Q4 2021 Aurora Innovation Inc Earnings Call
[music].
Greetings and welcome to the Aurora fourth quarter and full year 2021 business review call.
At this time all participants are in a listen only mode.
A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation.
If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference. Please press star zero on your telephone keypad.
Please note this conference is being recorded.
I will now turn the conference over to your host Stacy Feit, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you you may begin.
Thank you good afternoon, everyone and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2021 business review call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time.
If anyone should require operator assistance. Please press Star then zero on your Touchtone phone.
As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.
Announced our results earlier this afternoon, our shareholder letter and a presentation to accompany this call are available on our Investor Relations website at IR Dot Aurora Dot Tech and were furnished with our form 8-K filed today with the SEC.
On the call today are Chris Armstrong, co founder and CEO and Richard Kim CFO .
Chris will provide an update on the progress we have made across the key pillars of our business and Richard will recap our 2021 financial results. We will then open the call to Q&A.
A recording of this conference call will be available on our Investor Relations website at IR Dot Aurora Dot Tech shortly after the call has ended.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call we will be making forward looking statements. This includes statements relating to the expected performance of our business future financial results and guidance strategy long term growth and overall future prospects.
These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call.
In particular those described in our risk factors included in our form S. One filed by US with the SEC on November 12, 2021, and our Form 10-K for the full year 2021 that will be filed by March 31, 2022, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business the markets and economy.
You should not rely on our forward looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof and Aurora disclaims any obligation to update any forward looking statements, except as required by law.
Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our shareholder letter which was <unk>.
<unk> with our form 8-K filed today with the SEC and May also be found on our Investor Relations website with that I will now turn the call over to Chris.
Thank you Stacie and welcome everyone to our first business review call today, we're pleased to share our fourth quarter and full year results for the first time as a publicly traded company.
2021 was an incredible and transformative year for Aurora.
We acquired Uber self driving vehicle business, which brought an incredible team of talent and important technology to Aurora.
We solidify the number of powerful partnerships and pilots we partnered with two of the top three North American truck Oems with Packer and Volvo with the number one carrier in the U S with Fedex with Uber freight a transformative logistics platform with the number one ride hailing platform with Uber and with the number one auto OEM with Toyota.
We continue to advance our cutting edge technology, we're making progress on our sensor suite, which includes our proprietary first light Lidar Aurora driver software and with our on road and virtual testing we.
We introduced Aurora horizon, our trucking product and Aurora connect our ride hailing product both of which are underpinned by the Aurora driver and.
And of course, we took our company public.
Already in 2022, we have continued to make powerful progress through our development and in our partnerships and pilots as we work towards the launch of our autonomous trucking business in late 2023, and our ride hailing business in late 2024.
Before we talk more about our progress I'd like to take a moment to share why we founded Aurora.
Together drew Sterling and I founded were five years ago, because we saw an incredible opportunity to deliver the benefits of self driving technology safely quickly it broadly.
We believe in the meaningful impact self driving vehicles will deliver to our society and we saw a path to bringing self driving technology to market focus first on safety than speed than breadth of impact.
To deliver on our mission, we Architected our company, our technology, our path to market and our partnerships to uniquely facilitate this emphasis on safety speed and breadth.
We began by developing on light vehicles be it allowed us to move more quickly while we built out our foundational capabilities.
We understood that to operate safely we needed a multimodal sensor suite that could see it long range, it's enable more rapid reaction and the sensors that were available in the market.
We designed the Aurora driver with a common core technology that is vehicle agnostic. This allowed us to focus on a single architecture, while also enabling our rose technology to integrate with multiple vehicle types from a class eight truck to a passenger sedan.
We expect this approach will unlock a powerful market opportunity and allow us to move quickly in both spaces.
Along with our approach technical development. We also focused early on to establish deep collaborative partnerships, which we believe will accelerate our path to commercialization.
When we think about what we need to accomplish and how we're executing against our plan we measure our progress to our technical development the incremental validation of our safety case, our lessons learned through our pilots in progress with our partners.
I'd like to start with an update on our pilots why they are important and how theyre going pile.
Pilots are an integral step toward building our commercial business. They are one of the ways. We gained valuable insight as we continue to refine the Aurora driver.
Horizon and rural connect as we prepare for commercial launch.
Through our pilots, we gained a deep understanding of our customers' needs including operational requirements.
We build trust with our partners as we regularly autonomously move goods under the supervision of vehicle operators, while maintaining on time performance and striving for operational excellence.
