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Grayson Brulte:
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Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte, coming to you live from SAE's Government Industry Meeting in Washington, D.C. If you're just joining the series, I have to say I love coming to this show because it brings my policy and industry friends together for important policy conversations.
I'm absolutely honored to introduce our next guest from GI, Nat Beuse, Chief Safety Officer, Aurora Innovation.
Welcome to the podcast, Nat.
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Nat Beuse:
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Hey, thanks, Grayson. Nice to be here.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's great to have you here. You're a fancy gentleman, but things are getting really fancy for you. You were recently appointed to the United States Department of Transportation, I had to spell it out because you're fancy, 27 member Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee. What are you hoping to achieve? It's a big step.
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, talk about being selected, 27, 28 people out of what I understand to be hundreds of applicants. And then get vetted through all that and then actually be selected by the secretary to be on this. It's like a huge honor and it's a bit of D.C. wonkiness, but they don't just set up federate advisory panels, on, on a whim. There's a lot of thought that goes into it, speaking from experience. And so the fact that this particular topic is one that the secretary chose to set up, I think speaks volumes for how he wants to go forward on some of these very complicated issues involving technologies.
And for my part, it’s a huge honor to get to serve again in a different capacity not as a federal employee, but as a member of the private sector, just trying to make the world a better place. And to be able to help shape maybe potentially some recommendations for things that the Secretary should think about across the department.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You're going home but with a different hat.
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Nat Beuse:
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Exactly. It'll be very strange walking back into the building again. I have been back and forth here and there, but this will be a totally different experience than what I've been used to.
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Grayson Brulte:
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The technology that you'll help to influence or advise on will let go across the spectrum from passenger cars to trucks to all forms of transportation?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, exactly. The way that the committee charter is set out is really broad. It touches not just one particular part of the transportation ecosystem, but also other things, right? Things like maybe how feds and states should work together, how maybe within the department, maybe research agendas.
It's really broad. I'm looking forward to the meeting on Thursday to see how we're going to shape this because it really is the charge of the committee. So the secretary will give the charge to the committee and then the committee has to do the work.
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| Grayson Brulte: |
Will you touch on policy at all?
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| Nat Beuse: |
I suspect we will.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And then, because there's a big issue now brewing in California where the cities are trying to take control for deployment of autonomous vehicles from the state level. But what we've seen in autonomous trucking, we've seen a passenger car from a state level, you're going to patchwork of laws. Is that something from your experience admits your experience now that we're already going to look and say, okay, currently United States, we have a patchwork of laws. It's not, it's very complicated, not working. We want to avoid that at the city level.
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Nat Beuse:
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It'll be a great discussion, right? So you referenced my previous hat where I spent a lot of time trying to delineate those responsibilities that was laid out in the department's AB guidance. Interesting enough, if you look at some of the other members on the committee, there are actually two people from California.
One is Bernard Torriano, who's in charge of the DMV, and a couple of folks from San Francisco. I think it will be interesting to get this committee to gel. My, my hope in it, and you asked me this point blank, is that we actually produce something that's helpful. I don't want to spend the next six months, eight months just retoiling the same ground.
But how do we make this a conversation about 2024, which I believe is the year of AV trucking and deployments will start to happen versus that's let's go back and relitigate things that we were talking about in 2017 and 2016.
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Grayson Brulte:
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We have to move forward. Your company, Aurora. You've publicly stated in multiple outlets and multiple press releases and SEC filings, you're turning into a business. You're entering, that's called the phase of commercialization. We don't want to go backwards.
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| Nat Beuse: |
That's right. That's right. I think for too long, we've been talking about deployments and I'm reminded last year when I think you were there too. We were all at the TRB Arts Conference in San Francisco. And I remember very distinctly one of the Europeans standing up and saying, Hey, U. S. people, basically, we don't have anything going on over here. And you guys are like talking about all these like really tangential issues, celebrate that you actually have deployments happening. And to your point, now we're turning the curve more towards commercialization, really turning this into a business that's useful and not just, a science project or some weird thing.
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| Grayson Brulte: |
Aurora's going to go Dallas to Houston for your first commercial drive out run. How are you preparing that from a safety perspective?
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Nat Beuse:
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Really good question. We've spent a lot of time and a lot of effort talking about, our safety case framework, and there's more to do there for sure, because it's complicated. Why is it complicated? Because safety doesn't fit into a nice little one liner explanation, particularly in the way that Aurora is approaching it.
We are one of the only companies to actually put out our safety case framework, and all the things that we need to think about to close that safety case in order to go driverless. Everyone else, to the extent that they did it at all and they all did it afterwards and they never really provided any detail as to how they got there.
And we've even gone a step as we, we almost treat it like a financial statement kind of thing in terms of the SEC. And so there's a bunch of rigor that happens within the company to make sure whatever number we're putting out there for the public is actually traceable. It's with, with rigor from oversight perspective from my team to make sure we have right policies in place so that one person can't change the number.
