Alright. Let's go ahead and get started. Hi. My name is Lauren Kwan, and I lead marketing at Plus.Plus is working with the largest global truck manufacturers in the world, including Triton, Hyundai, and Iveco to bring self driving trucks that are factory built to the market. And in doing so successfully, we have to build trust in autonomous trucks. That is going to be a critical element. So today, I want to talk a little bit about how we're doing that and, importantly, why we're doing that. So today, AI is everywhere and for good reason. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate and known as the godfather of AI, said recently at a conference, as an example of how AI is impacting health care that for difficult diagnoses, a doctor is able to get it right about forty percent of the time. AI alone can get it right about 50% of the time. And when you combine a doctor that's using AI, they can get it right about 60% of the time.

This just goes to show you in terms of impact what we can do with AI, and we're really just at the early stages of that. AI is going to help us address our biggest challenges. So beyond health care in the areas of climate change, food insecurity, there's a lot being done already. And for myself being at Plus, for the last five years, I've had the front row seat to see how AI is being used to transform transportation, to make it safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. And that's exactly why we're working on autonomous trucks. Because if you look at the statistics out there, there are over five thousand fatalities every year that involve heavy trucks in The US. That a majority of that is due to human error because drivers get tired. They get angry. They speed. And with autonomous trucks, they do not do that.

They do not get tired. They do not get angry. They always follow the rules of the road. In long haul, which is a driver that is transporting goods, you know, over hundreds of miles a day, they average about a 100,000 miles every year on the road. And comparatively, for us as passenger car drivers, we drive about 15,000 miles a year. So a 100,000 miles is a lot already, but with an autonomous truck, you can increase that, double that to over 200,000 miles. So you think about how many more goods can be delivered because of that and how much faster can do that. That's a key reason, the efficiency side. And then lastly, even though heavy trucks are only about 9% of the vehicles on the road, they're responsible for 29.4% of the emissions that are emitted into our environment.

So autonomous trucks, on the other hand, can, because of the algorithms that are in the virtual driver, are constantly optimizing for the best way and the most, most, efficient way to drive so that they could save fuel. So taking into account the gradient of the road, traffic, not slamming on brakes, all of those things account for being able to save about 10% fuel by having an autonomous truck. That is why there's not a question of when, well, if autonomous trucks will come. It's actually really about when it will happen, and that when is more and more imminent. If you ask anyone working in the autonomous driving industry about, you know, five years ago when you will see commercial vehicles on the road, you know, autonomous trucks pulling freight, People will say, oh, you know, maybe in the next five years. That is vastly different now. For those of you who have been in LA, San Francisco, these major cities that have robotaxis, you see that the technology is here.

The regulatory approval for us to put autonomous vehicles on the road is here, and we have very experienced safety focused ecosystem of companies that are producing the base vehicles, that are producing the steering and breaking, redundant technologies, and also the different sensors that are available to make these autonomous vehicles.

And so in the next couple of years, what you will start seeing is actually the availability of commercial vehicles, these heavy trucks that are going to be factory built with our technology coming to market. Now not I know a lot of people are not necessarily exposed to trucks a lot, so I want to show you just a glimpse of what autonomous trucks are able to do now. This is a video of, some validation testing that we just completed recently.

Plus is taking deliberate steps to deliver safe and scalable factory built autonomous trucks globally. The robot trucks are autonomously driven by our AI based virtual driver, SuperDrive. No one in the cabin sensor seeing everything around the truck, adapting and making complex driving decisions in real time. SuperDrive is trained to navigate hub to hub, anticipate traffic, and handle all scenarios on the road, including advanced safety maneuvers, such as following a cone lane in a construction area and nudging for construction barriers on the road. When When the unexpected happens, including fault conditions at the sensor, software, and vehicle levels that may affect the safe operation of the vehicle, SuperDrive's autonomous fallback system detects it and knows what to do. SuperDrive executes one of the minimal risk maneuvers autonomously. Hazard lights are activated immediately. Signals come on, and the system looks for the safest way to gradually pull over and come to a full stop on the side of the road and wait for assistance.

