Tom Narayan (00:11):
I'm Tom, nor Ryan BC's European autos analyst. And today we have an exciting panel of executives to talk. One of my favorite topics self-driving vehicles. So thank you. First of all of you three for, for being a part of this it, it is the 12th in our navigating the energy transition series. Just a couple of numbers here, just to throw out, to, to give folks a sense of, of why this is so important. I'm sure our panelists know these numbers by heart, but over a million deaths every year globally over a hundred million serious traffic accidents over 90% of which caused by human error. The average speed of a commuter in Europe including tri traffic and idling six miles an hour. So it's not those long windy roads in the Alps you see in the commercials, a third of city drive driving is looking for parking 50 to 60% of some downtown city centers is just space for cars and parking. Some say that robo taxis could reduce the number of cars on the road by a factor of, of 20 of course, a lot of that is theoretical, but self-driving could save lives, prevent accidents, smooth traffic flow, free up space. In, in cities,
Nakul Duggal (01:39):
We are thinking about you know these new architectures not launching in as early as the 20 24, 20 25 timeframe. And certainly as the next wave of our roadmap starts to come out in the 25, 26 timeframe, you will see makers having moved to this architecture. So it really is the acceleration of the thought process are the platform that is being built, has to be built with the idea of being monetized over its life, which is something that is very new, but also very refreshing in terms of how the automotive industry is embracing the concept. Today, we consume so much of content. We, we are, we have so many subscriptions that we pay for in our home that we were not paying for five or 10 years ago. It's because the way that technology has entered the home has been seamless, has been faster, has been offered by the same types of ecosystems that we are used to working with on our mobile phones or in our offices. I think the car is going in the same direction. It is a more complex platform because it requires many different ecosystems to come together to actually make that happen.
Richard Tame (02:52):
Our plan is to commercialize the Aurora driver in what we're gonna call it drivers a service model. So we're gonna expect our customers will subscribe to the Aurora driver and they'll pay us a per mile fee. Aurora doesn't expect to own the vehicles. We want be an asset light company, and the vehicles will be owned by people with, you know, lower cost of capital people who are very used to and have experience management fleets. We expect at scale, they expect this to be a super attractive business with very high SA like margin. And you know, the road driver were certainly built from the ground up to work across all vehicle types.
Tom Fennimore (03:24):
Thanks for for having me on here and being able to share more about Luminar one of the one of the things that Austen our CEO did share at CS in addition to the proactive safety demo, which I'll talk about here in a second is his longer term hundred year vision for the company. And the two mingles that he has is to help save over the next a hundred year, a hundred million lives in order to deploy that highway autonomy, you need a long range, LIDAR that works. You need to be able to see out 250 meters, because what that allows you to do is bring a passenger vehicle to a safe stop. If it detects an object in the way. So if you have the right long range sensor, you can enable highway autonomy with hands off eyes off the road. And as I said, it's, it's an easier operational domain to stop four than some of the level five taxis,
Richard Tame (04:21):
The drive hardware, you know, there's a computer there's sensors, there's a LIDAR. This is still early in its life, but it's not being produced at a large scale. So on a unit cost basis, it's expensive today.