All these kinds of things that. Maybe you take for granted when you actually see the number in the SEC filing, but the fact that we're putting all this rigor behind it is confidence that like the engineering work behind that is really robust. And we continue to report that number every quarter.
And we will not go driverless until that number reaches a hundred percent. Why be so detailed? It's important, right? I think the AV industry in general needs to be, continue to be transparent and continue to share what they think is relevant to share. And I think the reason why it matters in this case is because it's quick to jump to a metric of safer than a human driver or something like that.
But that's not really the metric. This is really an engineering problem. And so we have to have engineering solutions to those problems. So our safety case framework embodies not just You know, do we have requirements and tests and scenarios and what you would expect from a systems engineering perspective, but also is how is the company right?
Do we have proper risk management in place? All these things that I think in the past folks have taken for granted. We deliberately are instilled it into our safety case framework and then have to generate evidence to prove to ourselves that we're closing those claims. And then it's on the operation side, right?
That's also part of the whole thing, right? You could have a great piece of tech, but if you're not Yeah. If you're not operating it appropriately or you're not paying attention to what's coming out on the operation side, then in my home opinion, you actually don't have a completely closed safety case.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Is it true that any individual on the Aurora team can ground the fleet?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, absolutely. That is a process that's been governed by the safety team. And there is a process by which any employee, if they raise an issue, yes, can result in the grounding of the entire fleet. And then to unground that fleet. That actually has to go through a separate process that actually gets final approval by our internal safety review board.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Do you feel that it's helped build trust inside the company where an employee doesn't have to be worried about saying something that they feel is detrimental?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, that's, it's a really good question, Grayson, and I would answer it in two ways.
The action that happens from someone raising an issue is I think what really drives the trust within the company, but then also the accountability. We log every single safety concern that's raised to us. A manager might raise it, anybody can raise a safety concern. And then there's transparency in the way that safety concern is adjudicated.
Because in some cases it might be someone who just doesn't have the right context. And so explaining that context is helpful to them. In some cases is legitimately like, Oh, Hey, this is, something that got missed. Let's make sure we close the gap on that and all of those items. So I mentioned this internal safety review board.
So all of those items are reviewed routinely by the executive team. So there's another layer of accountability. So it's not just. Did the safety team handle it? There's another piece of it, which is, did the executives know about what was going on? And did they approve of whatever the resolution was?
And like I said those metrics are routinely reviewed, including like how fast, right? You can imagine a scenario, if you're not paying attention and don't have the right policies in place, someone can raise the safety concern and then it goes into a. We'll call it the dark ether for six months.
That's not very helpful, right? So it's not just the fact that any employee can ground the fleet. It's also this other piece of it that we put transparency in place so that All the safety concerns are visible to people that want to go look for them. There's accountability with the executive team.
And then the metrics around, is the program actually working, is also something that is continually monitored.
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Grayson Brulte:
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How has this developed? Because if you look at, I'm not going to name names here, but other industry companies, if they did this, they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. But yet, you've implemented this, not from a mistake, but from a strength of power. Why?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, it's something that I think matters. Both at the executive level to have commitment and buy in, everybody from Chris Urmson on down his direct reports. We all have to be willing to put the ump behind us. Otherwise, it's just becomes a program that you might as well not even run, right?
The other piece of it is you just don't layer this in without kind of appropriate thought about how you're actually going to ensure that a program is actually working. I think I come at this kind of a little bit from a perspective of being scrutinized by Congress or the Inspector General every six months or something for my programs.
And so for me, this was It's very natural that, of course, you should look at your program to see if they're working. And I think for me, that's how I instilled it and built it at Aurora with my team and the support of Chris and the other executives is that we all believe that this is the right way to do it, how we want Aurora as a company to work.
And so that's why I think it actually produces the results that it does. You just can't. Carve and copy it and then stick it in your company and say it'll work. You really have to build the muscle to get it to go.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Without your government background and your experience. And that's a, what if you have implemented this program?
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Nat Beuse:
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That's a good question. I would like to think so. You're a very smart gentleman. And I think I appreciate the compliment. But I think there is a little bit of, we're all building this something new. And when I was in government, I was always reminded of these, we call these cyclical, huge investigations that would happen that, have terrible consequences.
And you look at that and you would see a company make very similar mistake, like two or three years later. And it's did they not learn anything from the previous people? And so I think that's what I bring from my government background is just that perspective of learning from others.
So when you look at what we built at Aurora, whether it be the safety case, or something we call safety management systems, those aren't things that I invented in my head. Those are things that we looked at what, how do other safety critical industries solve some of these very challenging issues.
And there's examples all over the place. And so as safety management systems, for example, comes from most notably the FAA land, but other modes of transportation have it. And then when you look at safety cases, that comes from a completely different industry. It doesn't have anything to do with what we're doing in transportation, but it has a lot of good similarities where you're trying to make a logical claims-based argument of whatever the thing that you're doing is whatever you say it's going to do.
