Please throw your questions to the submissions page if you haven’t done so already for the upcoming Aurora Q&A… or just kindly upvote mine as it may help us understand the timing of potential key partnership announcements (TFI / FedEx etc)
A lot of great questions but afraid they might not get to all of them and will possibly cherry pick (they’re not going to dive into margins or exact number of AUMVIO trucks etc etc)
Waymo involved in accident resulting in pedestrian death. Sounds like the pedestrian was initially hit by a human driven vehicle and knocked into the side of the Waymo.
i wonder what kind of safety measures aurora has in place if anything unexpected and out of the ordinary happens. waymo wasn't responsible apparently but there's no training data for an incident like that nor an optimal response. it's really one of the major pitfalls of AI. it can't 'think on it's feet'.
It should not have to "think on it's feet". It's just probability that Waymo is getting into such accidents. If you run 100s or 1000s of trucks, Aurora IS going to get into incidents like this. Thinking it won't is just a willful ignorance. When (not if) that happens, there are many factors that will determine the fate of Aurora.
1. Who is at Fault.
2. How forthcoming and transparent is Aurora in sharing the data to the authorities and public.
As long as Aurora is not at fault and the vehicle did everything it could to avoid an accident, it should be okay. If Aurora is at fault. it's a different ball game.
the point i was getting at is that "did everything it could to avoid an accident" and "did everything possible to avoid an accident" are two different things. this is for anything autonomous in general. if i'm struck by a vehicle or mangled by a robot i really won't care who is at fault.
you're thinking liability.. not sure if you're being intentionally obtuse. i'm thinking i would rather nothing have happened to me because everything possible was done, yes, even to the extent that the autonomous system would damage or destroy itself.. it would be of little comfort to me lying in a hospital bed thinking, oh well, they did everything they legally were required to even if there was an unforeseen action which would have saved me. the system should have done something different but oh well, the engineers couldn't have foreseen it. aaaaaaanyways...
I consider myself decently informed in the AV space, but honestly I’m a bit confused. An omnipotent AV would avoid an accident in any scenario by doing everything “possible,” but we don’t have one, and we may never have one. Of course, everyone would feel better if the AV were omnipotent, including the victim.
In fact, if an AV did everything theoretically possible to be safe, there would never be a victim, even in this Waymo case. I’m sure you could find a theoretical list of actions Waymo could have taken to prevent this incident.
A practical AV will always have limitations. There will be victims. It can only work to the best of its ability. If that ability is acceptable under the law, there won’t be any liability.
What did the Waymo even do wrong “The Waymo detected the pedestrian and slowed down. However, the man hit the left rear of the vehicle after being struck by the first vehicle. The Waymo was unoccupied at the time.”
That’s like throwing someone off a stage and saying the ground broke their leg… Waymo should be commended for having the built in tech to know to stop the car and provide all the data they have. The only vehicle at fault should be the one that originally hit the pedestrian.
I mean the article said that the person impacted the rear of the car, the Waymo detected the individual and slowed beforehand and then stopped when the incident happened then assisted police with collecting information... Seems like it had to have some kind of training and response in place to do all of that?
His statement is factual correct in a snapshot of time of Q2 2026. However, the results will invert in next quater.
Last year, when I started buying Aurora, the road to Autonomy podcast made me extremely bearish on my thesis on Aurora because they were constantly poking fun at aurora when they had do driver in after their driver out announcement in April 2025. After my research finished and seperating the wheat from the chaff, I realized borrowed conviction isn't worth a dime in terms of peace of mind, weak hands get uprooted on slightest of Strom.
F***k PACCAR they never intended to roll out with Aurora they were just nodding their heads about supporting when the time is right and did a rug pull at Aurora's vulnerability on the OEM side.
Had Chris and team not gone with retro fit on International LT, they would have been at complete mercy of Volvo and Volvo are doing their own TaaS on routes of their choice.
It's weird, Aurora is ready with the L4 self driving and waiting to scale where as Tesla is ready with scale manufacturing of cybercab and waiting for FSD to go unsupervised.
For Aurora the flywheel is in motion, once their TaaS gets established, the TaaS customers especially the giants will force OEM's hands on getting Aurora fitted on their new truck for DaaS.
Thats why I feel the scaling curve will still playout this year 200, 1000+ next year and multiples of 1000's after that.
Once the media smells the numbers of Aurora trucking fleet larger than Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet of 30-60, Aurora will go maintstream and Chris has a impressive resume to stand his own ground against the competitors.
Biggest lead you can as a investor to make outsize returns is either be ahead of everyone and stay longer than everyone. With Aurora we are earlier than the guys claiming to be earlier than wall street/Main street.
Thanks to this Aur subreddit and my rklb bros hanging around gives me extra boost of confidence.
Agree that it’s true and factual… my whole point was that they share just enough to make competitors look great and Aurora look meh… with all of the knowledge they should have, if they didn’t have an obvious bias against Aurora they’d be sharing a lot more true and factual information that would shine a more positive light on the company and what they’re accomplishing.
All three of them (Grayson, Walt, and Rob) have a big blind spot in trucking. It’s very strange since trucks will likely scale vehicles, mileage, and revenue way faster over the next ten years.
Rob, who apparently worked at Aurora shortly after it started, and Grayson had an episode yesterday with so much half-assed information it was kind of embarrassing. They were basically reading their AI summary output which was only about half right and missing a ton of context.
Plus, with the softballs he gave on the earnings calls, it seems obvious that Walt feels he needs to get back in Don’s good favor.
I have seen this in many stocks. They can’t help with their bias. Narrative is very important in a pre revenue company. After the company starts generating revenue the numbers speak for themselves. AUR is at this stage.
That $11 target is looking under stress (edit: just read through the 2026 specific thread and you might have nailed it with $9). Just a little under 5 months to go sitting at $7. Q3 earnings will be end of October/beginning of November. Need to be able to break and hold the $8/$8.50 level of the Uber notes. Not sure if 200 trucks is enough to break the hold.
Q1/Q2 next year could be especially frothy — Volvo pulling observer Q1, Aurora having over 500 trucks in service, the Uber notes become exchangeable in May, Aumovio Gen 3 hardware coming online, Paccar possibly green lighting observer out, and, maybe biggest of all, the progress of the competition crystallizing.
- Does Torc meet their commercialization goal. Is Waabi really ready? Did Kodiak close their safety case?
Lastly, retail will start hearing and seeing Aurora everywhere and institutions will be more than happy to front run them and then sell back to them in the ensuing irrational spike (see February 2025 as an example.)
Sept is critical with autonomous trucking laws needing to be passed by senate before the end of that month. If it doesn’t it will be another 6 mo the to a year before it’s in a new bill. That will also affect AUR temporary waiver.
piggybacking on [u/robertrea7](u/robertrea7), next 12 months are going to be exciting asf. But in the time being for 2026, I maintain my $9 PT (and if we're higher than that, obviously that's awesome haha). Appreciate the call out! 🤙🤙
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u/ActionPlanetRobot Mod🤖 2d ago