drives insurance rates for them down, which is a big part of their cost structure. We expect to reduce the fuel consumption of the vehicles between 14 and 30%. And you know, certainly with today's adventures, that's a huge part of the business and even in kind of normal times that's a big part of their cost structure, top three of their costs. We expect to be able to double the utilization of their asset. And so if you're spending $200,000 for a tractor and it has to sit idle half the time, that's just kind of money that's being wasted. And so this is one of their core metrics of their business. And then finally, you know, in the US there's a structural shortage of drivers. Truck driving is a super important part of how our economy functions. It is a dangerous job. It is a difficult job. And people are not willing to do it at the rate we need over the next decade. We expect to need another million truck drivers in the US alone. And we value the value of driving a truck at something like three times what we value driving an Uber. And so for a company looking at this and saying, okay, we can solve their core pain points, we can — we actually have a technological advantage that allow us to actually solve this problem in a way that we don't think others can. And then we have better unit economics. Oh, and by the way, it's a trillion dollar market in the US versus ride hailing is a $50 billion market. Like, hey, that's the place we should go spend our time and build our business and then we can go look at the other places we can take this cool capability and apply it.
Yeah. So one of the things I really admire about Aurora, you've been really front and center about your safety case and, you know, I know last year you went driver out. I know, you know, as a publicly traded company, you had to delay that a little bit and I know that must have been a really, really tough decision, but can you just speak to that decision at all? Because, you know, you're publicly traded, you're under all this immense pressure to deliver for your investors, but you can't compromise, can you?
No, you cannot. And our company's mission is deliver the benefit of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. And a lot of company mission statements are kind of trite, and maybe at surface ours may sound that way, but that safely, quickly, broadly is actually a decision-making criteria we use as the company. Safety first, given that, move as quickly as you can, scale largely. And so for us, we're building a company to be here for the next century. I am a deep believer that automation is going to be as transformative to the economy as the combustion engine was 100 years ago. And so, okay, we take an extra quarter to do something, that's the right choice because you build trust gradually and over time and you do that behaving safely. Being safe and doing what you say — you erode it in chunks. And so for us the trade-off between getting a thing out there that's safe versus getting a thing out there and hoping and praying it's safe is just a no-brainer. Let's do it right.
Yeah. That's that old saying of stairs up and elevator down, right?
100%. It's more like elevator shaft.
Right. So latest numbers I've seen, you put 250,000 fully driverless miles, no incidents —
And yeah, I assume that was in January. So I assume you've grown since then. And it sounds like — I've heard some of your recent interviews. It sounds like you got an exciting year ahead of you. Tell us a little bit about what's coming down the line for you.
Yeah. So last year was a big deal because we crossed that chasm. We have trucks driving driverlessly, really performant. Over the course of the year, we went from driving in the daytime between Dallas and Houston to driving day and night to driving in the rain to going a thousand miles from Dallas to Phoenix, adding Dallas to Laredo. Like it's been a big year, but this year is going to be transformational. We're going to go from having a handful of trucks to hundreds of trucks on the road, nobody in the cabs by the end of the year across the Sun Belt. And just imagine that, right? You're taking a road trip in your Winnebago across Arizona and you're going to see our trucks out there. And they're not just going to be out there kind of driving around hoping that we get some data or something with them. They're actually going to be in commerce serving customers, doing something useful. And when we have 200 trucks on the road, we're doing a million miles a week, right? Because of the scale and speed that we operate at. So it's going to be a big deal. And we'll not just have 200 trucks on the road, but we'll be producing 20 vehicles a week by the end of next year. So, a thousand trucks a year. And the customer demand is real. The opportunity to deliver this is just awesome.
Yeah. And to that broadly point of your mission statement, you want to be across the Sun Belt, right? And you're now crossing state lines. And yet, you know, it's fascinating. I was just talking about San Francisco, you come here, your friends come here, they see that the autonomous future is real. You can ride a Waymo. You can touch it. You can feel it. But you can't drive a truck autonomously here yet, can you?