And so that methodical breakdown and then providing the evidence to actually say that you've met those is what was the big unlock, I think for me particularly to try to take and make it scale.
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Grayson Brulte:
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On the theme of learning from others, Aurora's a partnership with Continental. What are you learning from Continental? I was very fortunate, Kirby Howard, thank you. I was able to sit down with their CFO and their CTO for a deep dive. And I walked away and I said to Kirby, wow, that was just an hour with that team. Obviously, you're in the trenches from them. What have you learned?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, I think it's great. For one, I get to see Kirby now more often than I did before. But that aside, I think I knew, I actually knew some of the Continental team obviously from my previous role, but mostly dealt with them more on the crash avoidance side of things. And they bring a certain level of expertise to the table that is unparalleled and big factor for us is how do you take this technology that now you've, started approach deployment and then scale it.
You're always talking about. and all the podcasts that you do, it's all about, let's, how are we going to scale this thing? How are we actually make this thing useful? You can't make it useful unless you have someone who actually knows how to build equipment at scale. And so that's the big unlock with Conti.
And so there's a lot of work that happened in the background to understand kind of functional requirements and the final design, which is all part of the what we recently announced and then taking that and okay, now that has to be built, has to be built, at some cadence, and it also has to be driven the cost out of it to make it economically feasible.
And so those are the skill set that Conti's bringing to the table and then what we're bringing to the table is this is how we think about replicating the driving tasks with software and where these components are on the vehicle. And it just makes this partnership just so unique.
It's in the industry in general, but I just think it makes a lot of sense where we're now paired up with someone who can build automotive grade equipment at scale and then have those relationships just right off the bat.
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Grayson Brulte:
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The key is scaling. Conti can scale and make great hardware.
From a safety perspective, what input or insight do you have? And so there's, it's a redundant system. I'll be very clear, it's a redundant system. What overview do you have? So you have all this experience from NHTSA. You have the experience in the private sector. Do you advise Conti on certain things that need to be in the hardware or software, or is it a collaborative relationship?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, for sure. Any relationship is going to be, collaborative, particularly with the players that are involved. I would say for us, it's really driven from, again, probably sounds a little bit like a broken record, but it's driven from the claims that we have in the safety case. And we have to fulfill those claims, and those claims require Engineering evidence.
And so that's where, whether it's Conti or even whether it's our platform partners meeting, Volvo or PACCAR, where they even have to provide certain engineering deliverables so that we can completely close our safety gate. So that just gives you a sense of How we're thinking about the engineering problem, right?
That way, it's not just, okay, we're going to get this part from somebody. We're going to get this part from somebody and put them together and hope it works. Oh no, there's actually work to make sure they actually do work. And those are embedded in the claims and the safety case. And so that's where kind of the redundancy piece comes in. That's where kind of some of these other aspects come in.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Is redundancy a large part of the safety case from all your partners?
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Nat Beuse:
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It is certainly a key piece of it. I haven't done the math to figure out, on a percentage basis what it means. I would say. If you think about it, there's a couple of big pieces of our safety case.
One is nominal driving, basically. Can you get from point A to point B under whatever conditions you say you can do that in? Then another big piece is okay, what happens when things go wrong? Do you have to get the system to a safe spot? The other piece of it then is really more around, okay, you're out there.
How do you catch things early, right? This idea of continuous monitoring and fixing things as things happen. Then there's kind of pieces around, okay, what if somebody puts a cone in the car, or the truck, right? All of these things are things we have to think about, right? And then the last piece is, are we really good partners with the public, the government, those kinds of things.
So again, if you think about all of these things, they sound pretty intuitive, right? But when you break them down to actually figure out have I answered all these questions, the deliberate thought process to make you do that. It's pretty powerful.
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Grayson Brulte:
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How do you mitigate that risk? Because that's all built in.
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Nat Beuse:
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Which one?
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Grayson Brulte:
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The whole thing. Because if you look at it, if for instance you have an issue with a truck or a blown tire, it has to be able to pull to the side of the road or if something fails to be able to pull to the side of the road. Do you look at all those different scenarios from just, it's called traditional trucking data of everything that could potentially happen, put into a pot and figure it out?
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Nat Beuse:
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That's right. That's exactly right. So those are part of, maybe there's one claim that says, are these things that you thought about? And then within that, there's a bunch of evidence that you produced to say I did. Wow.
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Grayson Brulte:
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One thing I think a lot about with the 18 wheelers when I'm with kids, I think about the runaway truck, but that's a conversation for another day, but is winds.
If you look at driving from Los Angeles to Vegas, and you have to go through Barstow and you have those winds, do you put all the weather factors into that potential thing, into your safety case of this or that?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, so the way to make it scalable is you say, Okay, what is the operational design domain? Like, where am I trying to operate? And what are the factors there that I need to worry about? You mentioned Dallas to Houston is the thing. There are certain things that we need to know about that operational design domain in order to close the claims associated with that. If we go to another operational design domain and there's new factors, let's say it snows there, four or five days out of the year, whatever the answer is, then you've got to close, you get, you have to close that now because it's different, and so the beauty of the safety case is if you think about it, you don't have to go back and redo everything that you did before, because now you know exactly what you're impacting when you go to the next ODD. So in your example, if we go to the next ODD and when does the thing we need to worry about, then that will be evidence that needs to be created for us to be able to close that particular claim related to the operational design domain.