We measure progress by what we were learning and how we're improving.
We look at product refinement network integration and the operational learnings we achieve.
We use this experience is to build a safe reliable and robust product.
We are running a multi phased commercial pilot with Fedex and pack or that launched in the third quarter of last year.
With Fedex uses of raw power Peterbilt trucks to autonomous haul Fedex loads between Dallas, and Houston, which is a 500 mile round trip.
This is an industry first collaboration between an autonomous technology developer a logistics provider.
Manufacturer.
During the fourth quarter, we launched our second multi phased commercial pilot with Uber freight where autonomously hauling loads for Uber freight customers and we are also working with them to explore integrating access to their digital freight network with or horizon or autonomous trucking product.
We see this as an exciting opportunity to provide carriers with an additional set of tools to maximize the utilization of the reward powered trucks, right and opportunities to haul goods and streamline supply chain operations.
During the fourth quarter, we began pulling loads for our partners five days a week in January we started nighttime hauls demonstrating the Aurora drivers capability of operating day and night and further increasing our opportunity to learn.
Texas has been importing testing ground for us it is the largest truck market in the country with more goods hauled by trucks than in any other state and the freight moved on Texas Highway is expected to nearly double in the next 25 years.
Today, we are announcing the trucks powered by the Aurora driver are now regularly driving between Fort worth at El Paso, and preparation for an anticipated new upcoming pilot launch.
This line represents the middle leg of one of the busiest commercial <unk> in the U S trucking industry Atlanta, Los Angeles.
The Fort worth to El Paso Lane is over 600 miles and takes approximately nine hours to complete its long distance in Manhattan, you contribute to this leans reputation for being undesirable for truck drivers.
By deploying your driver on such demanding calls we're building toward a future in which autonomous trucks can handle long routes, while human drivers can handle more convenient hauls that are conducive to more desirable lifestyles.
In addition to our pilots earlier this week, we announced the collaboration with U S Express through our collaborations we intended to leverage the intelligence of variance use expresses digitally enabled fleet to identify where autonomous technology can have to create its impact in terms of both addressing unmet demand and improving operational efficiency and productivity.
Together, we are also committed to exploring how autonomous technology and create a positive impact on the labor market by investing in programs to provide opportunities for new jobs.
To recap we are currently engaged with the largest LTE a free carry in the United States, a significant freight broker and now a large technology forward truckload carrier gaining distinct and important knowledge from each.
Yes.
As we continue to engage with these partners and other carriers, we have begun the first phase of the Aurora Horizon subscription reservation process. We've received initial nonbinding indications of interest that exceed our anticipated launch fleet capacity through 2025.
Underscoring the strong underlying demand for autonomous trucking solution we.
We believe our collaborative and pragmatic process will provide important insights into customer demand inform our trucking lane expansion plan and ultimately support the optimization of our final subscription allocations.
As we continue to learn increase our operational capabilities expand into new operational design domains and formulate our trucking launch plan. We're also making exciting progress developing raw power vehicles with our vehicle partners.
In the North American freight space, we've partnered with <unk> and Volvo trucks, two of the top three trucking Oems, who together make up nearly half of the market.
They are both premium brands and they are just incredible partners to work with.
These are again amazing companies and we've made tremendous strides with both.
Through our work with them, we have continued to invest in an autonomous fleet, which now comprises 80 trucks more than double the size of our operational fleet, we had in the fourth quarter.
Expanding our fleet allows us to test and develop our technical and operational capabilities at large scale.
While we continue to form the vast majority of our testing using virtual development tools.
We're also thrilled to work with Toyota on their vision for mobility for all bringing self driving vehicles to market.
Through our long term collaboration we are laying the groundwork for the mass production launch and support of autonomous passenger vehicles and ride hailing networks, including <unk>.
We're able to work towards the launch of both our trucking and ride hailing businesses with our partners because of our common core technology and the ROI driver when I say common core I mean that the Aurora drivers hardware software infrastructure and development tools are designed to work across vehicle types. There's commonality ensures that lessons learned development efforts hardware improvements.
<unk> and cost reductions made to the ROI driver benefit every vehicle it powers.
As we make progress on the trucking front. We're also forging ahead with both our development and commercial milestones on our world connect our planned product to serve the ride hailing space.
At the end of the first quarter, we expect to launch the Aurora driver Beta two point out not only on the next generation of Aurora driver powered trucks, but also in the next generation of our passenger vehicle fleet. The Aurora driver power Toyota Senate Sienna's that will ultimately support the launch of our product for ride hailing.
