The Six Five team discusses Plus Secures Major L4 Trucking Win.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Hey, let’s go into a completely different topic, but guess what? It absolutely involves AI. So here’s the backdrop. So Plus is a software provider for vehicles and trucks for ADAS and an L4. Okay? And we’ve had them on The Six Five Summit. Both of us have written articles about them, but they just announced a major deal with one of Europe’s largest trucking, I’ll call it conglomerates, called Traton. And key messages are this, right? The top five OEMs truck OEMs have declared partnerships with Plus, and that’s I think pretty important. And these are folks like Amazon, DSV, Bosch, the tier one, tier two, Luminar, a company that we’re familiar with, Nikola, Aveco. These are the ones that are just public. But I think what this does to me is it gives Plus… It gives me an element of permanence, okay? Because not only are they shipping L1 and L2 solutions into Aveco, Nikola, Bosch, Luminar, Amazon, and DSV, unlike their competition, Aurora, Torque, Kodiak and Wabi who they skipped over L1 and L2 went directly to L4.
Now we haven’t necessarily seen a lot of action. We’ve seen a little bit of action from Aurora with Amazon with the L4, but I’m interested to see in the future what Plus can do here. Ironically, Dan, we covered the disaggregation play that Plus did, where they disaggregated the different elements of their platform. So for instance, Intel could use them for a certain piece, but this solution that I’m talking about with Traton actually is an integrated solution that comes in, which to me was ironic. I was expecting this announcement to be about disaggregation, but it was about an aggregated solution. Anyways, that’s what I got here.
Daniel Newman: That’s it?
Patrick Moorhead: That’s it, baby.
Daniel Newman: All right, so I just had a couple. I had the chance to talk to their chief operating officer, Shawn Kerrigan. Definitely a great week for the company being able to announce effectively that the two of the major five autonomy platform trucking companies are going to go with Plus. Aveco, here. And then, of course, they were able to land Traton, which probably Navistar is the brand that more people would’ve known historically. It is a big moment and we’re looking by the end of the decade, we’re going to see a lot of autonomous trucks. I come from a family that’s in the trucking space. It’s funny. My dad didn’t believe it would be in his lifetime. Dad, it’s going to happen in your lifetime. It’s happening in your lifetime. So this is moving very quickly.
Effectively, we’ve got three different solutions. You’ve got totally turnkey, which is what the Daimler approach is, and then you’ve got the approach that’s hardware, software, aggregation plus OEM. And then what you really have with Plus is pure software. So it’s purely focused on software. The hardware and the truck building is left up to the partner. So that’s how the three companies split and create the value add. So they’re building block focused and their building block is software. That’s where they truly believe they’re able to differentiate.
You look at the TAM, you’re talking about a market that’s got a trillion plus dollars of TAM in the self-driving trucking space. It’s big. It’s a big opportunity. Of course, that’s all in, that’s hardware, software and truck, not just the software itself. So Plus obviously can’t capitalize on all of that, but it is meaningful. And again, this is directionally really good for the company, which is going to likely need to raise more money at some point. It’s either going to make another big raise, maybe it’ll go IPO if enough scale. But having these right partners, having these right OEMs, having… By the way West and an East Wind with Traton being a West Wind for U.S., Europe and then, of course, Aveco in China. They really have an opportunity to get meaningful saturation into all these different markets. And that’s important.
And then it’s strength in validation that they are best of breed software now with two of five. One’s doing it all. So of all those that are going to be outsourcing the software with Aurora and others, 50% of them have picked Plus. So strong, good win. Good moment for the company, Pat. And we’ve ridden in one of these. We didn’t run the L4 ones yet, but we’ve been in an autonomous truck with an experienced one of these with an L2 Plus driver. Participation is pretty cool and it’s going to continue to change the world.
Patrick Moorhead: Like what the company’s done. They have separated this out themselves from all China activities that have Aveco is actually in Europe and I think it’s smart. Now they’re the software arms dealer to the west for trucking. And by the way, cars, we haven’t seen a car announcement yet, but I’m expecting that in short order. I’d like to see the company partnering with all the platform providers out there. Interestingly enough, the ones that I listed for ARM, and I know they already have a partnership with NVIDIA on the platform side, but I’d like to see announcements, platform announcements very similar to the one, Daniel, we saw with VMware with private AI. It’s like VMware, private AI for NVIDIA. I’d love to see the Plus capability for Qualcomm, for Intel, for AMD. A company like AMD needs a company like Plus like crazy.
AMD is… They’re in Tesla through Xilinx. They’re in some key safety systems, but AMD is a company that needs what Plus does. And then Intel who has cast off Mobileye and came up with three new SoCs for the car also needs companies like Plus to do that. I’d like to see some integrations in there as well. And not only on the processing platform, because life is more than that, but also on the actuator side and the sensor side is where you need that.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
