Aurora Innovation, Inc. (AUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

September 10, 2024

NASDAQ US Information Technology Software conference_presentation 35 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Mark Delaney

analyst
#1

Great. Well, thank you, everybody. My name is Mark Delaney, and I cover Aurora for Goldman Sachs. Aurora, as many of you know, is a leader in AV technology with an initial focus on deploying in Class 8 trucking market. I'm very pleased to have Chris Urmson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Aurora, with us today. Thanks again for joining us this year.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#2

Really glad to be here. Thank you.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#3

I thought to kick things off, Chris, would love to better understand Aurora's view on developing AI technology. I think the company has a bit of a hybrid approach where there are certain specific rules of the road that you hard code in but also use a lot of AI and AI technology in order to develop your Aurora Driver. So maybe talk a little bit more around what you're doing in that area?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#4

Yes. I think we were one of the first companies to recognize -- certainly in the AV space, recognize the importance of this type of modern AI approaches, technologies like the transformer, which have been key to the advancement of LLM. That's been part of what we've baked into our approach. You can look through a blog post we put out in 2017, talking about the importance of data, the importance of trainability in the system. But one of the things we realized was really important was making sure the system is verifiable and controllable, if you will. So what do I mean by that? If you use an LLM today, I'm sure everyone here has used ChatGPT or whatever else, it's incredible how lifelike and realistic it is. And every once in a while, it has technically call a brain fart, right, something where it's [ actually ] something completely outlandish. And it turns out if you have the equivalent of that on the road, it's -- it can lead to tragedy. And so for Aurora, our approach has been one way we recognize that risk and we combine the best of these modern machine learning or AI techniques with guardrails that constrain the behavior and code things that we really think are important, like stopping at stop signs. So it turns out that if you model driving behavior of what people do, there's a great study that shows that 11% people actually stop at stop signs. And so if you just observe human driving and use that as the input to train the system, then you would rightfully expect that the truck is going to stop at stop signs 11% of the time. We prefer that it actually obey the law and behave appropriately. And so that's a place where we can encode explicitly what we think should happen or needs to happen in a very obvious situation. And then we use the AI to actually generate the humanlike and the much more dynamic kind of behavior. So when a vehicle cuts in front of you on the freeway, it's easy to tell your learning driver, you should leave 3 chevrons of space between you and that vehicle that cut in front of you. But how quickly do you hit the brakes? Do you kind of let it coast through it a little bit because they're going way faster? Or do you have to hammer the brakes aggressively because they're cutting in more slowly in front of you? There's not a really trivial way or a straightforward way to say -- to write an [ HTML ] statement for that. It just doesn't work. And so this is a place where we can gather data from both our expert drivers on the road and what we observed with other drivers on the road and use that to train, okay, here's the right behavior for those dynamic situations and really understand naturals to driving in that way. And so this combination of machine learned or AI, if you will, approaches with a verifiable set of guardrails, we think is absolutely essential to actually delivering this product in a way that you can -- as a customer, you could trust it, as the general public, you'd be safe and comfortable with it on the road around you and as a regulator importantly that you can understand it well enough that you'd be okay with it on the road. So super interesting, super important topic. It's influencing the way we think about solving the problem. And we've been fortunate to kind of cash that wave early and been riding it for the last chunk of time.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#5

That all makes a lot of sense. I think one of the arguments in favor of a different approach and fully end-to-end is that that is what's required to get through some of these edge cases that have been a limiting factor on AV development. What's your thought on those edge cases?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#6

Yes, I think that's kind of nonsense, right? So there's 2 parts to it. So one is that these models are fundamentally estimators or interpolators. What that means is that they take things that they've seen in the world, and they say, okay, this kind of looks like that, let me do something similar to that, at least if they're implemented well. It turns out that you don't get a whole lot of experiences of some of these crazy things like a person driving down the freeway at you on the wrong side of the road. Yes, we've seen it, I think, twice, but that's nowhere near enough data to actually train the model. And so for some of those boundaries, you actually do want to encode explicitly the correct behavior when it's straightforward to do so. You can also generate an understanding of what the edge cases are, like people talk a lot about edge cases, but in practice when you're driving the vehicle down the road, the thing you want to do is get where you're going safely without bumping into stuff. And the variability is in kind of what the stuff looks like and exactly how it's going to move. And so we've been able to generate guardrails that keep us in the right place. And then learn the correct behavior around or within the constraints of those guardrails.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#7