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Grayson Brulte:
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So a hypothetical, so Dallas to Houston, very public, and I think you are testing Dallas to El Paso, but let's just say you eventually go there, drive out. Do you just build on to the safety case and have the different elements that you're going to see there? Yep. And then, okay, so then you're operating terminal to terminal is the way that your system's designed.
Do you look into the human factors’ element of that? Because you're in a terminal. There's a human driven truck, there's an autonomous truck, and oh, by the way, there's a guy driving the forklift to, to get the load off the truck.
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, there's a couple of different pieces there that, and again, it depends on how that terminal operation is set up.
So in the current state, we don't, we're not loading trailers at our facilities, but maybe that comes down the road. But your point, broader point about the human factors piece associated with that is, is very relevant. And that's actually something that other industries have. Many of the things that we have addressed mining, for example, mining has machines, robots doing interesting work alongside humans, and they've solved many of the issues involving with those humans, interacting with those machines, manufacturing plants.
Same thing, they have robots doing welding, all sorts of things. They've addressed the way to figure out how to make sure people are not in a general area when those machines are doing their work. We have to do the same thing, and that would be part of our safety case. I mentioned there's a piece there around operations.
One of the things that my team actually has to practice oversight on is those operations. So I have folks on my team that specifically are subject matter experts in, let's call it terminal operations, on the safety team. And then we also have similar expertise on the ops team. So those two folks work pretty well together to make sure we are thinking through all of the different issues that can occur inside a terminal when you have robots working with people.
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Grayson Brulte:
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When you're in a terminal is day one is a divide where it's a North side is autonomous only, South side is human only. And then you start as your technology evolves. The human interaction evolves that you eventually mix them at some point. Does that help you to limit your risk?
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Nat Beuse:
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That's not how I think about it. I don't think about it in terms of that's what changes the thing. It's really more around what are the safety issues that you're trying to guard against. And then that's how I, that's how I think about it in terms of Okay, then what claims and what evidence do I need to close to ensure that when that thing happens, those two things Whatever risk you were concerned about that it's appropriately mitigated That it's not this kind of open ended loop where you didn't think about it And again, like part of the beauty of the safety case is there's a specific thing in there around how are you gonna monitor this thing to make sure that it still meets your expectations and that's a very crucial piece of it. So let's say hypothetically, If you started seeing some increase interactions, Close calls or something like that, then you would want to come back and say, OK, is there something that I need to, further improved in to limit those interactions are?
Are those interactions OK? Monitoring is a big piece of the power of the safety case as well because you go in it with this humble view that we're all human, might've missed something. And so let's make sure we have the right monitoring in place to make sure that when issues pop up again, you have a proper resolution process.
This is very similar to the safety concerns side of things. You want to layer in that same framework though, but for the safety case itself. So you're monitoring everything? Yeah, and it sounds maybe more complicated than I need it to sound, but you have to be able to measure the performance of whether it be your autonomy system, whether it be the controls that you think you have in place to make sure they're still effective.
All of these things are not that complicated per se, but you just need to put them in place and then put the oversight and governance function on top of it to make sure that Again, that these things are actively being monitored, actively being resolved, not sitting around for days on end if the risk is not appropriate for it to be sitting around for days on end.
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Grayson Brulte:
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What does it look like when you ship a new hardware update? Does it have to go through a governance? Does it have to go through a safety review? What does that process look like?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, so one of the things we, as we turn the, we'll call it turn the crank on our first safety case. Oh, I like that. That's right.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I got a Model T if you want to go out for a ride.
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Nat Beuse:
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I'm not surprised by that, as we build that muscle and turn the crank, we want to do the next thing, which is Hey, how do we then do this faster? How do we do this in a way that doesn't take a long time to do, but still has the high bar of safety.
So that's some work actually my team is doing right now is looking at, okay. So when we look at our kind of version of this safety case, what changes do we want to make as things change so that we can better isolate which claims are impacted and then therefore be very focused on which evidence needs, needs, needs to change?
Because again, it still has to ladder up into a structured argument that makes sense, right? Doing willy nilly things with your argument, then your argument won't hold, hold water.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Let's say, fast forward to the future, no timeline on this. Aurora's operating drive route in multiple states, commercial runs for your partners.
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, that's going to be the day.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's going to be a good day. It's going to be a great day for the economy and a great day for your company and the industry. Great day for safety, too. A great day for safety. That's where I'm going with this. How do you maintain that high level of safety?
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Nat Beuse:
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It's a challenge. It's a challenge like any other consumer product. And I think one of the things that we will have to do, and I hate to sound like a broken record on this, but we have to make sure we have the right indicators in place so that we can catch things early and earlier in the process, right? That'll be a key piece of this.
