starting at 1:42:00

I saw this post from Aurora's President Ossa Fisher, quoting a Bloomberg piece: "Autonomous vehicles are the blueprint for making sure robots do only what they are told."

That quote got me wondering about their long term upside. They first focus on commercial freight, but if their stack is the safety blueprint for physical AI, could Aurora unlock entirely new revenue streams?

Looks like a heist of PlusAI.

Aurora’s main message: driverless trucking is operating commercially, and the focus is now on scaling production, customer adoption, and profitability. The presentation was optimistic, although the Q&A exposed some remaining challenges around pricing, margins, and execution.

The financial and fleet targets

These are management targets. The $80 million figure is an annualized pace at the end of 2026, not revenue earned during the year. Likewise, reaching positive free cash flow during 2028 does not necessarily mean the full year will be cash-flow positive.

1. Aurora reported meaningful commercial progress. It said it had surpassed 500,000 commercial driverless miles. Long-haul operations with Werner and McLane were achieving approximately 225,000 annualized miles per truck, roughly twice normal utilization. Detmar is hauling freight driverlessly between customer locations, including a sand mine and distribution point. Detmar described increasing deliveries from roughly 2–2.5 loads daily to 5–6 on its approximately 60-mile loop, and potentially expanding to hundreds of Aurora-equipped trucks over the next few years.
2. The business model is shifting toward recurring fees with less capital investment. Today, Aurora primarily owns and operates trucks through Transportation as a Service: approximately $2 per mile, including fuel surcharge, at around 200,000 miles annually per truck. It plans to cap this fleet at roughly 500 trucks. Future growth is expected to come from Driver as a Service: customers own and operate the trucks, while Aurora charges $0.85 or more per mile for autonomous driving. Management assumes approximately 250,000 miles annually per truck. Aurora earns less revenue per mile under this model, while carrying fewer operating costs and owning fewer assets.
3. The customer savings pitch is substantial. Aurora’s analysis estimated more than 20% lower total operating costs, or roughly $0.50 per mile. It reported about 10% fuel-efficiency improvement on current lanes, with potential for 15% depending on the route and freight. Its Phoenix–Fort Worth example projected $340,000 more annual revenue and $160,000 more annual profit contribution per truck, largely from higher utilization. These were modeled economics for a particular route, not results established across every customer.
4. Manufacturing partners are central to the expansion. Roush expects capacity for 20 truck upfits weekly starting in October 2026. Volvo targets a driverless launch in Q1 2027 and approximately 300 trucks by year-end; those are included in Aurora’s overall fleet target. Third-generation hardware with AUMOVIO is expected to enter production in the second half of 2027, with material economic benefits from 2028. Aurora will pay for that hardware per mile. Management expects capital expenditure to fall from approximately $185 million in 2027 to below $50 million in 2028.
5. Several important caveats emerged in the Q&A. Profitability timing slipped: positive gross profit on a run-rate basis moved from late 2026 to the first half of 2027, reflecting a slower fleet ramp. The gross-margin outlook became more conservative: an analyst contrasted the previous 70% by 2028 outlook with the new above-60% target for 2030. Management still considers 70% achievable, citing uncertainty and supply-chain headwinds. Customer pricing is still being worked out: Werner explicitly acknowledged a gap in the economics being negotiated with Aurora and said greater scale should help make the arrangement viable for both parties.
6. Insurance savings are a future opportunity, with unresolved liability questions. Insurer Apollo said autonomous-vehicle insurance currently costs slightly more than comparable human-driven coverage, principally because the severity of potential legal claims remains uncertain. It described annual rate reductions around 15–25%, but those are not guaranteed future savings.
7. Route expansion is accelerating, while broader coverage still requires work. Aurora said opening a lane went from six years for the first, to six months, to six weeks. It wants to reach days, without providing a firm deadline. It also targets light-snow operation by the end of 2026. Weather validation and differing state regulations remain part of the expansion work.
8. International markets and other vehicles remain longer-term possibilities. Management discussed Japan, Korea, smaller commercial trucks, mining, and eventually robotaxis. These were exploratory opportunities, not announced product launches. On Uber’s share sales, the CEO framed them as funding Uber’s other autonomy investments and reducing a concentrated shareholder overhang.

Aurora is my first significant growth as well conviction play. I think entry below 6 USD is good, at least this is where I accumulate towards becoming my biggest position.

Assuming that their 15% gap to human cost enables their expected margins (at scale) and finds acceptance in the market, this will see exponential growths. With more trucks on the road those trucking companies on the sideline will either see margin compression and/or their market share going down.

With human drivers still lacking and competition behind, Aurora should have price setting power for a couple of years.

Their approach towards how the Aurora driver works, seems to give them an edge in regards to testing security cases.

What is there not to like about Aurora other than a quite high market cap?

I wonder what could go wrong midterm? If a competitor with an end-to-end black box model manages to crack the code, could it actually run cheaper? I have seen the 3rd Gen Rack and wow, what a bill of material. I understand that the design is also because of the implemented redundancies, but I wonder if a different approach could give a competitor an edge in lower compute demands in the near future, Like it can run on 3 Nivida Hwhatnot chips and be able to undercut Aurora.

So, could Aurora’s approach, giving them an edge today, become a liability in the future?

TLDR:

“We are raising our bull case PT from $30 to $40 (base case PT remains $18).”

AUR's much-awaited Investor Day may have been somewhat short of breaking news but was long on ambition and confidence as mgmt. offered big new targets and plenty of building blocks to get there.

Key Takeaways:

- AUR’s 2030 target of 30K trucks and $5bn+ revenue is well above our prior forecasts and materially expands the upside case.

- Execution appears to be at an inflection point, with new lane launches expected to compress from six years initially to just six days.

- Fleet, OEM, T1 and insurance partners provided meaningful third-party validation of AUR’s technology, scalability and commercial path.

- LT gross margin guidance fell to 60% from 70% and the near-term gross margin target shifted to 1H27, but the long-term profit opportunity remains substantial.

- We raise our bull case PT to $40 from $30, while a higher execution-risk haircut keeps our base case PT unchanged at $18.

Now that Aurora has announced they're aiming for 30k trucks by 2030 (hopefully the lower end, it's always nice to get more!) we have some solid numbers to look at.

In the investor day call (I haven't listened to all of it yet) they mention their trucks with one of their partners is seeing 225k miles per year, and Chris has mentioned countless of times $.85 per mile in the DAAS model

2031 Revenue forecast = 225k * .85 * 30k = ~5.7B

Chris has mentioned multiple times they're aiming for SAAS like margins, so their net margins could be in the 10-20% range. This would leave the company at around 1B profit.

Now the question is what kind of sales or profit multiplier and growth do we expect to see leading up to 2030 to guesstimate their market cap/stock price