That's all very interesting. And the purpose of doing all this R&D is commercial deployment. And the company has a target to launch commercially at the end of 2024. Maybe talk about how the company is tracking toward that and what the company still needs to complete in order to achieve that?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#8

Yes. It's one of the things I feel incredibly fortunate. I get to lead a company where we're going after this space that's $1 trillion dollar market in the U.S. on the back of $200 billion -- 200 billion miles traveled each year in trucks. And we have this incredible set of partners. We have this incredible technology -- technological underpinning, and we're making incredible progress towards commercial launch. We're working hard towards that. We've talked about the measures of progress for that, which are our on-road performance indicator, API, and our safety case, Autonomy Readiness Measure, and we feel excited about the progress we're making towards commercial launch at the end of the year.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#9

In your 2Q shareholder letter, the company highlighted the percentage of loads that achieved a 100% autonomy performance indication and thus didn't need any on-site support, increased 80% in the month of June, up from 75% earlier that year. Maybe talk a little bit around how that metric is developing.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#10

Yes. So first, just to decode it. What API means is what fraction of miles did a person have to touch the truck for us to be able to -- for it to drive safely to its destination. And then at some point, that got high enough that it was hard to understand what it meant, right? We're at 99-point-something percent. And so we started to look at what really matters to customers, which is what fraction of trips would the truck have gone from A to B without having to have somebody touch it. And that's this 100% API number. And so that progress is continuing the way we would hope and expect towards getting to this high enough level that customers could actually benefit from this technology on the road. It ultimately won't get to 100% because things happen, tires blow out, engines break, et cetera. So at some point, folks will have to go and touch these trucks and rescue them, but we're making strong progress there as well.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#11

Yes. And I think it's been a little bit nonlinear, right? There's a software release and then there's maybe a step function change in performance?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#12

Yes. So one of the things that you -- it's important to understand is that today, we actually operate our trucks a bit differently than they will when they're actually in production. And that's that we are, almost on a daily basis, pushing new software to the trucks that is passing a stringent set of tests, but not all possible tests. And so that means that we see some temporary regressions while we're maximizing development speed. As we get to launch, what we'll move to is actually released software, where we're stabilizing that software and kind of getting the performance up on these kind of nuisance issues. And so yes, you see this kind of nonlinear performance, and we expect that as we grind those -- we have the experience of every time we take a release version and kind of deal with the minor nuisance issues, which is a very common process in any software development and deployment, we get really good results out of it.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#13

You mentioned safety a few times already in our conversation. In July, Aurora announced the result of an evaluation by a third-party organization that audited your safety approach. Tell us what they examined and what have they concluded? And any areas for improvement they suggested?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#14

Yes. So this organization is called TÜV SÜD. It's one of the big European safety auditors. So if you're in Europe and you want to ship a car, these folks come in and audit you. We had them come and audit our -- what we call, our safety management system. And this is really how we think about monitoring and evaluating risk at the company. So particularly safety risk. And it was awesome, right? They're very professional. They're very well respected. They came in and looked at how we perform relative to the AVSC standard for this. And it turns out, we passed with flying colors. I've talked with auditors for a variety of reasons. These folks came in, they spent about -- they want to check with the CEO to make sure he understands what's going on and answers questions in rational ways, they get partway through that, and they said to me, "Hey, okay, we're good. I just want to let you know, like we just call up your employees randomly and ask them about this and they were able to kind of quote it directly, right, they understood how to answer the question exactly." That it was clear to the auditor that our company really didn't just have safety kind of stamped on the outside that it was actually core to the way we operate the business. And the reason why that's important to me, and it should be important to you is that at some point, I'm going to be looking at a set of reports that say, "Is this ready to go?" And the team is going to tell me their thoughts on it. And I want to be able to trust those reports and be able to say, "Yes, we're good to go." And this audit gives me confidence that we have the tools in place where folks have the opportunity to raise risk that they feel confident that they can and that those risks are adjudicated appropriately so that we're not going to have some kind of lurking safety concern behind. And that means that when the product does get to the road, we're going to have an awful lot of confidence in what we're putting out there is going to perform the way we expect.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#15

Really interesting and quite important. [ I was hoping ] you could provide an update on how integration of the Aurora Driver is going with the trucks, partnership you've announced with PACCAR and Volvo. I think those trucks need certain capabilities in terms of redundancy. Where does that all stand?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#16