And that's really What we'll say maybe in scale, it's not that different than today or on today's vehicles, right? Like I think when you look at the system we have in place today, manufacturers monitor all sorts of things that come in, to their systems, whether that be through warranties or whatever.
And there's a process that they have to follow, letting us know and all these kind of things. We can argue about how that process works, good, bad, or indifferent, but there actually is a process in place. So we don't have to invent some new thing now just because we have self-driving vehicles and operations with trucks.
Likewise, FMCSA, I don't know if you know this, but, they're a regulatory agency as well, and have, cops and oversight and everything else like that. And trucking is a unique piece, there's an FMCSA piece, there’s lots of people practicing oversight and so to me, there'd be a natural extension for expectations that are on us as a company, first and foremost, our partners, right?
Anybody else in the ecosystem with us, but plus also the regulators who are, all of those people, are practicing oversight.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's interesting you say that. I had an Uber driver on the way here, he's a former 18 wheel over the road driver and he's now, and he's retired driving for Uber. And we just started having this conversation, I don't tell them I do, because I tell them I work in the automobile industry, and they don't like me.
But this gentleman was going on and on and brought up autonomous trucks out of the blue. Okay, so I'm listening to this gentleman. And he said, do you know the problem with the hours of service? You're fatigued. You don't know if I got a good night's sleep. I'm stressed out and you've got me on this limit so I can't pull over and take a nap.
That's what's wrong. And that's why autonomous trucks are going to win. I said that because I'm retired. And I drive the Uber now. This gentleman was bringing up all these really interesting fatigue issues. Your trucks are not going to get fatigued. How do we take what the Uber driver told me and put it into a nice Aurora message and tell that to the public?
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Nat Beuse:
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So I think there's a lot of benefits we can talk about that, we haven't got there yet because we actually need to close our safety case and be able to deploy the truck. But let's say if you take a step back there's You know, there's obviously economic benefits, right? They're, the goods get there on a time that is measurable, right?
They get there on, on a cadence that is not worrying about whether someone needs to take a necessary bio break, whether someone is feathering the speed limit way too fast or whatever the issue may be, right? Because if you look at the crash picture we've got kind of some problems.
We've got some challenges whether that'd be distraction, you mentioned fatigue. There's other now issues creeping into the system, at least on the light vehicle side, we still have. Some challenges with alcohol, there's drugs now in there. So there's all these human issues that are documented, they're not fake.
Some people like to go, oh, I can't lie. The data is what it says, right? And these systems won't do that. And so we do as an industry though, I think, again, going back to what I said about, this is an engineering problem. We need to prove first that we've solved the engineering challenge.
And then these other benefits will come as a result of getting this technology out there in mass. I've been a big believer of this technology for a while because I'm of the opinion that 43, 000 people is a lot of people that don't have to die, right? That is the astronomical number. I think the challenge we have in the United States and maybe around the globe is that these crashes happen, like in bits and pockets in some neighborhood that maybe you're not in that particular day.
They're real debt toll on society, not just the fatalities. Then you talk about the economic impact of being stuck in traffic. You talk about the economic impact that happens to those families and those jobs that are not going to happen because that particular individual is not there anymore. Like these are real costs that we have.
So we have to we have to do a better job. We need to be able to drive somewhat, desensitize ourself too. And we knew we need to do a better job. So like one of the challenges, for example, when you go to someone, you say fatigue is a big problem. They'll look at you. I never drive fatigued. And it's yeah, my name's Homer J Simpson.
How do you know you're not fatigue, right? The systems are coming on vehicles, but they're not there yet. I think there is a natural tendency for humans that's, drive around every day, decided to displace and say it's the other person. It's not really me. And I think this is where autonomous technology can have a huge impact, which is like there's a machine that's now doing a lot of the things that we can take for granted and doing it in a way that's safer and bring huge benefits to society and I believe completely transform the way goods are moved in this country. People are moved in this country and the like.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's going to change the world and it's going to be good. It's going to be a safer road. So I can sit here and make an argument to you today with an economy on the brink, fatigue is up, stress is up. I think at some point, I'm not going to give a date, but at some point, you're going to have more people driving high well than drunk just to wait. All the data's going and then you have all the distracted driving. So the 43,000 numbers are scary as bad as today. If we don't figure out Tommy, that number is going to grow and that's scary.
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Nat Beuse:
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That's right. And I think it also can't be all on autonomy. Like we need a lot of tools to stay as being in this. transportation space for a long time. And it takes 20 years or so to get a single piece of technology to penetrate the fleet. To get to maybe 70, 80 percent. Not even 100. 70 or 80 percent. A long time. We gotta get on with it. And we need to continue to invest across the board.
But I think, the technology that we're working on at Aurora. Is a key piece in the toolbox, let's say, and we would be remiss to not use it, to have it at our disposal and continue to foster the innovation to go forward. Are there gonna be bumps along the way?
