Aurora Innovation at Goldman Sachs Conference: Autonomous Trucking Advances

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ:AUR) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, offering a strategic update on its autonomous trucking operations. The company highlighted its progress with driverless technology, expansion plans, and partnerships, while also addressing the need for future capital raises amidst a challenging trucking market.

Key Takeaways

• Aurora has completed 50,000 driverless miles and plans to expand routes by year-end.
• A focus on "verifiable AI" emphasizes safety and reliability.
• Partnerships with Volvo and PACCAR continue, with autonomy-enabled trucks expected by 2027.
• The company ended Q2 with $1.3 billion but anticipates needing more capital.
• Aurora projects cost reductions with its second-generation hardware.

Financial Results

Aurora’s financial outlook remains cautiously optimistic. The company projects a driver-as-a-service model with an average sales price of $0.65 to $0.85 per mile, aiming to undercut the current labor cost of $1 per mile. Aurora closed the second quarter with a strong balance sheet, holding $1.3 billion. However, they acknowledged the necessity of future capital raises to sustain growth and innovation.

Operational Updates

The company has reached a milestone of 50,000 driverless miles on public roads. Aurora is currently operating driverless routes between Dallas and Houston, with plans to extend services to Fort Worth, El Paso, and Phoenix by the end of the year. The expansion includes adapting to challenging weather conditions, such as rain and wind. Additionally, Aurora has established a partnership with customs border patrol agencies to facilitate new routes.

Future Outlook

Aurora’s future plans include launching customer terminal operations in early 2026 and integrating OEM-produced autonomy-enabled trucks by 2027. The company expects significant cost reductions with the rollout of its second-generation hardware, manufactured by Fibronet, and plans to offer a hardware-as-a-service model through Continental. Aurora aims for its trucks to achieve 200,000 to 250,000 miles annually, supported by a favorable regulatory environment and the American Drives Act.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, CEO Chris Urmson discussed Aurora’s "verifiable AI" approach, which integrates modern AI with safety guardrails. The company believes it is ahead of competitors in the autonomous trucking space. Partnerships with Volvo and PACCAR were emphasized as key to integrating autonomous systems. Cost reduction remains a priority, with a focus on efficient capital allocation.

For a detailed account, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yes, sir. Whenever.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yes.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: We’re ticket. Okay, great. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. My name is Mark Delaney, and I have the pleasure of covering Aurora for Goldman Sachs. With us from Aurora, we have Chris Urmson, the Co-Founder and CEO. Really appreciate you joining us.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: I thought, Chris, given your extensive background in the autonomous space, I wanted to get your thoughts around AI and how Aurora is pursuing this. You’ve talked in the past about using what you call verifiable AI for your product development. Help us better understand what verifiable AI is. How is that similar or different than a full end-to-end approach?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, yeah. Thanks. For those of you who don’t know the company, we’re working on making trucks drive themselves, ultimately driving all kinds of things. Our mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. We’re operating trucks between Dallas to Houston today driverlessly and anticipate by the end of the year to be operating between Fort Worth and Phoenix, Fort Worth and El Paso, and El Paso and Phoenix. That’s kind of the 30-second version of what we do. Verifiable AI is the way we think about bringing kind of modern AI techniques to a safety-critical space. There’s been a lot of excitement, of course, in the large language model space and the visual language model space. These kind of techniques are exceptionally compelling in that area.

In a world where we can’t afford to have a model kind of doing the proverbial "use glue to hold the cheese on your pizza," we need to do something a little beyond just kind of train and pray. For us, that’s this verifiable approach where we combine the best of AI machine learning with guardrails. What does that look like in our system? It is, one, it makes sure that we actually can understand the representations that are being expressed by our models and using those as kind of a way to contain and constrain the communication of what’s learned by the action part of our system. It also allows us to put in place constraints on how the system can respond that can’t be kind of jailbroken, if you will. For constraint, for example, we want our vehicles to stop at stop signs.