Yes. So again, to kind of fill in the back story here, we work with PACCAR and Volvo trucks. They make about half of the trucks sold in the U.S. market today. The reason why you can't just go to the used car lot and bolt our stuff on to the truck is that you need a set of redundancies in it. You need things like if the steering motor in a truck today breaks, I can use my arms to turn the steering wheel. It's harder, but I can do that. Computer doesn't have arms. And so we need to make sure that there isn't -- if that steering motor breaks, there's another motor that can take over or if something happens with the way we actuate the brakes, there's a second way to provide redundancy is what this is called in the way we actuate the truck. And so for several years now, we've been working with both PACCAR and Volvo to set them up to produce at volume trucks that have those appropriate features in them. Integration and work with them is going well. They're both set up so that as we move through the progression of our hardware kits that they'll be there at scale to deliver these vehicles.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#17

And can you speak to who will be doing the upfitting of the early trucks when Aurora begins commercial operations and what's done by you versus partners like Fabrinet?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#18

Yes. So today, we build all of the hardware that goes into our trucks, and we do rigorous testing on it, but we're talking about building tens of things. At some point, it doesn't make sense for us to do that. There are companies in the world that are dramatically better at this. And so we work with a contract manufacturer, in particular, Fabrinet, who is building our second generation of Aurora hardware. And then we work with Continental, one of the world's leading Tier 1 organizations who's developing the third generation of Aurora hardware that will come to market in '27. That hardware will ultimately get line side installed on our OEM partners' truck. So as a customer, you'll call up PACCAR, you'll say, "I want a Peterbilt 579, I want it to roll off the line with the Aurora Driver on it," they'll put it on and you'll get it from the factory that way. With both what we do today and with the hardware that will come from Fabrinet, the OEM will create a truck that is ready to accept the Aurora Driver hardware, then we will upfit it at our shop, taking both first with our initial version that will commercial launch -- that we're working to commercial launch with initially at our shop. And then the hardware that comes back from Fabrinet will upfit that for our customers.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#19

Maybe you can talk a little bit more on remote assistance and help us understand what that even is, but also the ratio of people per truck doing remote assistance?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#20

Yes. So the world is complicated. And the way we've approached driving is that the truck itself is responsible for keeping itself and others around it safe on the road. But if it gets into a situation where either it needs some help addressing some internal limitation or it encounters a situation that it doesn't understand, it will take a safe action and then it'll call base and ask for help. And you can think of this not as someone with a Logitech steering wheel behind a desk that's going to jump in and drive the truck down the road. But much more like a trucker on the road, who's going to call a dispatcher and say, "Hey, this is happening, what should I do?" And so that's the role that our remote assist operators play in our vehicles. So they don't drive the trucks, but they support the trucks with complicated decisions where it may not be obvious onboard what to do. You can think of it as kind of abstracting intelligence, right? So these are problems that are either we don't understand how to solve algorithmically or algorithmically would be too expensive to run on the hardware on the truck. And so we outsource that to a person off board. When we launch our product, we expect that to be one operator, one remote assistance person to a small number or a few trucks. And then we expect to get that to many trucks and -- apologize for the imprecision, but that's the way we're talking about it right now. We shared at our Analyst Day a curve that shows kind of the knee in the curve. But once you get to 1 to 10, you've got most of the savings. And as you get further down, we can continue to drive cost out of the system. So we're excited about the progress there.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#21

And then maybe you can help us better understand if Aurora needs to add incremental infrastructure in terms of people or services in order to enable commercial launch?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#22

So no, not to enable commercial launch. And we've really intentionally built our business to focus on what we can do best in world and that is delivering the driving capability. And that's why you see us partnering with companies like PACCAR and Volvo. We don't want to build trucks. That's a really hard business. These are companies who've built decades of experience and know how to do that well. We don't want to manufacture things at scale because that's hard and complicated and the skills people have, and that's why we work with Fabrinet and Continental. We don't want to become FedEx, Werner, Schneider, again, complicated difficult business that are hard one experience. Let us amplify each of our partners' skills and help create value for our customers. And so we've tried to keep a model where we'll be able to kind of manage our internal expenses and end up with this really nice contained business going forward.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#23

Maybe talk about how much investment maybe you needed in order to add new lanes beyond the initial Dallas to Houston leg.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#24