For sure. We need to learn from those bumps and keep going forward and not using as a way to, Oh let's reset. You mentioned the Model T. I don't hear too many people wanting to go out and crank vehicles anymore by hand, right? Everybody's got push button start now, basically.
Technology evolves and that's just a convenience thing. That is not even really a safety thing. You can go back in the old days and look at vehicles that didn't have airbags. I don't see too many people wanting to run around with vehicles with no airbags anymore. And now cars are full of airbags.
And again, that's just. That only is a technology that appears in the most awful of circumstances, right? You're basically, the crash has happened, now you're just trying to protect the human body. What we're talking about here is the thing doesn't even happen. It literally does not happen. What a day that will be when we actually get these inappreciable numbers on, on, on the roads.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's going to save lives. It's also going to help the economy. I started looking at some health data, the amount of money that we spend as a country on health services for individuals involved in and crash is both fatal and non-fatal is very high. And so you developed this great technology, which is good for your partners from an economic standpoint.
But look at the societal benefits from an economic standpoint from the health cost decreased. That's really positive. You're scaling up. You're getting ready for a drive route. You're going to go drive route at some point. Yes. On the Dallas Houston run. What goes into that from a preparation standpoint?
Is it all hands on deck? Is everybody working towards a goal? And then when the safety framework. Mark. meets a hundred percent, then it goes for a final review, or what goes into that driver out?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, that's exactly it. You've nailed it, right? There's our framework. There's the evidence that needs to be completed to close that framework, and we have a very big milestone coming up with Aurora Driver Ready, which, for you and the audience is really to say that are, that's all the pieces. That the evidence around them is closed with the exception of we need a platform, right?
We need a truck that has right redundancies and all those kind of things and then only once those two pieces are done Then we're gonna go driverless, right? I think the days of one-off stunts is we've already did that life That was You know, circa 2016, you and I probably remember that very well. This is about the real...
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Grayson Brulte:
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Are you going to have police cars follow you and shut down exits?
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Nat Beuse:
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No, that's not how it happens. This is really about building a commercial business that is reliable that is safe, that customers will find value in. Otherwise, it doesn't. It won't matter, at least in my opinion, right?
So this is really about doing this in a way that actually scales, doing this in a way that is methodical, doing this in a way that kind of matches what the customer's expectation of what the product is supposed to do. All those things have to come together. So you're right. When we get all of our pieces together, we will have that completed safety case, and we will talk to the safety review board, and we will see, are there things that we need to Not so sure we think we closed it correctly or hey this seems like this is good enough, safety concerns or like all of these different things will go into that decision. And it'll be a big decision. And then we have to go then make sure and work with our partners and everybody else before we go.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Do you go sit down with law enforcement as well?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, that's a big, and we already do that work now, there's a ABSC best practice, for example, around interactions with first responder. That's all of the things that we have already addressed and now it's really about some last pieces around validation that we're looking to close. But, whether it's law enforcement, public safety officials those are important stakeholders for sure.
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Grayson Brulte:
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So all those stakeholders will know. I'm not going to ask for a time, but they will know prior to Aurora going drive route on that route, they'll be well briefed and noted.
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, I think if you look at Aurora's track record, we are the kind of the company of no surprises, right? So people shouldn't be surprised when the safety case is closed that we say we're going to commercially go drive. We've been telling people that for 24 months now or something and been reporting the progress on that number. That's the public piece of it. There's also the conversation that is needed and had with the regulators for sure on.
Here's our progress, so whatever that cadence is, we go in there and we talk to them about the progress, talk about things that we've closed, interesting things that happened, whatever they want to know, right? This is not trying to come at this in a way where we're going to do it no matter what they say.
It's no, this is everybody has to like row in the same direction. And part of the way you help everybody row in the same direction is you be transparent about what you're doing. And I think we've been a company for a long time that has been transparent in the way that we're doing this.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And that goes back to your culture. How is the safety culture at Aurora developed and how are you nurturing it?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, super proud of the way that we've continued to nurture the safety culture. We actually measure it. It's a hard thing to do, but we actually measure. I think it's really important to understand the employee sentiment around safety and kind of track that over time.
You see it's going up, is it going down? Are there hot spots within the company that need maybe particular dressing? And if you think about it from a company perspective, it's not like new employees don't come in and old employees go, right? So there's a kind of constant, in and out of people, new people, right?
You have to constantly be working at it. You just can't say Oh, I did that three months ago. So I need to do anything again. Like there, so there is a piece of this that is a constant, maybe drumbeat is one word to use, but maybe a constant focus is the word that I would use to ensure that the safety culture continues to stay where it is.
And, I've been known to say that it's not the responsibility of just the safety team, right? So this is where I mentioned before about. Chris's executive team that, he put together, we're all in it, right? And if I come to the executive team and say, hey, there's a certain hotspot in your org, they're looking at it like, okay, how can I do better there?