Achievement of this important milestone will demonstrate one of our key competitive advantages the transferability of our common core technology, notably the Aurora driver Beta 2.0 powered truck in Siena fleets are targeted to launch with the same expense and maturity.
Gross product roadmap is designed to deliver the real driver at a large commercial scale with each quarterly product release Aurora plans to deliver an ROI driver that's incrementally advancing on two axes expense and maturity.
Expense represents the breadth of capabilities and domains in which the Aurora driver can operate for example training the ROI driver to handle different types of construction on highways than suburban settings, and ultimately dense urban environments are increasingly drivers expense.
Maturity represents the degree to which capabilities are ready for commercial deployment and we will evolve from development to validation to completion maturity will be exemplified through longer durations of commercially representative autonomous operation with a safety case that supports it.
A critical milestone we expect to achieve in the third quarter of this year as your ruler drivers ability to safely pull over the shoulder without the help of a vehicle operator.
When we look at the key capabilities necessary to safely operated vehicle at highway speeds. It is critical that the vehicle can safely handle possible system failures.
We believe this milestone will demonstrate the maturity of the ROI driver and our progress towards satisfying the fail safe core claim of our safety case framework.
In the slide deck. We've included a video of our initial development of virtual testing of this capability Youll see that we were able to bring the vehicle safely to the shoulder of the road and stop we're now expanding our development and testing to mature the capability to be able to handle more complex scenarios like avoiding other vehicles stopped on the shoulder.
We are working to ensure the ROI drivers capabilities address varied road environments like highway suburban and urban roads changing lighting conditions like date night, Dawn and dusk, a myriad of weather conditions, including clear skies fog rain and snow and different types of construction and responding to system failures.
A great example that we include in our slide deck is a video of the Aurora driver operating autonomously in a monsoon rain storm in Texas. This is an incredibly challenging seen there's a lot of rain in the camera lens, there's water being thrown up with road and there is heavy rain in the air.
Despite all of this the Aurora drivers able to reliably see other vehicles on the road and drive safely even as people are pulling up to stop.
As you can imagine, making our technology work reliably is incredibly challenging not only as a CEO , but also as a robotics as an engineer it's incredibly exciting to see the strides were making with our technical progress as.
As I mentioned, when we started Aurora, we believe that one of the most critical steps for building technology to transform an industry like transportation was to invest in the foundational elements to both accelerate development and enable scalability.
One example of where we've done this with our proprietary first light lidar with frequency monthly to continuous wave technology known as <unk> CW.
This novel measurement technology allows us to see further that conventional pulse lidar technologies and instantly measure the speed of things moving through the world.
Our first light lighter has unlocked our ability to deploy our products at highway speeds, where even fractions of a second can affect the vehicles ability to react to unexpected obstacles.
When it comes to sensors, there has been some debate in the industry around the right approach at Aurora, We feel strongly there is only one bright approach a multimodal sensor system that enables our vehicles to get the richest set of data to perceive the world around them.
With that our World class hardware team has designed and built a multimodal sensing suite comprised of first light lidar and other <unk> as well as powerful cameras radars that optimizes range field of view data quality and data processing efficiency.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, we're always considering ways to further enhance our hardware stack. We have hypothesized that our F&B CW technology may also deliver advantages in midrange distances. We have recently tested this hypothesis and observed that first slide demonstrates superior probability of detection.
<unk> targets relative to commercially available mid range Lidar.
With FMC W. Technology, we also get the additional benefit of simultaneously returning philosophy measurements at these mid ranges distances that traditional lidar can provide this analysis is ongoing and we will inform the architecture of the lighter component of our future hardware generations.
In terms of testing our hardware and software stack there is a limit to how much meaningful data that can be efficiently gathered from on road driving so we've also invested heavily in the development of proprietary high accuracy and scalable virtual testing technology.
And our virtual testing suite, we've built proprietary technology that allows us to accurately model, how energy and light blue suit. The world. This allows us to build physically accurate sensor stimulations for cameras conventional lidar and of course for our proprietary first slightly items.
We've also built a procedural generation framework that allows us to create a basic scene and then create complex variations on that seed this becomes.
Particularly important when we are testing scenarios that are too rare or dangerous to test in the physical world.
