Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Balon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. At the Human X conference in San Francisco, I had the chance to sit down with one of the top names in autonomy. And today, we're bringing you a conversation I had with Chris Urmson, CEO of self-driving vehicle tech firm Aurora. For those who aren't following this, self-driving has been almost there for a long time, but the commercialization story may be finally changing with long-haul trucking. So, I had Chris walk us through what has actually shifted after a decade of technical bottlenecks, why trucking could have a better pathway than robotaxis to real revenue, and what founders and investors still tend to get wrong about this market. Chris and I actually just got off a panel and talked about a lot of the stuff we're going to talk about today. So, we're all warmed up for you. Chris, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. And, you know, thanks for putting up with me for another half hour. So, appreciate it.
Please, it's a pleasure. Um, okay, so give us a little bit of a rundown of where you come from because you've had such a storied career in the physical AI space and where Aurora is today.
Well, I've had the privilege of working in self-driving for twenty-some years at this point. I started when I was at Carnegie Mellon University, working on the DARPA Grand Challenges, which were these robot races across the desert. I then got a chance to work with Caterpillar on these giant dump trucks for mines. That was a lot of fun. And then I got the privilege of helping found what's now Waymo, the Google self-driving car program, and led that for seven and a half years. Ultimately, I stepped away from that. I took a little break to figure out what I wanted to do next and hadn't gotten rid of the bug, so I ended up having a chance to start Aurora. I founded that with Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell, who've been great co-founders. And we've been at it for nine and a half years. As a company, we've been really focused on our mission, which is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. In the field of trucking, starting April of last year, we have trucks on the road in Texas and now in New Mexico and Arizona, hauling goods for customers in a driverless way. And then this year, we're going to go from having a handful of trucks to having hundreds of trucks. So, it's a big year for us and an exciting year for the industry.
We talked about this a little bit on stage, but autonomy has been here for over a decade. You're now running commercial driverless trucks. Are we at the start of scale or is this more of a polished pilot phase?
I think we are very much in the begin-to-scale phase. It's exciting. So we've done over 250,000 miles of driverless operations. So we're getting good experience. We have customers who are learning with us what this means. These are companies like FedEx, Werner, and Schneider, some of the biggest names in trucking. And what they're seeing, they like. And so for us, it's this big moment of starting to scale and going from a handful of trucks to hundreds of trucks, and then ultimately to thousands of trucks next year and on to tens of thousands of trucks. So we've kind of cracked the problem, and we're now off to, okay, how do we really build a business with this, and importantly, how do we serve customers and make sure we're building their businesses.
How does your roadmap change when you think about macroeconomic trends like, we are in a recession, not recession, you know, people are spending a bit less? I imagine that creates less opportunities for shipping, but maybe I'm not sure. Does that change your roadmap?
I've had the privilege of working in the space that is really transformational. The impact it will have on safety on America's roads is profound. The impact it's going to have on fuel economy and sustainability is great. And the benefit to our customers in how much they can use the trucks they have and how they can build their businesses is, again, huge. And so the benefits that we expect and we're seeing with these trucks already really kind of outscale the macroeconomic situation.
There obviously are bottlenecks. Like, we've established that we all thought autonomy was going to happen a lot faster than it did. What are the main bottlenecks? Is it tech? Is it regulation? Is it just public acceptance?
So, I think historically it has been primarily technology. This is a really hard problem, whether you're driving in a city or whether you're hauling a trailer down the road at seventy miles per hour. These are very hard problems, and it's critical that you get it right and that you make it safe. You just can't cut corners when it comes to safety with these kind of applications. And so I think what you see is the responsible folks are making sure they get to that point where it's safe, and that has really been what's kind of been the bottleneck up until recently. At this point for Aurora, we are very much supply-constrained. The first generation of hardware that we launched with, we knew we could only make twenty or twenty-five of those trucks. And so we just couldn't build our fleet. We couldn't grow customers beyond that. What's very exciting is in Q2 of this year, we're going to be launching our second-generation hardware with our new International LT trucks, and that will be able to scale up to about 1,500 trucks. And then next year we'll launch our hardware that we've been building and developing with Amovio, and that'll take us to scales of tens of thousands of trucks a year. And so we're kind of unlocking the supply side. The pilots and work we've been doing, customers are really creating the demand. And we've got a lot of demand this year. We're getting demand for next year. It's really exciting to see how it's resonating and the value's there for customers. And then on the regulatory side, we're seeing progress. So it feels really good.
I want to talk about the regulation stuff, but also, as we're talking about you scaling, I'm curious. All we hear about is chips. Chips, there's so much demand for chips. Data centers are using all these chips. I imagine that self-driving trucks, you're doing a lot of onboard inference. Are you fighting with data centers and hyperscalers and AI companies to get access to chips?
Yeah, we're not directly fighting with them for access to chips. The truck is big and has a big engine, but it still has a lot of power limitations that just aren't relevant for data centers. And so the kind of chips we use are intended for automotive and physical AI applications. And so that third-generation hardware that we're launching with Amovio will be on the Thor SoC, and that's something that's been specially designed for this and it's not super relevant for data centers. So no, we're not seeing a direct competition for that right now.