If you just built a trained model, it turns out something like 11% of people actually stop at stop signs. If you actually trained off of that data, more likely than not, you’re not going to have a stop at a stop sign, which we think is actually a pretty important part of building a safe system. One of the things that’s actually really interesting to see is how the story around this, around end-to-end models has evolved. A couple of years ago, when ChatGPT was new and large language models were having, you know, their kind of introduction and large moment, it was, well, you’ve got to be doing completely end-to-end stuff. That’s what those guys are doing.

It turns out that if you actually look at how these models are now beginning to work, they look much more like the approach we’ve been taking for a while, because as these models move from curiosities and chatbots into things that industry and businesses are relying on, they’re moving to federated models and constellations of models. They’re moving to learner-ranker approaches to make sure that the thing that comes out, the end of it, is something that makes sense and is valuable. It is great to see that kind of this approach that we’ve spearheaded is starting to be the way that other people are starting to think about this as well.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: As you think about that approach to your product development using verifiable AI, what does that mean for your ability to add new features to your stack? Does it accelerate it or slow it down?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: It accelerates it and makes sure we get it right.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Right. That, you know, for example, by the end of this year, we intend to be operating in rain. If you came and rode in one of our trucks today, you’d be like, "Chris, why have you not launched this feature?" It works. It works well almost all the time. When we’re talking about an 80,000-pound thing moving at 70 miles an hour down the road, almost is doing a lot of work in that sentence. We want to make sure it’s really right.

For us, being able to understand and evaluate and validate the system, avoid the challenges that come along with kind of a compounding exponential set of complexities that come from both understanding the world and figuring out what to do in it, and being able to differentiate that and verify the sub-elements of it means we can have really strong conviction that the thing that we put on the road at the end of the day is going to be safe.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You mentioned before about starting to operate between Dallas and Houston. That was your launch lane. You began in late April. Talk a little bit more on some of the key learnings from that, and how has customer feedback been?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, it’s been kind of what we expected, right? The vehicles are out on the road, they’re operating. As of last week, we’ve done 50,000 driverless miles on public roads. This is kind of a big, you know, illustration of kind of it’s starting to accelerate and pick up. The technology works. The validation process we put in place, you know, we believed in it. We had conviction in it. What we’re seeing is it behaves the way we expected, right? The performance on road matches what we wanted, and that’s really what you want at the end of the day. What it’s meant for us as a company is, one, we’ve believed for a long time we were ahead of the game. Now it’s kind of demonstrable, right? We’re the only company in the world that can do this.

We feel like with the approach we put in place with verifiable AI, we’re actually continuing to accelerate relative to any competition there might be. Two, when we go and talk to customers, it goes from a hypothetical, what this could mean for your business if self-driving trucks are a thing, to now self-driving trucks are a thing. We have them. They’re coming to a freeway near you in the not-distant future. It’s really caused a significant uptick in enthusiasm from potential customers.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: The next big thing is already here, as Samsung would say.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, I guess so. I’m familiar with that tagline, but sure, let’s go with it.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: I think it was a smartphone advertising campaign they ran when they were starting to get more against the iPhone, if I’m remembering correctly. Debating myself.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, I don’t know if I want that as our metaphor.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah. You recently expanded to nighttime driving. With that change, how many miles per week is one of your AVs typically doing fully autonomously?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: The way to think about it is where this is heading, right, is that we expect trucks to be able to do somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 miles a year, if not a little bit more in certain situations. Being able to go from operating in 8 to 12 hours a day of daylight to being able to operate, you know, day and night means we unlock that potential. That translates to something between 4,000 and 5,000 miles a week, roughly. That’s kind of what we’re expecting.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: The company, as you mentioned before, is planning to address rainy and windy conditions as the next step in expanding its operational design domain. Can you provide an update on how the validation, testing, and safety case for these conditions is progressing? Are you on track to do that by the end of the year?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, it is moving along well, right? We continue to expect to be able to address those conditions by the end of the year and begin operating in them. It’s really important to understand there’s a difference between the performance of the system and the validated performance of the system. Today, we take you and put you in one of our trucks in the rain, and it will feel like it works. If you’re unlucky, what you’ll see is that in certain conditions, we’ll sometimes think that some of the vehicles adjacent to us are a little bit bigger than they really are. That may cause us to think that they bumped into us, right? That causes them to pull us out of the road and stop. It’s rare, but it’s a thing that you don’t really want in a product.

