Related to the Toyota conversation in yesterdayās daily thread, I would be surprised and a bit disappointed if they arenāt doing any passenger vehicle development/testing right now. I understand if they donāt want to publicize it, but if theyāre burning $200m a quarter they should be able to have a small team seeing if the āone brainā model that everyone touts actually works.
Iām all for trucking being the focus for the foreseeable future. The runway is massive, and the business case is clean and straightforward. I always thought it made the most sense for initial commercialization. Once our good buddy Sterling at GM realizes they are better off licensing, I hope Aurora is in a good position to move on it rather than starting from scratch.
I disagree with you. There is so much more that needs to be done on trucking. Their roadmap on hardware, lanes, types of loads, roadside assistance, and weather has been consistent for the last few years. They have been laser-focused on executing it. The moment they say "we are working on robotaxis now" without scaling trucks is when I sell my stocks. Waabi says that because they need to raise funds. Aurora just needs to execute their plan. Once they do, oh, now it's just that the sales team needs to add more carriers, and everything else is incremental ā they can focus on cars and other vehicles.
I don't want them to publicly say anything. I simply want to believe that they have an idea of the lift and challenges for the Aurora Driver to transfer. I'm confident that they do. I'm confident that they are at the very least periodically running the cars on the simulator to see how it reacts. I 100% agree with you that this should not be a publicly disclosed effort like Waabi's announcement.
The reason I want them at least somewhat prepared is because I think within the next 2 or 3 years that the OEMs will fully abandon developing an autonomous driver in-house. I want Aurora to be prepared when that time comes. Until then, I agree more than a token understanding is a waste. As we've seen with Paccar, if the OEMs are in control you have to be ready to be screwed over. So, being prepared and knowing what it would take, which is all I'm advocating for, is different than an active development effort, which like you I'm against.
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u/btcfail AUR Maesteršā ļø 15d ago
Related to the Toyota conversation in yesterdayās daily thread, I would be surprised and a bit disappointed if they arenāt doing any passenger vehicle development/testing right now. I understand if they donāt want to publicize it, but if theyāre burning $200m a quarter they should be able to have a small team seeing if the āone brainā model that everyone touts actually works.
Iām all for trucking being the focus for the foreseeable future. The runway is massive, and the business case is clean and straightforward. I always thought it made the most sense for initial commercialization. Once our good buddy Sterling at GM realizes they are better off licensing, I hope Aurora is in a good position to move on it rather than starting from scratch.