Yes. Yes. So as we look at expanding from our launch lane Dallas to Houston, there's really 2 types of work we need to do. One is we need to map the area. And this turns out to be not very expensive. We drive our trucks down it a couple of times. We have automated tools that then generate maps, and then we have the QA team go through and make sure that map meets our quality standards. So -- and what's great is that then becomes a competitive advantage for us because we can maintain it from the vehicles operating on it. And then we have a model -- think of it just I guess, intuitively, when you drive your car in your neighborhood, I would bet that you feel more comfortable than we drive in some random place elsewhere in the world, even if you're a very good driver. But I can tell you that when I drive around the Bay Area, I'm a much safer driver than when I drive in Dallas or Houston. I'd stay clear because I just don't understand the road network, I don't understand where to expect traffic. The map gives that benefit to our truck and it leans into what computers do best, which is recall information, and it does that with very little cost to us. And it becomes, like I said, this perpetuating advantage we will have. The other thing is that we need to develop any new skills that are required for that lane. And so the next lane that we expect to expand onto is Fort Worth to El Paso. I've kind of talked about that. There's -- most of the freeway driving looks the same. Freeway going Dallas to Houston looks mostly the same as freeway going Fort Worth to El Paso. There's a big hill. That means that we need to use engine braking and not just foundation brakes. We do that today. We just need to validate it. We need to go through a Custom and Border Patrol Station. We're super proud of the fact that actually, we're the first company that's built a process to do that in Autonomy with Custom and Border Patrol, and we're now working with them to expand that to other places. And so we'll need to validate that. At that point, we basically can drive Fort Worth to El Paso. And so as we open new lanes, there will be small incremental features we have to add potentially that will go less and less the more places we operate. So really excited about that and expect to be able to grow the business relatively quickly as we get to that time.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#25

Have you shared any time frames around when to think about that El Paso leg and sort of the time to go, yes, incremental lanes beyond that?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#26

I don't know that we have. I think we've guided to kind of next year, we expect to begin operating Fort Worth to El Paso and begin to pilot. I think we just announced Phoenix, El Paso to Phoenix as well.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#27

Yes. That makes sense. The company announced the Premier Autonomy program with Uber Freight this quarter. Can you talk about what that program is and the business and financial implications for Aurora?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#28

Yes. This is a first-of-a-kind partnership with Uber Freight, it -- for customers, the big benefit is that if you're a small- or medium-sized customer, it's going to be hard for us to reach out to you and engage with you, whereas Uber already has that relationship. For us, the benefit is that we don't have to do that outreach, and we get connected with qualified customers, that will want to use the Aurora Driver. And so you can think of it as a really high-quality lead generation arm for us without us having to grow a massive sales force, so we're really proud and excited for that. And then for Uber Freight, it creates a unique advantage for them in that they can now unlock for their customers access to a technology where we don't see a whole lot of competition in the landscape. And that's pretty valuable. So for all parties, we see this as a huge opportunity and win.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#29

Longer term, Aurora has talked about moving to a more asset-light and revenue per mile business model. That's in partnership with Continental. You spoke a little bit about it already, but maybe expand on that, if you could, and if you have any updates on how it's progressing.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#30

Yes, kind of in that spirit of let's do the things we're best in world at. Let's not spend money on things that we aren't. We want to be an asset-light business. And so one of the big pillars of that is working with Continental, and we've created again a first-of-its-kind type of partnership with them, where they're providing hardware-as-a-service. So what does that mean? That means today, Continental is spending upward -- over $300 million, co-developing with us a generation of automotive-hardened Aurora Driver hardware kit that customers will pay for through us, and we will pay to Continental on a per mile basis, think of it as cents per mile for that hardware. This allows Continental to get to a world where they are operating in value-based pricing rather than should-cost pricing, which has been kind of a goal for Tier 1s for decades. It allows our customers to get access to the truck and the Aurora Driver without having to pay a prohibitively high upfront cost toward that or without increasing or changing the way they structure their business, right? They're used to buying a truck and paying a driver, in this world to be able to buy a truck and pay a driver, it just happens to be us. And then for us, we don't have to sink a whole lot of capital into owning and amortizing these assets. We're able to pay that through Continental on this per mile basis. It also has the benefit of aligning incentives all the way through our stack. The more our customers drive, the more money they make. The more we drive for our customers, the more money we make. And the more the hardware drives for us, the more money Continental makes. So that's -- it's rare to find in life where everybody's incentives are fully aligned and we've been able to set that up here. And as I said earlier, that Continental hardware, one of the benefits of working with them is they know how to be in an OEM supply chain. So the hardware can shift from their docks to our OEM partner's docks. They know how to be integrated into that. They know how to put like silly things, like putting it in the right kind of crate, right, and be able to track the inventory through it, all stuff that we no longer have to learn because we have amazing partners who know how to do that. And it's those kind of operational things to get in the way of execution that we just aren't going to trip this up because of this relationship we have.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#31