As we continue to pull the additional data that gives us conviction that the rest of the things all work the way we will, and we make the minor refinements to the system, we’re feeling really good about the timing.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Very helpful. The company is also working on adding driverless operations for its Fort Worth, El Paso, Phoenix lane. How are you progressing with starting to add those lanes to your map and overcoming some of the more unique features like having to go through a customs stop?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, and I’m going to sound a little bit like a broken record in that, yeah, it kind of works. We’re on the road today. We have those, you know, we’re operating for customers Fort Worth to El Paso and on to Phoenix. Phoenix is particularly interesting because at that point, it’s 1,000 miles, about 16 hours of driving. Fort Worth to El Paso, it’s right around the hours of service limitation for a human driver. Fort Worth to Phoenix is beyond it. Companies like Werner are super excited about that and the opportunity for their business. We’re feeling quite good about it. As you said, there’s a couple of things that are a little bit novel. The prevalence of cattle on the freeway is slightly higher than it is between Dallas and Houston.

Not a thing I think we’ve ever seen, but we’re making sure we’re good with, you know, we don’t want to be hitting someone’s steer. There’s this inland border patrol station. We’ve put in place a first-of-its-kind partnership with customs border patrol agencies. We’ve been testing that and working that for a couple of years. Now it’s just, let’s get through the final validation and call it ready to go.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. That’s good news. As you start adding some of these different capabilities, right, going to a different city, going through a customs and border patrol stop, how much incremental R&D is needed to add those sorts of features? How long does it take to validate those things?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, I guess you can be looking at the clock, right? That we got to the initial launch. It took us about, you know, eight and a quarter years to be able to get there. By the end of this year, we expect to be operating in the rain. We expect to have unlocked three additional routes. Relatively modest, and part of that is because of the investment we’ve made, not just in the technology, but in the process and tools that allow us to have conviction in the technology. I really think that’s important to understand. If you look at a company like SpaceX, in fact, let’s look specifically at SpaceX. The reason why SpaceX is lapping Boeing is not because Elon is brilliant, and he very well may be, but it’s because they can validate their flight software in a week.

It takes Boeing a year to three years to do that. That means they get 50 to 150 more shots on goal than Boeing does. If you read any article in business, any article or any book on business or on technology development, fast iteration cycles done safely is the key to this. For us, we’ve invested heavily in this V&V tooling and framework. That means that not only do we have a product that’s on the road and safe, but that we can continually add to it and improve it and do that rapidly and with conviction.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Is that something you’ve developed in-house?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: That’s something absolutely we developed in-house. Talking with the team, my theory is, if you think we have three major assets for the software in our system, we’ve got the actual code itself, our data sets, or our process, and you told me you had to delete one of them, I’d tell you to delete our code. With the other two, please, by the way, do not delete any of them. They’re all super valuable. If you had a gun to my head and told me you had to delete one of them, I’d say delete the code because with the infrastructure we have and with the data we have, we can quickly go and ultimately recover that if need be.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Just clarify, the V&V, what is that?

and verification (V&V) framework.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Oh, V&V. Validation and verification. Sorry, I’ll take that.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Validation and verification.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: This is basically the process for making sure that the thing that we built actually does what we think it should do. What we should do is actually what it needs to do to be out in the world and be safe.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s a lot of simulation and software capabilities.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, it’s a combination of simulation. Importantly, simulation is not enough, but actually understanding how to use a simulation to test is important, because you can create a virtual world and it’s pretty easy to understand, did the thing crash into something in the virtual world? Understanding whether it didn’t just not crash into something, but it drove in a smooth, predictable way, it drove in a way where it’s not like jerking and hitting the brakes. There’s a lot of nuance in actually assessing whether the behavior is good or just didn’t crash into something. Clearly, you want to not crash into something, but you need to do more than that. That’s part of some of the interesting infrastructure we’ve built.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Very helpful. You’ve spoken about eventually driving to and from customer endpoints. Talk a bit more about what the key steps are the company needs to accomplish in order to be able to enable this, and any sense on the timing.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, this is one of those things where I think we probably shot ourselves in the foot a little bit in telling our story. That driving to a customer endpoint is like driving to one of our terminals. I just saw some analysis recently that said that 50% of distribution centers across the U.S. are within 1.5 miles of freeways, and 80% are within 5 miles of freeways. This is kind of where our stuff is today. There’s, you know, we literally, in going to our terminal site in Houston, we drive past one of our customers’ terminals. It’s been expedient for us to operate between terminals to date. Believe it or not, it’s actually good for our customers. At the Senior Executive level of our customers, they’re like, yeah, you need to go to our terminals.

