Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:09:43 · Boris Sofman
[00:09:43] S0: Trucking is an incredible space. Like it's such a deep passion of not just mine, but actually a lot of the team at Bedrock is from the trucking program, just kinda really loved working together on this. As an industry, it's astronomically large, so the entire ride hailing industry in The US, I believe is something like 50,000,000,000 in revenue. Trucking is a trillion. So it's like really, really significant. And it's the lifeblood of the entire economy. So you have, everything grinds to a halt, you burden the transport of goods, It's very dangerous. There's like, point an accident happens, it's catastrophic. There's over, I think it's over 5,000 people a year die from trucking accidents in The United States. Very difficult kind of lifestyle for long haul truckers. And what you end up having is this like really deep inefficiency in the entire network where you have by design like eleven hour driving limits, federally regulated to where you cannot exceed that because of fatigue. And so what you end up having is this fragmentation where you do a long haul route across the country, 55, 60% of your time is spent on overnights, kind of like resting, or you have to do dual drivers, which is incredibly expensive. You end up having huge amounts of, I think it's something like over 25 to 30% of trucks are almost empty or close to empty because you have, people having to like, they missed their pickup window and now they're not gonna be able to meet their shift. Right, they have to go back home. You have people in Chicago when you actually need the trucks in LA during the holidays. And so you have all of this inefficiency and there's studies that have been done where only about a third of that inefficiency is due to asymmetric demand. Like there's more trucks coming into The US from Mexico than going the other way. The rest of it is human factors. And so you have this like giant latent kind of capability to be able to like optimize across the whole network and move trucks around anywhere we need to demand, be able to drive 20 fourseven. When you do that, the pricing will go down because the price of a load is amortizing all these empty loads and all this inefficiency.
00:11:51 · Boris Sofman
And the elasticity is actually quite interesting that if you fluctuate the pricing just a bit, you start competing with the price of rail, you start to be able to meet demand where previously there isn't, you start to be able to be more efficient in retail, more efficient in kind of goods. You start to reshape the entire logistic network right now, hubs are about ten hours apart because of these driving limits oftentimes. So you start to go from splicing into today's economy of routes and trucks into one where you can fundamentally re optimize how you get much more productivity out of this network. And a lot of times when you do these sorts of things, the elasticity is actually surprising where you unlock a huge amount of capability because the prices get a little bit cheaper and suddenly the demand grows and you start to be able to leverage these capabilities much more. It's actually quite exciting where you see this property in a lot of areas of autonomy and what we're doing in construction and trucking and cars and transportation and manufacturing. When you change the constraints, the physics of the whole industry completely reoptimizes around them.
00:12:59 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:12:59] S1: I think that's part of what excites me so much, not just the improved safety, but just the incredible efficiencies that will be unlocked when our supply chain logistics get incredibly improved. Quickly, because I would be bummed not to ask you, give us your predictions five to ten years out. What does autonomous trucking look like? What percent of truck drivers are autonomous? Like what's your prediction of how quickly that will be adopted?
00:13:25 · Boris Sofman
[00:13:25] S0: Yeah, it's a good question. So just like we saw with Waymo where the scale can start to be exponential, but every 10x in volume takes time. Like it takes time to ramp up the manufacturing, to qualify the safety systems, to really methodically kind of scale these technologies because if you go too fast, you can kill people. Like it's just, you have to be incredibly thoughtful. Today, it's an interesting ecosystem where Waymo has paused this trucking program, but it completed the vehicle platform with Daimler, who's an incredible, like absolutely incredible, you know, like technology guy. I believe they're the strongest kind of like, of OEM on a technology front. I would expect Waymo to come back in the trucking in the next handful of years, particularly now that the ride hailing side is scaling. They're in the middle of a very, very aggressive ramp, but in the next handful of years, there's no future of Waymo that doesn't include trucking just given how gigantic of an opportunity this is. And the message... The the the thesis of Waymo has always been it's the driver. It's not the Rubber Taxi or the Thomas car. Right? So trucking would be back. And so I would imagine that as you get towards the end of the decade, Waymo's ramping up its trucking program again. I do believe that there's far more that's unique and challenging about just scaling autonomy and dealing with what does it take to ship hundreds of millions or billions of miles than there is that's unique about a car versus a truck. And so I do think that Waymo, I would still put them as a front runner even if they're delayed by a few years. Aurora is also a really, really capable team that's now starting to like do the... In their earliest ramp. And so I would I would look at them as one that would start to maybe retrace some of the early kind of ramp that Waymo was doing a few years back at like, I think they're set to launch this year at some tens to like a 100 units. And so I would imagine that by the early 2030s, you start to get into really meaningful miles. Now that could be hundreds of millions, like where Waymo is today to billions, but that's still pretty early in the ramp. I would imagine that by 2035, you start to really see a sizable percentage of this become driverless because it's such a powerful enabler.
00:15:32 · Boris Sofman, Alexa von Tobel
And truck drivers, like the local routes are some of the most challenging, but also more preferable ones where they don't have to be on the road all the time and away from the families. So you'll start to see re optimization of where the Waymo goes. [00:15:46] S1: Okay. My last question is, obviously, I asked about trucking. How do you think about autonomous vehicles in cities? When do you expect that that... When can I stop worrying that my kid needs to drive a car? [00:16:00] S0: Oh, it's funny. I'm in the same same same boat. I got three three kids from... Between five and 11, so I'm anxiously waiting to. So... Okay. [00:16:08] S1: So we're waiting do on the exact same page. I've got seven seven, eight, and 11, and my question is, like, can I make sure that they don't ever have to drive
00:16:15 · Boris Sofman
[00:16:15] S0: a car? Amazing. Alright. Yes. We got a lot in common here. Okay. So where's Waymo today? Over 200,000,000 driverless miles, 10 times safer than a human. Like, it's superhuman. It's absolutely incredible. It's in 11 cities and various degrees of maturity. Driverless, fully driverless. San Francisco is the most mature where over 40% of ride hailing in the city is Waymo's. It's by far preferred to Uber and Lyft. And it's constrained mainly by the availability of cars where Waymo's like catching up on the like volume of cars. That's a really good signal of where things are going. There's 15 more cities announced including London, New York, Tokyo. So really aggressive ramp. I think they're it's something like 15 cities that are on the like, have been announced publicly for 2026. So you're gonna see this go exponentially where you're gonna get into billions of miles. And so if you fast forward at that rate by three, four years, I believe that every single major metropolitan area in The US will have very deep penetration of robotaxis. And if you fast forward into the 2030s, it's very natural that this goes from robotaxi where you can take advantage of being okay with higher price points because of utilization, some constraints on geography into a world where you're fully unconstrained on geography, the price points are lower and you start to infuse this into personal car ownership where you and I can buy a car that is level four capable. I would see that in the early part of the 2030s being a real thing. And so I literally