In this, the twelve episode of the Energy Transition series, Tom Narayan, Autos Analyst at RBC Capital markets hosts a discussion with included Nakul Duggal, Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Automotive for Qualcomm Technologies; Richard Tame, VP of Finance at Aurora; and Tom Fennimore, CFO at Luminar Technologies. On the future of vehicle automation and the hugely transformational opportunities for user experience and safety.

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- I'm Tom Narayan, RBC'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, all of you three,

for being a part of this.

It is the 12th in our

"Navigating the Energy Transition" series.

Just a couple of numbers here, just to throw out,

to give folks a sense of why this is so important.

I'm sure our panelists know 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 traffic and idling, six miles an hour.

So it's not those long windy roads

in the Alps that you see in the commercials.

A third of city driving is looking for parking.

50 to 60% of some downtown city centers

is just space for cars and parking.

Some may say that robo taxis could reduce

the number of cars on the road by a factor 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 cities.

- We are thinking about these new architectures launching

in as early as the 2024, 2025 timeframe.

And certainly, as the next wave

of our roadmap starts to come out

in the 25, 26 timeframe,

you will see auto makers having moved to this architecture.

So it really is the acceleration of the thought process

where 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 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.

- Our plan is to commercialize the Aurora Driver

in what we're gonna call a Driver-to-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 wanna be an asset-light company,

and the vehicles will be owned by people

with lower cost of capital,

people who are very used to

and have experienced management fleets, we expect.

At scale, we expect this to be a super attractive business

with very high SAS-like margins.

And the Aurora Driver were certainly built

from the ground up to work across all vehicle types.

- Thanks for having me on here

and being able to share more about Luminar.

One of the things that Austin, our CEO,

did share at CES 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 hundred year,

a hundred million lives.

And 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 an easier operational domain

to solve for than some of the level five taxis

- The Aurora Driver hardware.

There's a computer, there's sensors, there's a lidar.

This is still early in its life.

It's not being produced at a large scale.

So on a unit cost basis, it's expensive today.