If you’re the operations person on the ground in that terminal, you’re like, no, do not put that S in truck in my terminal right now while you’re still learning, right? I have to get N trucks out a day, and I’ve got to turn this over. I don’t need some new technology messing that up. Now that it’s actually working, now that the customers kind of get it, we’re ready to go, and we expect in early 2026 to begin operating to customer terminal sites. Yeah, customer sites, to be clear.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Maybe we could speak about the partnerships with the trucking OEMs. You’ve announced partnerships with Volvo and PACCAR. When does Aurora plan to start using trucks with redundant steering and braking included from those OEMs? How is your view informed by the expectation to receive 20 development trucks from Volvo by the end of the year?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, so we use trucks with redundancies from our OEM partners today. In 2027, we expect our OEM partners to be producing trucks off of their line that have those redundancies in them. We’ve been working with them for several years to collaborate with them to ensure those, what they call autonomy-enabled trucks, meet the requirements that we’re going to need to ultimately operate them safely. We’ve also been working with them to line-side install the Aurora hardware kit. For those of you not as familiar with the story, we have hardware today that we’ve effectively built ourselves. We tested extensively. We’re confident in the safety of that on the road. In 2026, you’ll see us bring to the road hardware that’s been manufactured by Fibronet. That’ll have a major step down in cost relative to what we have today. We’re excited to see that come to life.

In 2027, you’ll see the hardware that we’re developing with Continental, which is again a huge step down in cost from where we are today. We’ll produce that at tens of thousands of units a year with Continental, or able to produce it at tens of thousands of units a year with Continental. What’s really exciting about that is that hardware kit is going to be paid for through a hardware-as-a-service model. Continental is investing or spending $300 million and some to co-develop this with us, set up manufacturing for it, and ultimately finance this hardware. We will pay them back on a per-mile basis. If you’re a customer wanting to use the Aurora Driver, you’re going to buy a truck that basically looks like a normal truck and is going to cost very similar to what a normal truck costs.