Assistance. No driver, no remote intervention, just the vehicle acting confidently with safety as its first priority. When it comes to super drive, safety is tested, it's proven, it's OEM integrated. It's engineered for consistency, reliability, and durability. It's the future of trucking.

Now I can't see your faces, so I, can't tell. But, my guess is your response is one of these two. You are either in awe because, wow, an autonomous truck? A truck that drives on its own, it could do that? That's amazing. Or you might be on the right hand side in terms of reaction of you're in shock or fear of what? A truck driving on its own? Why would you want it to do that? And in marketing, as we say, they're saying that perception is reality. It is, my job as a marketer to be crystal clear on who I'm targeting in terms of my audience and also how they perceive our technology and our company and to then do what I need to do to bridge that gap. There's no point in setting yourself up for failure by targeting the wrong group.

And especially with emerging technology, which has been the focus of my career, it's always been, look. You need to really capture the attention and the excitement of the innovators, the people who are just willing to try something new because they're so excited about anything that's new. They're the ones that will get in line, stand up for three hours just to wait to get a hold of or try some new technology. Or the early adopters who, you know, might need a little bit of data, but, you know, for the most part, they're like, wow. Okay. This sounds really cool. Let's do this. And not to, you know, right off the bat, expect that you have the mainstream market, the people who are like, you know what? I wanna wait until it's really proven out.

Like, you know, if I have no other option, you know, the laggards will say, if I have absolutely no other option, I will, I guess, do this. The tricky bit about autonomous trucks is that while we need the really innovative, OEMs, the truck makers, and the fleets, you know, who actually ship goods to be the adopters and use our technology and to buy it, we actually are operating these autonomous trucks on the road where you have the mainstream market there.

So we also actually need to build trust for them to know that this technology is on the road and they're safe. So collectively, in terms of our responsibility as an industry, I like to use this framework of the three e's, which is we really need to make sure that we educate the market in terms of helping people understand not just the what we're building, because as a technology company, as a company that's founded by engineers, it's really cool to talk about the technology, talk about the AI.

And so, you know, we focus on that, you know, where we need to. But, actually, the how we're doing it in terms of the safety layers and how we're working with different partners to bring all these pieces together, that's really important as well. But, actually, one of the most important things is to talk about the why because people need to understand. Understand, they need to understand why we're doing this. And in terms of the exposure, that's critical because, yes, I can understand the why. But if I have not seen this technology at work, I don't know. Can I trust it? And that's part of that trust building process. And we've seen this already in the robotaxi space. JD Power did a study recently that looked at consumer confidence in robotaxis.

And there was a 56% difference in the people who've actually been in a robotaxi to really see and feel like they're confident in technology versus people who have not been in one. So that's humongous. The other thing is, actually, even for people who have not been in it, if they live in a city, if they've been in a city where they've been exposed and have seen a robotax at work, even if they've not been in one, they are still much more confident in the technology than people who've just never been exposed to it at all.

And then lastly, in terms of evidence, we need to make sure that we provide, as an industry, the data, the metrics to really show everyone how the technology is working and how much safer it is compared to a human driver. And so in the spirit of wanting to really further that education about why autonomous trucks, I want to spend a little bit of time on dispelling the top five myths about autonomous trucks. Now myth number one, autonomous trucks will eliminate trucking jobs. And because trucking is a industry is an industry that employs a lot of people over, you know, two and a half million drivers alone. What I want to address here is, actually, that's absolutely not true because, one, the very reason why autonomous trucks is needed, the fundamental reason for it it is because we do not have enough drivers. You have to remember that trucking is not just a job. It's a lifestyle.

It requires, as I was saying earlier, someone who on average drives about a 100,000 miles a year. That means they are on the road, you know, three weeks at a time. They get home for a few days, you know, do some of their laundry and run some errands, and then they're back on the road. This right here, this picture that you see is the inside cabin of a truck. This is where a trucker sleeps, eats, and works every single day for weeks at a time. It is not easy, and every driver coming into the industry will retire as a truck driver. And there are also going to be jobs.