We continue to accelerate our development and validation through simulation and virtual environments testing at scale costs, we couldnt achieve in the physical world. We believe our virtual testing is the quickest and safest way to train test and ready our self driving technology.
Appointment at commercial scale.
In the slide deck, we included a video of a new capability nudging for debris in the roadway that we've been developing and testing and simulation while vehicles can run over small obstacles in the road for obvious reasons, they should avoid larger pieces of debris.
This video shows the ROI driver was capable to detect an object at a far enough distance to gratefully move out of way to avoid it.
We're incredibly proud of the technical progress, we continue to make and look forward to sharing more on this front.
Another important part of bringing this technology to market is educating our various stakeholders on a <unk> approach to development and deployment as well as the far reaching benefits self driving technology can provide.
Earlier this month <unk> had the honor to be the only autonomous vehicle company asked by Congress to present at the House Committee on transportation infrastructure hearing on automated vehicles.
This was an incredible opportunity to show our leadership on safety and a Great example of how we work collaboratively with legislators at the federal state and local levels as well as with the regulators safety advocacy groups and other self driving companies to bring safe and innovative technology solutions to market.
We're committed to being transparent with our work and our progress to help bring the government and public along on the self driving journey.
As we wrap up our first business update as a public company I'd like to reflect for a moment building a great company and technology to transform transportation means not only making tremendous project progress technologically, but also demonstrating the societal and economic benefits self driving technology can provide on that note I want to reference the principles for transportation innovation.
Released recently by the Department of Transportation Secretary, Pete boutique edge.
As he mentioned innovative technology is not an end to itself, but is meant to serve the public and society. We couldnt agree more we're building the ROI driver to safely lives increase access to transportation and support an improved supply chains as a public company. We are proud to have our investors on this journey as we work towards building and delivering a commercial self driving product.
Scale.
I will now pass it over to our CFO , Richard <unk>, who will share more about our financial results.
Thank you Chris.
2021 was a capstone year financially for us.
As Chris mentioned to kick off the year, we acquired Atg, Uber self driving vehicle business, which further bolstered our technology stack and gave us the depth and breadth of talent to better tackle the complex challenge of developing scalable self driving product.
As part of this transaction, we received $400 million to capitalize the combined company.
This transaction also had a onetime impact on our reported stock based compensation that I will review in a moment.
During 2021, we had $83 million in collaboration revenue for development work on the C&I platform associated with our agreement with Toyota.
This work will ultimately support the launch of our product the ride hailing space.
As a reminder, this collaboration revenue was recognized easily input measure of ours expanded as a percentage of total estimated hours to complete the project.
Operating expenses, including stock based compensation totaled $813 million.
Excluding both ongoing and acquisition related stock based compensation of $92 million and $128 million.
Respectively.
Operating expenses totaled $593 million.
Within operating expenses.
R&D expenses, excluding $206 million in stock based compensation totaled $491 million, primarily comprised of personnel costs as we continue to invest in our industry leading autonomy work.
SG&A expenses, excluding $13 million in stock based compensation were $102 million, which included costs associated with building our public company infrastructure.
There are two items I want to flag on stock based compensation, which are reflected in the reconciliation that we provided in the non-GAAP financials in the shareholder letter that we have posted to our Investor relations website and furnished with our form 8-K filed today with the SEC.
First.
On a full year basis $128 million of the $220 million stock based compensation presented as onetime in nature.
Weighted to our acquisition of Atg in January 2021.
Prior to the acquisition employees of Atg received RSV grants and Uber the former parent company of Atg two based on their investment in Aurora is considered a related party following the closing of the transaction.
Well. These are not a were awards given the related party characterization. They are accounted for as a stock based compensation.
X.
Second when looking at the fourth quarter of 2021, specifically in addition to $30 million for related Party Awards. You will also see a $47 million catch up in stock based compensation expense for our rewards that previously satisfied time based vesting requirements, but also had.
Liquidity event performance condition for full vesting.
This performance condition was met with the closing of the business combination that took a republic in November .
Another accounting nuance related to a business combination to be aware of is the treatment of the public and private placement warrants as well as the sponsor or enough shares.
These financial instruments are classified as derivative liabilities measured at fair value.
With changes in fair value reported each period.
We recorded $20 million and noncash expense during the fourth quarter to reflect the associated change in fair value.
Turning to cash flow in 2021, we had $563 million in operating cash spend and $48 million in capital expenditures the.
The latter primarily reflecting investments in our facilities.
And other infrastructure.