You’re going to pay a subscription to Aurora to operate that truck for you to be the driver. That’s going to include the hardware cost. There’s not some giant hurdle that a customer is going to have to overcome to actually bring this into their fleet. Of course, these customers are used to turning over their vehicles regularly, right? I think it’s about three to four years in most fleets where they’re going to move one truck out, sell it off to a second party, and bring a new vehicle in. There’s a really natural refresh cycle we see for our customers over time.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You spoke a little bit around the timeframes. I think you said you’re using trucks from those OEM partners with redundant steering and braking already, but it comes off the line in 2027. Today, if I understand correctly, there’s upfitting happening.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You’re doing that with your partners, right, in terms of the upfitting?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, today and in 2026, we’ll be upfitting trucks. This is where we’re going to be taking the Aurora hardware kit and installing it on those trucks for our partners.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You put a blog post up on your website. You talked about how important it is to have the good relationships with your OEM partners. PACCAR had asked to have an observer in the front seat. From your conversations with them, and as you think about some of these considerations, like when these trucks that are coming off the line and maybe the redundant steering and braking included on the line, what are some of those things that would have to happen to take the safety observer out of the truck?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, to be clear, we are confident in the safe operation of our trucks today. We do have an observer sat in the truck, but they’re just sat there. Go check out youtube.com at Aurora Driver. Quick plug to the Aurora Driver Live. This is one of our ways of kind of continuing to demonstrate transparency, industry-leading transparency. You can just go see our trucks driving down the freeway, what they’re doing today in this moment. What you’ll see is for the ones that are operating driverless, like literally our drivers will be sat there twiddling their thumbs or eating a bag of Fritos as the things go down the road because they are not there to observe the safe operation of the vehicle. They’re not there to ensure the safe operation of the vehicle, sorry.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, from your perspective, the trucks are working well. These observers aren’t needed. Anything that you think would have to happen for them to not need to be there anymore?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: No, I think it’s once we have those production parts from Peterbilt in particular, and then the Volvos that we are receiving this year. Volvo has indicated those have the hardware that’s necessary for us to ultimately operate driverlessly.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Maybe we talk about remote assistance. How often are you needing remote assistance? I mean, that’s always been part of your plan. It’s in the long-term plan. I mean, any surprises on how often remote assistance is contributing?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: No, it’s kind of going to plan, right? We aren’t disclosing the rates of that at this time, but we’ve shared that there’s an objective where you hit kind of the economic knee in the curve for the ratios. It’s about 1 to 20. We’re not seeing any concern on building towards that or building up towards that ratio.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Very helpful. You spoke about Fibronet. You’re going to be using hardware they make next year in your trucks. Can you elaborate a bit more on what they’re going to be doing and how impactful that might be to the BOM?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: We really believe deeply in working with folks who know what they’re doing and can do their job better than you can do their job. Fibronet is a fantastic contract manufacturer. This is hardware that we have designed. We’ve done the DFM with Fibronet. They’re now manufacturing this hardware kit. We’ve had early samples from it. The big objective for this hardware kit is to reduce the bill of materials cost so that we can ultimately get to a unit economic profitable product.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Okay. No, very helpful. You also spoke about working with Continental and making the shift with them in 2027.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: They’ve had a lot of restructuring that they’ve been dealing with at a corporate level. Any impact on the relationship with you?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: No, not at all. In fact, I think it’s actually exciting because I’m a big believer that companies, when run well, are focused on their mission. As Continental spins out Omovio, which is going to be focused purely on the electronic components and ADAS systems for vehicles, they’re just going to be even more closely aligned to our mission. They’ve been very clear about this. Our work together is one of the tentpole programs that they have as a company. They’ve been a tremendous partner. We continue to see that and really just love working with Philip and the team.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: I think if I’m not mistaken, Fibronet’s the second-gen hardware kit. Continental will be doing the third-gen hardware kit.

What’s different with this third-gen kit relative to the second-gen?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, there’s a few things that are different. One is price. That’s actually the biggest thing. We’re going through one of the benefits of working with someone like Continental is they are used to looking at a bill of materials and saying, "How do I make this for less? How do I make this so I can mass manufacture it?" Having that ability around the table with us is going to lead to a major, again, another step function reduction in price. Architecturally, it’s a little different. Today, we’re using a conventional kind of x86 GPU type architecture in our computation. As we go to that Continental generation hardware, we’re moving to the NVIDIA Thor SoC. Lots of computation, lower cost, lower power.