What we want to do is automate the long haul portion that takes people away from home that is, you know, on long stretches of boring road so that, actually, the drivers can move closer home to jobs where they're driving regional or local routes. And actually, the Department of Transportation not long ago did a study looking at the impact of autonomous trucks on the market and on jobs. And they found that on average, what they're expecting is that each year, there will be 26,000 to 35,000 jobs created by having autonomous trucks on the road. Because if you think about the trucks, they're not just going to be on the road and never needing any kind of maintenance. Right? So that is something that will be really important, for us to remember because we've seen this happen in a lot of other emerging emerging technologies. You know, the mobile phone, when that came to market, you know, there are changes certainly in the way that we do things, like the way that we travel, but the travel industry hasn't gone away.

Now, myth number two, autonomous trucks are unsafe. Well, safety is another critical reason why we're working on this technology in the first place. We want to eliminate as much as possible those fatalities and accidents on the road. And in order to do that, Plus is partnered with global truck makers to bring these AI driven factory built autonomous trucks to market. So on the technology layer in terms of what we're building, we have at every level of the technology development, the operations, as well as the way that we do the integration with our OEM partners, that has all got safety case framework, you know, really tightly bound. We're monitoring it, you know, to make sure that everything is super safe. And if you look at these truck makers that we work with, they've been in the business of building safe trucks for decades and some of them for hundreds of years.

This is something that they know how to do. And another thing which I think a lot of people may not know is that trucks are actually among the most regulated vehicles on the road. So the FMCSA, which is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, regulates everything from how many hours a truck driver can be on the road, mandatory breaks, how, the vehicles need to be inspected, how often, all of that. So in terms of safety, again, it is the reason why we're working on this technology in the first place, and there are safety, systems in place across every layer of both the vehicle, the technology, as well as the operations. Now myth number three, autonomous trucks will be on the roads tomorrow. You know, there are these blanket statements that are made of, hey, it's coming online and it's going to replace everything. Actually, that's not true.

We at Plus are planning a phased approach to scale our operations. So in The US, in the 2027 time frame, the plan is for us to launch first in the Texas Triangle, so the San Antonio, Dallas, Houston area. And then from there, we move to other parts of Texas, and then we expand to Sun Belt states, and then over time, expand nationally. And we do that because, one, in terms of the technology, it we want to take the time to do the validation and then expand the routes as we go. It is also critical in terms of building trust for us to take the time to do that because we want to show, you know, as you gather more and more data that, look, the technology is really safe. And there are in terms of the, operations design domain, which is where the truck can operate, we can actually increase the complexity of what we can deal with.

And myth number four, autonomous trucks can't handle complex driving situations the way that human drivers can. Well, here you see a number of different scenarios that, our vehicle has driven through in different countries, in US, Australia, in Europe where we're doing testing, and these are across all different driving conditions. And the amazing thing about autonomous trucks is that when we learn something new, when we have new features, when we deploy it once to the software, all of the vehicles, you know, have that extended level of functionality and capability, which is not what you can do when you have a driver in one single vehicle.

And myth number five, autonomous means no human involvement. Well, we are, as I mentioned, looking at focusing on the long haul portion and automating that, but the human is still in the loop throughout the entire journey, whether it's the pre trip inspection, loading, unloading. Also, even as the autonomous trucks are on the road, there are teleoperations to make sure that if a vehicle needs to be rescued or if there is additional support that that is provided with humans. There's refueling. There are field services. So there are really a lot that humans will do to ensure safe operations, to ensure that everything is going to be, efficient as we talked about. And, again, the focus for us is to automate the hub to hub or the kind of long haul portion.

But in terms of the urban driving, in terms of, you know, hazardous materials, you know, there's going to be a lot that the autonomous trucks will not address that would require humans to do. So in closing, we need autonomous trucks. We don't have enough drivers to really address the capacity that we have in terms of the goods that need to be moved from a to b. As we as consumers, we shop more and we want things faster, those goods need to be moved, and over 70% of that is being moved by trucks. We will benefit as consumers by getting our goods faster and not compromising safety or environment, you know, as we do that. And in closing, I love this quote because it says, there are no shortcuts to any place worth going.

And I absolutely believe in this future that's going to be made possible by autonomous trucks, and it's absolutely worth going. Thanks for joining, and I hope, you spend some time getting to know the technology and what it's capable of. And please do get in touch if you have any questions and want to learn more. Thank you.