Insight
Ferguson: Nuro deploys faster than robotaxis by prioritizing safety over passenger comfort
“Now when you remove passengers, you still have to nail safety, but like our groceries don't care if we're a little bit more of a defensive driver than you or I might want our driver to be. We're okay with taking our foot off the gas. If we think we've seen som…”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Nuro secured federal exemption to operate vehicles without controls
“That was actually our second generation vehicle. So a couple years ago we got that exemption for the vehicle that we are today actively operating out in, in California and Texas.”
Disclosure
Ferguson: Nuro's BYD partnership enables capacity for hundreds of thousands of vehicles
“Well, so we're working with BYD who is, they usually alternate between Tesla as the number one or number two electric vehicle manufacturer in the world. I think right now they're number one. And so we do have the capacity or will have the capacity to make hund…”
Insight
Ferguson: Robotics ML techniques translate directly to automated financial trading
“A lot of the techniques that we apply in robotics are basically taking in huge amounts of noisy data, trying to make sense of it, and then trying to come up with intelligent or hopefully reasonably intelligent actions, and all of that is very much on point for…”
Disclosure
Ferguson: Nuro is a general robotics company, not just self-driving delivery
“When we created Neuro, it really, it wasn't and isn't a self-driving company, nor a self-driving delivery company. It's really a general robotics company”
Insight
Ferguson: Removing human occupants allows AVs to prioritize external pedestrian safety
“If you can relax the constraints for an on-road vehicle to not have to put people in it, then in many ways you can almost entirely rethink what vehicle design is. And in particular, you can make a lot of safety optimizations for the vehicle itself that largely…”
Disclosure
Ferguson: Nuro uses remote operators to monitor vehicles and drive slowly when needed
“We have remote operators, we call them guardians, that, that monitor the vehicles. You know, we try to be very careful about ensuring that any vehicles that were operating out in the wild, in the public, that we have really robust monitoring. And we can send c…”
Disclosure
Ferguson: Nuro plans to launch regional commercial service within the next year
“Really it's those two coming together over the next year or so for us to be able to provide a commercial service over a pretty significant region, and then going on to really Turn on the spigot of the manufacturing, and then scale it across the country.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ferguson: Nuro retains roughly $1 billion on its balance sheet
“We are trying to be very, very thoughtful about how we manage our burn as a company where we spend every dollar and how we ensure that with the balance sheet that we still have, you know, we still have roughly a billion dollars on the balance sheet that we can…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ferguson: Package delivery will piggyback on on-demand autonomous trips
“And that's what I think genuinely is the future of package delivery. It's that the packages are going to effectively come along for the ride with another on-demand delivery that you are going to get anyway, and I think that's the best possible end consumer exp…”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Google's early self-driving car project incorporated ML first into behavior prediction
“When I got there, I actually worked on, on the prediction system. So this was trying to predict what other agents, other road users were going to do. And so this was some of the first machine learning that, that we incorporated into the self-driving car projec…”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Americans take nearly 100 billion personal vehicle trips annually for errands
“Almost half of all personal vehicle trips that we take today are for shopping and running errands, so that's almost a hundred Billion trips every year just in the US.”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Over 20 million Americans live in food deserts
“Over twenty million people in the US live in food deserts, which we think we can make a significant dent in if we're able to provide this service across all across all neighborhoods and cities.”
Disclosure
Ferguson: Nuro completed a few hundred deliveries in its initial Kroger pilot
“And I did, I think we did a few hundred a few hundred deliveries with the R one to the general public around that fries.”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Nuro vehicles use thermal cameras alongside LiDAR, radar, and cameras
“They use a bevy of sensors, you know, somewhat similar to cruise and Waymo where we have cameras, we have LIDARs, we have radars, we have thermal cameras as well to help detect people and other living beings at night in particular.”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Nuro operates regular driverless vehicle services in the Bay Area and Houston
“We have regular operation, fully driverless custom vehicles in both the Bay Area and in Houston, and we're constantly expanding the regions over which we're operating.”
Assertion Supported
Ferguson: Nuro laid off 20% of staff after overly aggressive growth
“You know, Jay-Z and I have often said that the building the neuro team is what we're most proud of, and here we were having to cut roughly 20% of it, and that was all on us for growing too aggressively and being too optimistic about the market and funding cond…”