The other big one is that our FirstLight LiDAR, which is this proprietary LiDAR sensor that allows us to see further than we think, frankly, anyone else can, is going to go from discrete optical components to an integrated optics on a chip system. That really helps with reliability, manufacturability, and cost. We’re really excited about that. Parts of those systems are already up and we’re bringing up today.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: I imagine, you know, optics on a chip. I mean, there’s other partners like Fibronet would still be able to be involved or somebody else, you know, working with Continental to enable those changes.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, so the chips that we’re developing, you know, these are chips that we’ve developed in-house and that we worked with a fab to manufacture. We’re actually developing not just the lithography for it, but also the deposition process. You know, even things like how do you, because silicon’s a really good passive conductor of light, but it doesn’t create light. You need to actually bond it with, you know, these three-five semiconductors that can actually produce light. How do you flip and align those chips with it? There are lots of cool things that are part of the tech infrastructure and tech stack that we’ve been building that are IP that we have at Aurora Innovation. Of course, we do work with a variety of other suppliers to enable us to manufacture stuff at scale with Continental.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Continental has a lot of experience in the industry working with OEMs. I certainly understand the benefits of that partnership. As you think about the trucking partners starting to manufacture line-side redundant steering and braking, is that something that Continental’s going to do, or are you guys going to do that even before Continental begins to take over some of the?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, our OEM partners are going to have their suppliers for the redundancies and the braking and steering systems in their trucks.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Okay.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Right. The way I really think about this is there’s a truck and a driver. The driver’s the software, the computer, the sensors that allow that driver to see the world. The truck is all the stuff you think of a truck: steering, braking, power, engine, right? The OEM is responsible for those components today.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Okay. You’ve spoken in the past around a bigger ramp in volumes in the late 2027, 2028 timeframe as Continental begins to come on. You’re already working with Continental on the third-generation hardware kit. Do you have the sense Continental is already engaged with the trucking partners as well, such that you could have this sort of faster ramp in that timeframe?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: I don’t just believe it. We’re actively involved in those conversations, right? We’re the one developing and designing this hardware kit, and we’re the partners with Continental and with our OEM friends as well. The three-way conversations in both cases.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. Maybe talk about the regulatory environment. I know you’ve made the point many times about how, where you’re operating, it’s very favorable for autonomous trucking. Speak a bit more on some of the more recent developments from a regulatory standpoint and how Aurora has been advising and partnering with some of the government officials.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, the environment today, we can live with and work with. We have the ability to put trucks on the road wherever we feel confident in the safety of doing that, across, I think, something like 40 of the 50 United States. That feels great. What we are seeing is continued enthusiasm at the state level. You know, when we launched, Governor Abbott in Texas congratulated us publicly, right? That’s not normal, right? We really appreciate the government of Texas’ support for this technology. We are really seeing a lot of support at the federal level. You know, this administration has really been forward on automated vehicles, whether it’s Secretary Duffy’s comments in his confirmation and since, whether it’s Vice President Vance’s comments around the importance of automated trucking for the United States.

Just yesterday, I think, former Secretary and Governor Perry had an op-ed that came out in support of this technology. We are seeing a lot of support there. Just recently, Representative Fong, a Republican from California, put forward the American Drives Act, which really puts forward legislation that would create a federal framework and preemption, which we think would be really powerful in helping the U.S. stay on the forward foot with this technology relative to overseas folks.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s very helpful. Maybe we could speak a bit on the market and some financial topics.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Sure.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You spoke about having trucks on the road and how that’s been very positive as you’re having conversations with customers or prospective customers. We’ve also seen some weakness in just the trucking market at a broader industry level in terms of trucks driven by people. Talk a bit more around what you’re seeing with the market and how is that affecting your business?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, I think we’re building something strategic for the long term. There’s just going to be a shortage of drivers in the U.S., right? We expect to be, it’s not we, American Trucking Association expects to be short a million drivers over the next decade. With the current administration’s immigration policy, that probably is going to be more steep. You look at the average truck driver in the U.S., it’s 55 years old and it’s increasing. Yes, there’s been an unusually deep kind of down cycle in trucking coming out of COVID. As we look to the point where this technology is going to begin to scale, the benefits far outweigh any challenges to adoption, right? As we look at our customers, their ability to significantly increase their margins, dramatically increase their revenue, improve safety, and really build their business.

If you’re not using our stuff in five years, I don’t see how you’re going to be competitive as a trucking company. We love to work with these partners and we love to help them go win.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: At the 2024 Investor Day, the company spoke about ASPs for its driver-as-a-service model being projected in the $0.65 to $0.85 per mile range. Since then, there’s been tariffs. There’s been broader inflation in the global economies and in the U.S. As you reflect on some of the things you’re observing in the business and some of the momentum you have with your technology, what does that say about this pricing projection from your last Investor Day?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: When we look at the cost of labor for driving trucks, it’s basically at $1 per mile at this point. I don’t see that coming down. It’s just a question of how rapidly it is going to go up. We feel very confident in that pricing window and expect there’s opportunity for that to go up. We also want to make sure that we are good partners in helping our customers, you know, see the benefits of this technology and build their businesses.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Besides just sort of the cost of labor, you’ve also talked about some opportunities around insurance and fuel, right? The broader savings you could bring to your customers go beyond that dollar.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Oh, it’s gigantic, right? I apologize for, thank you for underselling it. That, you know, when you look at the fuel economy benefits, we expect between 14% and 34% improvement in fuel efficiency. Given the cost of fuel for these businesses, that’s big. Given the environmental sustainability benefits, that’s also big. When we think about insurance over time, this will be a better driver than people are, a safer driver than people. We expect that to drive insurance costs down. For our customers today, it’s already a win, right? Today, they are responsible for their people driving the truck. If they do something wrong, they’re the one who’s going to write the check. We immediately kind of alleviate that risk from them. That’s a meaningful benefit in and of itself.