Okay. Going back to regulation, you're running in Texas, you can't run in California yet, right? They've got, I believe, a ban on deployment or testing of fully autonomous or autonomous trucks, right? Anything over like ten thousand pounds or tons or something. How much of your roadmap is dictated by regulation versus the technology?
So today, obviously our roadmap is constrained by regulation. We don't break the law. We operate places we're allowed to, and that's the vast majority of states in the US. And we can build a heck of a business if the law just stays the way it is today. We estimate in the Sun Belt there's fifty billion vehicle miles traveled, and that's mileage that we can go and support and support our customers and grow our business in. What's exciting, though, is that it's not just customers who are seeing the benefit and value. We're seeing at a regulatory level and at a policymaking level real interest in this. And so we're seeing California. We expect regulations to be released for trucks on the road, and we expect that to happen in the next month or so. So that's really promising. And then we see at a federal level real interest in there being a framework that would create a consistent set of rules across the United States. I think that's an important step. It's one that we look forward to, but it's not one that today is limiting our business.
Yeah, you can operate in all these other states, but California always seems like the holy grail. I mean, you've got the... it's got the shipping from the ocean, right? You need that coast, I guess. I don't... and they're sunny. It's a sunny state, right? Are you operating in rain conditions?
We do operate in the rain today. Yeah.
Okay, fully autonomously.
How long ago did you start doing that?
We started in April of last year operating in the daytime in good weather just between Dallas and Houston. Over the course of the last year, we unlocked what we call operational design domain increases, so new places we could operate. We started operating at night, I think, in the middle of last year. We started operating to El Paso towards the end of last year, and I think in January we unlocked operating in the rain.
What are your customers most excited about? Is it that you can kind of run all night and just do more runs, essentially?
It's a combination of things. So for all of these companies, safety is top of mind, right? It is, you know, one, two, and three, I think, when they talk to us. And so the opportunity to have a driver that is always vigilant, that never gets distracted, that is able to look 360 degrees, and the safety implications of that, I think, are real. And that's not just good for customers, of course, that's good for us as a society. Beyond that, the ability to utilize the truck more. So again, if you're a company that runs trucks, you spend fifteen hundred, two hundred thousand dollars for a truck, and you can only operate it half the time because we very rationally limit people to driving a truck eleven hours a day. This allows us to take that truck and use it twice as much. And so if you think, any business where you have a major capital expenditure, the more you can utilize it, the better it is for your business. They're also excited about the sustainability benefit.
Do we care about sustainability today?
I mean, I certainly do, but it seems like it's gone out of both.
But I think you can, you know, you can both think of it as I do as both a societal good that we want the world to be a cleaner place. We want it there for our kids and grandkids. But also you can look at the bottom line, right? A truck that consumes less fuel is lower cost to operate and emits less greenhouse gas and other pollutants, right? And so I think it's a win on both sides. And we expect to be fourteen and thirty-four percent, and we're actually seeing that in practice in our fleet. So it's, again, another big deal, particularly with our current set of adventures and the impact that has on the diesel fuel, right? It's a big win.
We're talking about safety. We're talking about regulation. I remember last year, a couple years ago, there was a whole hullabaloo about safety cones. Do you remember this? You guys, I think, filed a complaint against the warning triangle. So, for those who don't know, so much of road safety is obviously designed around humans. So, when a truck pulls over on a highway, the driver is meant to get out and put out safety cones at certain distances. So that cars coming down the road can see this. Now, if you have a driverless truck, obviously a human can't get out and do that, right? So, that causes problems that I imagine it's like a weird little regulatory thing that would have held you back from being able to do fully driverless deployments. What's the update on that? Because I covered that when it happened and, let me tell you, I was surprised that this story got so many clicks. Like, so many people were interested in this.
It's interesting, right? And I think what's neat about it is it translates something that a lot of people don't have direct contact with, right? Like AI and machine learning, verifiable AI, and translates something very real, right? A person having to walk down the freeway and put a cone down. Um, it is. And it's grooving here at Human. You do a great job paying attention to your own thoughts while that's happening in the background. It's pretty fun. Um, you know, it's an extra level of difficulty on the podcast. Um, but you talk about this idea of dropping these triangles as a safety thing. Well, turns out there's no data that shows that. It was a rule that was put in place in the seventies, and then I think it was in the nineties. NHTSA actually studied should we require that for passenger vehicles, and they said, oh, actually, there's no reason. Like, there's no evidence this is actually helpful. And so our approach has been, like, how do other vehicles on the road tell drivers to look out? You know, what does a police car do? What does an emergency vehicle do? What does a tow truck do? A construction vehicle, they all turn on flashing lights. And we're like, hey, we should turn on flashing lights and warn people. And it felt very common sense. And it turns out at this point that the administration, the Department of Transportation, has come back and said they'll give us a waiver to study this for a few months. And then, you know, that would potentially lead to an exemption that would last for five years. And we've been excited to have a good conversation with the federal regulators around this. You know, they're smart people and they're listening to common sense and things are moving forward.