They're not looking at it. We're like, okay, that's cool. I got other things to do. It's super important because this is how you maintain that strong focus. The challenge is it's hard to stay there, right? It's easy to make progress, I guess if you're zero up to some number, it's really hard to stay at the top number.
And so we spend a lot of time, constant reminders, constant things to employees about our safety culture, tools that are available, the accountability that's involved, even in an onboarding, like it's really ingrained in the company culture. So it's top of mind. Not just the tagline top of mind either, right?
Cause people like to call it a tagline, but not for us. How do you keep it that way? Yeah, like I said, part of it is this constant focus on it to make sure that we're integrating it in different parts of the business where it needs to be integrated. So from the earliest employee experience, they learn about the fact that they can ground the fleet.
They learn about how they can submit safety concerns. They learn about the safety case. And so these are things that are in addition to where am I getting my health care benefits, where do I get my paycheck, right? And so I think this is how we've chosen to instill it in the company. Do you feel it empowers the employees?
I can't tell you on a number of times I'll get side slacks from companies, from employees. Who might've come from other companies who are remarking about how a different experience it is now. I have no way to survey where they came from and how, but I think from a standpoint of their sentiment, they have no reason to tell me something that they don't believe in.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Where did your passion for safety first come from?
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, I think for me, a lot of it came from my earliest days of understanding what the heck my, my dad did for a living. So my dad worked on surgical instruments. And surgical instruments that were used particularly around like people that typically had been in a in a bad car crash or something.
So you're trying to reconstruct their face, let's say, for example very specialized field, very intense. And I was always like, that is a cool way to help people. And I got my undergrad degree and I thought I was going to go do one, one part of that. And then I found myself at NHTSA and there's a saying for people that end up at NHTSA.
It's once you get there you're always there, even if you go off and do something else. And I remember one of the earliest tag lines at NHTSA used to be people saving people. And I just thought that was such a unique thing early in my career that I could literally go home and tell anybody like today I impacted somebody's lives who might never meet.
That's pretty powerful and I think for me that's something that's been ingrained in me like from my earliest professional career. And here I just feel like I'm doing it just with a different lens. Trying to bring a new technology to the market that's never been done before. And it has to be safe before it can do its thing. And so that's pretty awesome.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Did your dad share stories or did you see photos that you shouldn't have seen as a kid that really ingrained in your head, this is what we have to do?
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Nat Beuse:
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Some, sometimes, right? Sometimes I think his unique skill set was he could talk to some MD about a case and he would go like custom build them a special tool, like on the fly. Like it was pretty amazing stuff, but it was mostly around just his passion for trying to make these people, have some sort of normalcy back in their life.
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Grayson Brulte:
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The passion passed down. It did. You have the passion. Aurora's doing big things and soon to be driver out things. In your opinion, what is the future of Aurora from a safety perspective?
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Nat Beuse:
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Super bright, right? I think our approach is holistic. It's methodical. We've been transparent in the way that we're sharing it. We've been transparent in the way that we are addressing issues that folks raise. I don't see us going any other direction. And so for me, it's more about how do we scale this thing in a way that, matches what the expectation of ourselves.
First, which is a high bar. At least I believe the way that we've done it, it's a high bar and then continue to bring this technology to market in a way that can save some lives. I think what I worry maybe most about in doing all of that is the kind of reaction to let's say events that are beyond our control and kind of this tendency to.
Maybe make it a bigger thing than it really is. We have to do our part to really understand in those situations what has happened. But I think there is a good role for, whether it be media like, like you, or whether it be important stakeholders in the ecosystem, to treat things with some balance in a way that still results in the right safety outcome but doesn't result in a situation where we're presenting this bar of, zero or something like that.
That would leave a whole lot of people on the table, maybe for a long time, if that is indeed what we say is good enough.
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Grayson Brulte:
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How do you avoid the collateral that comes when somebody does something silly or stupid? While you're sitting here being honest and transparent, but media or individuals just bundle it all together, and you and I know that it's completely different.
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Nat Beuse:
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Luckily, I think in my case, I try to keep really good context with many of the We'll call it the safety leaders around the industry, if they exist, right? And some of the companies, they're not there. So I can't talk to those people, but in the case of where they are, we talk. We also have more forums, right?
So whether it's SAE is a good forum for that. As we have the automated vehicle safety consortium that gets together and puts out best practices specifically for level four automation. By last count, I think we have. Almost everybody in there that is deploying in the near term, or that has some form of deployment already, so that's a good-sized chunk of the industry.
And we work on legitimate safety things that we think, hey, it would be really nice if we all got together and had a best practice around this. So that's one piece of it. I think the other piece of it is just a normal SE standards process that kind of churns along a lot of activity in that camp, too.
And then there's other things like IEEE is involved. There are things that are happening globally with the UN. And so I think the more that companies engage in these processes and these activities. I think the better off we will be as an industry. And so at least for my part, I try to get more people around the table to get us going in the same direction.