The fact that we have the data that comes along with whatever events may occur on the road means that we have the ability to quickly adjudicate that and ultimately get to what will hopefully be the right and reasonable answer out of whatever occurs.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: An autonomous truck has more hardware that goes on to it compared to a traditional truck. I must better understand the evolution of the BOM. I mean, you spoke about Fibronet and Continental and them contributing to improved cost structure. Is there a cost point where the BOM needs to hit for AV trucking to really take off?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: I think we are on the cusp of that. Our expectation is that the generation of hardware that will come from Fibronet will actually enable positive unit economics for us. Today, it’s really about how do we set price relative to our costs? There are other things we have to do. We have to continue on the path that we’re on with reducing the rate of remote assistance and support and get that into the neighborhood we’re anticipating. We need to look at the rate of recovery on the road and continue to drive that down, then increase utilization. The more value we can provide the customers, the more it’s going to be worth to them and the more we can charge for it.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: As you spoke a little bit around over time getting to 20:1 ratio on remote assistance and tracking to your prior expectations, as you think about that variable, is that going to be tied to some of these future technology releases, like second or third gen, or is it more just as you see the trucks driving on the road?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: It’s really going to be around the performance of the software system, which is kind of independently evolving or parallel evolving to the hardware generations. At this point, you know, we’ve released several versions of the Aurora Driver since launch. One major release, which was the update to be able to operate at night. We’ll continue to see those incremental improvements in both the Aurora Driver, but also in the Aurora Services layer that sits above the truck, right? This is effectively how our customers ultimately will interact with that truck.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: You mentioned with the second-generation hardware kit that allowing for positive unit economics.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Just to, I mean, that’s something that would allow you to get to positive gross margin. To be clear, that’s what you were referring to?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Is there a certain miles per week that we need to have in mind as we think about that utilization where you can start to cross over?

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: No, I don’t think I’m going to share anything more precise than we want to get to that 200,000 to 250,000 miles a year, and it’s quite attainable.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: So.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: It’s really interesting to me. You start looking at some of these routes, right? Even you just talked about the Phoenix, right? That’s already longer than a human can do. You can actually get to very high numbers of miles traveled in a year as you start adding more of these routes and nighttime driving and different weather.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: You do the round trip from, you know, one-way leg each day from Fort Worth to Phoenix. That’s 1,000 miles. You do that every day. That’s 365,000 miles a year. Now, do we do it every day? Probably not quite. You can see that these numbers are very approachable. Even a short trip like Dallas to Houston, if you do three round trips a day, you’re already well over that threshold.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, we did a big AV report a few months ago, and we dug into insurance and BOM costs across the broader autonomous space. One of the interesting things as we were doing the modeling was how important that variable was, just of miles traveled.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: For trucking, right? You can see how it quickly starts to.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Massively adds up.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Just lastly, just free cash flow and capital allocation. Maybe just talk about how you think about managing the balance sheets. You’ve done a few raises so far. You spoke a bit about your raise call. Just remind investors what your thoughts are before you reach positive free cash flow.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: Yeah, so we left Q2 with a very strong balance sheet, $1.3 billion. We feel better about the capital position basically than we’ve ever done, and we’re well positioned. We’ve been clear about the fact that we’re going to need to raise incremental capital at some point. We’re going to continue to do that in a thoughtful way where it meets the capital needs for the business and doesn’t put the long-term goal at risk, but doesn’t unduly dilute our existing investor base. We’ll continue to be careful about it.

Mark Delaney, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. We’re approaching the end of the session. Chris, really appreciate you joining and thank you for coming.

Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO, Aurora: No, glad to be here. Thank you.

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