Yes, very exciting.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#32

So maybe didn't sound exciting, but it is really freaking cool.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#33

No, it is. On some financial topics, the company commented it had contracted a large portion of its 2025 volume. It was in that process of finalizing the rest. What does this mean for how much revenue investors should expect next year?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#34

Yes. So we have not provided and I'm not going to be breaking news here about how much revenue do we expect next year. Sorry. But it is exciting that we have customers that are already willing to commit with us to operating trucks driverless on the road. That's one of the critical enablers to actually having a business is having customers who want your product. And so that's very exciting for us. We will definitely take a crawl, walk, run approach to this, right? We want to make sure that as this kind of groundbreaking kind of technology comes to market that people can come along with us on that and that we don't kind of create problems for ourselves by moving too quickly. We're going to move as rapidly as we can while bringing folks along with us.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#35

Tying the technology with the financials. Aurora has talked about a 50% reduction in cost per mile between 2024 and 2025 with this next-generation hardware kit. Can you talk a bit more on this?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#36

Yes, sure. So if you think about the cost that drive our business, there's really 3 core elements to that. So one is that remote support that we just talked about a few minutes ago. The second is when the truck breaks down, having somebody go out and service it. And then the third is the depreciation of the hardware on the vehicle. And so today, we have, as I mentioned, hardware that we build in-house, it's kind of expensive. As we move to working with Fabrinet, we see dramatic reductions in costs. So things like the computer that drives the system is going to be about 40% lower weight, 40% lower cost to deliver. Things like FirstLight, our proprietary lidar, that's a special technology, allows us to see a long way down the road. We see another significant cost reduction in that as well. And then we see the lifetime of the hardware increasing so that reliability and robustness reduces how often you have to change parts out, which reduces the operating cost of it. So we see a significant step change in the cost there. And then a significant additional step change when we move from the Fabrinet-produced parts to the Continental-produced hardware kit.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#37

The company is targeting a positive gross profit in 2026. What would have to happen for this to occur?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#38

Yes, the things that we have in plan already, right, that we look out at the world and we see, okay, we need to take the hardware that we're already bringing up from Fabrinet and we need to get that on to our fleet and operating, we see that as kind of in plan and moving forward. We need to move that few to a few more on the remote assistance so that we have -- that we're kind of safely through that curve -- through the knee of that curve. And then we need to be driving up the operating life through this reliability program that we're putting in place with hardware development for Fabrinet. So we look at that and see some elbow grease that's needed but it's a pretty straight shot.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#39

That's great. Aurora recently raised a little over $480 million of incremental capital. With this raise, how much additional capital does Aurora still need -- still think it needs in order to reach free cash flow positive?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#40

Yes. So when we did our Analyst Day earlier this year, we said we thought we needed -- we estimated $850 million. If you take out the fees to our bankers, I guess you're not one of them, our bankers. We raised about half of that. So you can do the math.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#41

Yes. Okay. Very helpful. Maybe talk on the competitive landscape and how that's changed because I think, a couple of years ago when you and I were having one of these fireside chats, there was a number of competitors, some of them have actually now exited. So where does the competitive landscape stand at this point?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#42

Yes. From my perspective, it's awesome, right? That as we look at the landscape, most of the folks have left, right? So a few years ago, you would have looked out and said, "Well, there's Embark, and there's TuSimple, and there's Waymo, two of them don't exist in the U.S. market. And the third is focusing on robotaxis instead of trucking. So as we look at this landscape, we see none of our competitors have the OEM partnerships, the Tier 1 partnerships, the scale that's necessary, the capital to really deliver this. And so we feel like we're in a place where this is our market to go win. And, again, I feel incredibly fortunate to be in that position with the team we have.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#43

I think you and I have also spoken or maybe is it one of your earnings calls that this is a market that -- it's very large and presumably, there's room for multiple providers as well?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#44

Yes, I think that's right. And I think ultimately, there will be multiple providers in the market. right? When you talk about a $1 trillion market, no one gets to have that to themselves. But we're excited to have what we see as a pretty good lead, and a pretty good strong position to begin from. And then we'll just keep executing. And we expect this will create a lot of value for our customers, reducing both their costs and improving the revenue. And so we think that's a pretty good recipe for building a business that wins.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#45

Maybe talk on the regulatory environment and whether or not you expect any significant regulations to be put in place.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#46