We closed our business combination taken a republic in November with one $8 billion in gross proceeds and cash on hand, which we expect to fund over through the commercial launch of our trucking product Aurora horizon and into 2024.
We ended 2021 with a very strong balance sheet, including $1 $6 billion in cash, enabling us to continue to execute our mission of delivering the benefits self driving technology safely quickly and broadly.
Going forward, our intention is to provide a fulsome financial review like this one on an annual basis on our fourth quarter and full year business review calls.
As we encourage the investment community to consider our results on an annual basis.
With the long term approach, we take to executing on our mission and working towards delivering a commercial product at scale.
With that we'll now open the call to Q&A.
Thank you.
At this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question. Please press star one on your telephone keypad.
A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue.
You May press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue for.
For participants using speaker equipment and may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys.
Our first question comes from the line of Steven Fox with Fox Advisors. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, good afternoon, and congratulations on all you've accomplished this year.
Chris I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about digitally enabled fleets you had the announcement this past week and <unk>.
The Uber meeting last week Uber freight highlighted some of the hopes for economy.
How does those opportunities do you think differ and time wise and revenue wise for versus say traditional methods of trucking and then I had a follow up.
Thank you Steve I appreciate the question. So as we think about this what we're trying to do over the next.
Over this pilot period and exploration period with our partners.
Is understand the unique needs of each of the different <unk>.
Current segments of the freight space.
And so we're really excited to have the partnerships with.
With U S Express with Uber freight with Fedex and we look forward to learning from them as we move forward. We're excited about the technologies.
U S Express is bringing to bear through variance and we look forward to offering their customers and other customers to benefit of.
The understanding we get through that.
Great I appreciate that and then in terms of just some some.
Yes.
Maybe checks we should be looking for in terms of <unk>.
<unk> this year you did mention.
Demo ing the sales space on roads later.
I guess, sometimes this year can you just sort of talk about what you have to do to get from.
Where you currently are with doing that.
In the cloud and online to doing it on the open road.
Yes.
We're excited about the things we have in front of us. This year. So at the end of Q1, we anticipate showcasing the transferability. This is one of the core kind of architectural choices, we made with the Aurora driver is enabling it to operate both trucks and light vehicles.
In Q3, we anticipate showcasing one of these very important elements of bringing the vehicle to a safe stock.
We've shared our safety case framework of one element of that is safety.
And part of.
Part of that is being able to understand when to trigger and then actually having the capability on the vehicle to bring it to a stop and this is a significant milestone.
In the development of it today, we're running this and simulation were doing early work on vehicles that would close task forces.
And between now and the time, where we're going to showcase this on public roads.
We'll be continuing to advance that capability.
Enhancing the fault.
<unk> capability, we have onboard the vehicle to handle more large broad set of problems that we can.
Might occur at some point in the future. So that we can operate safely.
Great that's helpful I'll jump back in queue. Thanks.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Tom White with D. A Davidson. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks, guys. Congrats on your first public company earnings call I guess, we'll have to wait 12 months.
For the next one of these it sounds like though.
Two if I may.
Chris you talked about.
Some of the different kind of milestones and.
Kind of markers of progress.
Here over the next several months.
I'd be curious to hear your updated thoughts on the usefulness of.
Metrics.
For investors like things like real world miles, driven or maybe miles driven without human intervention intervention.
Do you think those are useful things for investors to try and track or.
Do you guys anticipate maybe at any point in the future.
Kind of publishing.
Publishing sort of a regular metric and then could you just double click on the comments around that.
Nonbinding indications of interest.
I'm just curious has the pace of that really picked up in recent months or has it been kind of healthy all along and I'm curious whether.
Okay.
It might cause you guys to kind of increase your pace of investment or the urgency of investment to make sure you don't.
Take advantage of all of that interest.
Sure and maybe I can just speak to so on the timing of calls we do anticipate providing more regular roughly quarterly updates.
On the business I think the depth of the financial.
Disclosures as where we intend to do that on an annual basis.
So have no fear, we look forward to engaging more often than once a year.
We think we're making exciting progress and we look forward to the opportunity to share that with.
With anyone who joins us.
On the metrics front.
So there's a lot to unpack there.
As we think about.
Metrics, we continue to to.
Think that the disengagement report work that put out there is many people not just his belief is is just not a super super useful indication as we've shared repeatedly we think there is an immense amount of value in simulation.