I can remember, probably circa 2012 or 2013. You might remember there were certain activities going on. Yes. And I remember asking folks like, What's the formula we're talking about, like crickets, because, that was a timeframe when a lot of people thought, Oh, I don't need to talk to anybody.
I can do it on my own. Yes. I think that has dramatically changed. Certainly, I think the NHTSA guidance had some influence on that. At least I'd like to believe that. It did. But I'm hap, happier in the way that we've. where we sit in kind of 2024 than where we sat for sure in 2012, 2013, but there's more work to be done.
We need more players around the table. We need to start tackling some of these other, maybe more complex safety challenges that are being raised. I was actually talking to a fellow competitor slash colleague just before this and I was talking about, metrics is an area where I think we as an industry could probably do more to really be just a little bit more crisp on what are the metrics that really matter post deployment.
So you've already made the decision to go, right? I think a lot of times we get caught in this this circle around like metrics to launch. What we really should be focusing on is after you launch, what are you measuring and how are you keeping track of things? And so I mentioned this before, part of our safety case, that's a big piece of it.
The decision's already done. How are you keeping track on it? I think this is an area where we can be super helpful and measuring crashes is useful, but it already happened. We want to get to the things that are before the crash actually happens from the system perspective, if there is something wrong in the system or the operations.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Then you learn and it ties into an Aurora's culture of transparency has been pretty clear to have that because at the end of the day, you're a business and you are going to, you are going to launch and you're going to expand.
The question is those new metrics. So let's go post launch, you're operating, your customers are happy. Do you expand the framework now? Because if you enter, it's called the next phase of the business.
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Nat Beuse:
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Yeah, exactly. I think the beauty of the safety case framework is that it actually allows you to do that. So remember I mentioned, it's very, the way you structure the claims allows you to be very targeted in what you go after. Or not to go after, it's you can identify what are the things that you need new evidence on. So maybe think of it like. I don't know, like Legos, right? They're like Lego blocks you can put together, and put them together, you can make a house.
So if we were building a house and we wanted to add an addition on you go add the addition on. It's very flexible in that way. In fact, if you look at the way we've done ours it actually even encompasses our current operations today. So our framework you can think about it, certain claims turn on because we have vehicle operators in the cab.
They're responsible for certain functions. As you solve those Then those claims get turned off, let's say, and then other claims turn on because you're now headed down the driverless path. And so there are certain things that don't matter anymore, and there are certain things that matter now more. And so that's how it's flexible, is when you can go to the next, if if you add more trucks you can't assume, for example, that your operational side that you were doing for fewer than that stays the same, right?
So you go force yourself to go look at those claims and say, Is the evidence there complete or do I need to do some more? And you do that in advance.
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Grayson Brulte:
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When Aurora rolls out your vans your passenger side of the business.
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Nat Beuse:
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I would say we're talking trucks.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Oh, I know that, but no, but I'm evolving in this. Do you build a new safety framework for that?
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Nat Beuse:
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I think what would not what I think, what I know is. The, again there's certain claims, for example, that don't matter for trucks. People messing around with inside the cab because there's nobody in there, right? But in the past car environment where there could be somebody in there, those are claims that now we need to address.
So that's how we built it, is that you can tailor it to the product that you have, but the basic methodology stays the same. So in, in that example. You, the claims that you need to go now look at is the ones that have to deal with like passenger interaction inside the vehicle. What about they need to get out?
All these other kind of things that very much germane to that environment that are different. Likewise, you're probably not worrying about FF and CSA inspections or something like that, that are very applicable to the commercial side that don't really apply to what you're doing on a pass card side.
Maybe pieces of those, but certainly not the whole thing. You're not checking hours of service records that you mentioned before. So then, I think these are. Things that my perspective is having been in a department and worked with so many different colleagues in there is to actually be able to build this framework in a way that's scalable with what the product that we're building and that we plan to put on the streets.
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Grayson Brulte
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You're building a great product. I give you a lot of credit from my perspective and the industry perspective. Thank you for the honesty and the transparency because your honesty and transparency, it's not only going to help Aurora, it's going to help the whole industry. And that's what we need a lot more in this industry.
So thank you. And to the leadership team at Aurora for doing that. Nat, we made it happen. We finally had you on, it's been too long, but we got to do this more often. It's been great.
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Nat Beuse:
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It's been wonderful. Thanks a lot. And that was a great conversation. Thanks for the questions. I think these are the right questions to be asking, and I think for my part, I think the more we can raise awareness about some of the thoughtfulness that's at least going on behind some players, I think that raises all tide. So thanks for the opportunity to talk.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You're welcome. Keep doing what you're doing. The industry thanks you.
Today's tomorrow. Tomorrow's today. The future is Aurora. Nat, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today.
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Nat Beuse:
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Thanks Grayson.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Thank you for listening to SAE Tomorrow Today. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please kindly rate, review, and let us know what topics you'd like for us to explore next.
Nat Beuse: SAE International makes no representations as to the accuracy of the information presented in this podcast. The information and opinions are for general information only. SAE International does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this podcast.
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