At the federal level, I'm pretty convinced there's nothing going to happen over this year, just given where we are politically. But I think the good news is this is one of those questions I think is somewhat misunderstood in the investment community, that in the vast majority of the United States today, if we are confident in the safety of the truck, we can put it on the road and operate it. I think 25 states is explicit, 15 states is implicit and that includes our launch markets and much of the southern freight belt that we intend to operate on initially. So from our perspective, there's always opportunity to improve regulation, but there's no big movement that's needed. We continue to work with folks like California, where light vehicles are allowed and hard -- heavy vehicles are not currently allowed. But we saw a really promising movement last week, I think it was, or maybe the week before when the California DMV released their early draft regulations for heavy vehicles. So we're really excited about the enthusiasm we're seeing from the regulatory community and the lawmaking community. And I think a lot of that is due to hard work in education that we and others in the community have been doing.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#47

Maybe talk about how you respond with some of those local regulators, permitting officials to the extent there is an accident that unfortunately, maybe Aurora Driver is at fault, in one of these situations, what steps do you guys have to take? So you don't run the risk of the change in the political environment, losing permits or things like that?

Christopher Urmson

executive
#48

So we have not been. We've been involved in a number of collisions, unfortunately. And when we look at the tape of those, the Aurora Driver was doing the things that you would expect it to and the other driver was not. We've had situations where we had a very gentle collision, where somebody in a box truck drive along beside us and just touches the trailer. Turns out in that situation, we were able to see that they were looking down at their phone and just not paying attention while driving. We had another situation where somebody came screaming up behind us on a wet road trying to make a swerve around the truck and hydroplaned and tapped the back of it. So we see these things on the road. It's one of the benefits that we think is going to be really valuable from having things like the Aurora Driver out in the world, is that we can improve safety. There's about 6,000 fatalities related to truck accidents every year, and we can drive that down. As it turns to your question directly, we both believe it's very important to build relationships with the parties that were on the regulatory side of this. And so we spend effort making sure they understand our intentions. They understand how the technology works. They understand the risks and opportunities. So they can make informed decisions, right? Their job is to keep the public safe and we see that as one of the opportunities and part of our mission as well. So that aligns really well. We're proactive in communication. So when we have an event, we make sure that the -- whether it's our customer or whether it's a regulatory agent -- entity, that they know what's happened, and we can give them visibility into it. We also internally practice this, right? So we, on a regular basis, turn the crank on mock incidents so that we know what will happen when a real event occurs. And we think that's important, right? You don't want the first time you deal with this to be in the heat of battle, you want to have turned the crank, practiced it. Much like a football team doesn't show up on first day of the regular season and go out there and hope all the blocking schemes work, right? You actually set this up ahead of time so that when the real event occurs, you're ready to go.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#49

That makes a lot of sense. So the company's focus today is on the Class 8 trucking market, but you've spoken about ambition to do robotaxis in the longer term. Help us better understand what type of time frame we can think about for that and how similar the technologies are.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#50

So I think this is one of the things that's just incredibly cool about what we're building, right? When we get to the point where we have trucks operating on the road, doing that at scale in a sustainable business, that's incredibly powerful. And the tools we will have built internally and have built internally, the intelligence that we build for that truck is going to be broadly applicable. And so the obvious next steps are in things like robotaxi, things like local goods delivery. But more broadly over time, this kind of general environmental understanding and intelligence is going to become an incredibly interesting asset for us. Now we need to keep our eye on the ball for the next few years to make sure that we get this product out the door and focus on trucking because we think that's an incredible opportunity, strong unit economics, huge market scale, all of the things we talked about. But from there, the opportunity for this business to go and have a broad impact on the world is amazing.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#51

Bringing it back to a more personal note for all of those in the audience who are listening on the webcast, would love to get your views on when you think consumers will be able to get a personal Level-4-capable vehicle.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#52

Yes. I don't know. I don't see it happening soon. I think the opportunity to use these vehicles as parts of fleets is incredibly powerful. I'm really excited about what the Waymo folks are doing in robotaxi and seeing that in San Francisco here, like I drove in this morning and they're just all over the place, it's just awesome. So I think that that is actually the right way to introduce this technology to consumers for a variety of reasons. And so I'm excited to see that. I don't have a lot of confidence that there's any -- anything happening in the near term where someone is going to truly own a real Level 4 system.

Mark Delaney

analyst
#53

Well, great. Well, lots of exciting stuff the company is working on. Hopefully, we can get an update again next year. Thanks for joining us.

Christopher Urmson

executive
#54

Yes. Thanks so much for having me. Look forward to it.

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Aurora Innovation, Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.