We leveraged that dramatically and we do orders and orders of magnitude more testing and simulation and we would do on physical road because it allows us to do much more focused testing. It allows us to do more efficient testing and it allows us to test things that we just wouldnt encounter.
By just operating trucks out on the public roads, and so that can give us more confidence in the ultimate safety of our vehicles.
We do we have been trying to we've heard the investment community around the need to provide progress metrics of progress we're continuing to try to find a good way to express that we think there is something around the way we talk about the maturity of the product.
Look for us to try and share more of that in the near future.
So stay tuned I guess on that one on the the non binding intent so.
We've tried to take a very collaborative approach to engaging with partners.
And customers in this space and instead of going out to them and trying to beat them to kind of.
<unk>.
Shake them, sorry to shake loose their checkbooks, it's really about what can we do together to learn.
So that we can deliver a product that's a immense value to them and ultimately to their customers.
So the approach we've taken is a three phase process, where we began engaging with partners and potential customers around indications of interest and we're in that phase of the process right now.
We expect later to shift to a conversation around initial allegations and we'll do that collaboratively collaboratively with our partners.
And that will start to be more firm and then ultimately we'll get to a final allocations what we've heard from our partners as they really appreciate the transparency of the engagement we've had with them.
Around this.
And so we're very excited for that and as I indicated we have at this point.
Initial indications of interest exceeding our ability to deliver through 'twenty five.
We're really proud of that and I think it speaks a lot to the work our team is doing and both developing the technology, but also building the relationships with these key customers in different segments of the freight space.
Does it mean that we will want to accelerate investment to kind of keep pace with the demand.
We're still assessing that and of course, we'll share more as we.
As we move forward.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you Tom.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question. Please press star one on your telephone keypad.
Our next question comes from the line of David Vernon with Bernstein. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, good afternoon, and thanks for taking the time Chris.
Well I understand your get your updated thoughts on your expectations for when.
Particular sort of use case like for example, Fedex when youre running between El Paso and Dallas.
You might be.
I'll be taking some of the support capabilities of the safety driver and safety engineered that kind of start out of the truck I'm just trying to think from a big picture standpoint, how is your thinking on the timing of when you might be able to validate the technology without.
A driver in the cab changing right now.
Yeah. So we continue to work towards a commercial launch of that trucking product at the end of 'twenty three.
And we're excited about the progress towards that our philosophy on this really is one of continuous advancement and that at any given moment theres, a kind of a duration of which the vehicle could operate without oversight.
But until we get to the point, where it's continuously viable.
And doable in a commercially relevant way it feels like it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Right, if we have to operate our trucks with <unk>.
Three five other vehicles surrounding them.
To be able to do it safely it's just kind of.
Distracting from the core objective of addressing these increasingly rare events that hold up operation until we're ready to do that and meet that acceptably safe bar. It feels like the most practical efficient and safe way to do the development and testing is to have an operator in the vehicle instead of kind of 5%.
Strewn about the highway around the vehicle.
Okay. So it sounds like those 2023 is still still what youre looking for there and then maybe as a follow up.
Richard could you help us understand kind of the clean cash burn rate I'm not sure if the stock based comp charges that you had for Uber yourself would've affected kind of the underlying cash burn rate in <unk> and can you give us a sense for where you intend to be exiting.
Fiscal 'twenty two at I'm, just trying to get a sense for what we should be expecting in terms of cash cash burn for two.
2022.
Sure. So I think to the second 0.1st we don't think because of the pre revenue company that it's meaningful to provide forward looking guidance. So we won't speak to that.
The cash flow is relatively clean from the <unk>.
There are a few perspective that obviously shows up in the non-GAAP reconciliation.
For stock based compensation, there, but I think we had.
$563 million of operating cash spend.
$8 million on Capex, that's basically clean cash flow for full year 2021.
And then in quarter four.
Okay.
Okay.
And I think thats.
That's what we have.
We can follow up okay.
Yes.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate the things that you don't want to give too much guidance here, but I guess, if you want to.
About it just directionally.
Are there investments in R&D and a step up in Opex that we should be expecting that is going to make that number get worse is it going to get better just anything directionally you can give us.
Give us on that front would be it would be helpful.
Yes, I think the directional thing that we have Ken and $1 $6 billion of cash on the balance sheet at the end of the year and as we work towards launching the product at the end of 2023 trucking, we feel like we've got enough cash. We believe we can get through the commercialization and then into 2024.
Alright, thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of our question and answer session. This concludes today's conference and you may disconnect. Your lines at this time.
Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.