All right. Good afternoon, everyone. This is on? We are thrilled today to have Gil West, the COO of Cruise with us. Prior to joining Cruise, you were also the COO of Delta Air Lines, and just flew in today. Nice. Yeah, just flew in today. Thanks for joining us. I am built. Yeah. Great to be here. All right, well, let me do the disclosures. You can get your LaCroix. We'll handle all that. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and the Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The disclosures are also at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today by GM may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and GM undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to GM's Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Maybe we should start a little bit with your background. I would first love to hear, you know, what attracted you most to the Cruise opportunity. When you do a lot of meetings and you sit down, you talk with investors, what is sort of the biggest part that is still most misunderstood? Yeah. Well, let me just say I'm a transportation geek at heart, so, you know, it didn't take much arm twisting to join the Cruise team given the, we're creating a whole new mode of transportation. That's the big draw for me. You know, I've been here for a little over two years now as COO. Yep. I'd just say really just living the dream in terms of probably the most advanced application of AI that the world's ever seen, you know, with self-driving cars. It's an exciting space to be in. You know, I think, before I joined Cruise, as you mentioned, I was COO at Delta Air Lines, was there over a dozen years, that was, you know, that was, I joined about just after bankruptcy there. Team sport, but we took the airline from bankruptcy to kind of the pinnacle of the industry. Reliability, customer experience, most profitable, most value. I think some of those lessons transfer over to Cruise. Not all, but, I mean, aircraft are not autonomous vehicles, but there are some things that overlapped that in parallel. So Safety, of course big part of the equation. I think the airlines are probably the pinnacle example of safety management, risk management. We adopted best practices with safety. It gates everything we're doing at Cruise. Reliability, of course, customer experience, really cost management efficiencies, you know, leveraging your fleet, high asset, fleet to drive utilization those type of things. There's clearly some parallels with what we're trying to do at Cruise. Transportation economics. Yeah. Yep. I know my team saw a couple of them, rolling around the streets last night. Yep. Maybe, I think it's been about a year and a half- Yeah ... in San Francisco now. Can you just sort of talk to us about some of the early learnings over that last year and a half in San Francisco, both on the positive side as well as sort of hurdles you said, "Okay, these are challenges we really have to overcome as we think about scaling to new markets like Austin or Phoenix, et cetera."? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we just to give a little bit of context around it. We launched full driverless service a little over one year ago. You know, since then, we've accumulated over 1 million mi of driverless miles. This is no safety driver, but driverless miles. We've added the public in the cars as well and of course continue to expand. There's a lot of lessons and learnings flow from that. I would probably bucket it into three different buckets. First is the customer experiences. We brought the public in. Just refining that based on feedback. As you would expect, we've got good data sources from our customers. Generally, it's continued the app development. This is an app that you would use to hail a vehicle just like you would an Uber, as an example. That app development through the eyes of the customer, that development has continued. Giving the customer more control over the experience is another big piece of the equation. Especially the kind of in-cabin experience in terms of being able to just, you know, end a ride if you get to where you think is a nice destination, you wanna stop without having to talk to somebody, being able to control the temperature, play your music, you know, variety of different things. That piece has been, I think instrumental in the development. Reliability is another bucket I would add. Again, you know, it's a lot different, the signal you get institutionalize a lot of that as we move forward. That point around scale and sort of constraints to scale, it's sort of, you know, there, you mentioned earlier how this is such a complicated engineering problem. Are there any learnings you've had where you can sort of increase the pace at which you expand the service radius? Like how fast, how long does it take before you can be fully throughout the San Francisco metropolitan area and then learnings which you can go to Austin, Texas, and say, "We will start with a much larger service radius... Yeah ... than we did previously"? Again, a little bit of context. We started in San Francisco to develop the tech here because I think we viewed it as the most complex urban environment to kind of flush the technology out. You hear about edge cases, et cetera. You guys walk around the streets here, you see plenty of the edge cases, so it's a good environment to develop in. So we've learned quickly, we've expanded quickly, you know, both what we would call the operating domain throughout the city. Time of day is another variable, so as we went to daytime operations, fully driverless. There's a number of variables that we have and levers that we have as we expand, number of AVs in a given point in time. What I would say is everything we do is gated through safety, ultimately. As we, you know. Then we learn based on safety, reliability, all the signal that comes in, and it's really what I would describe as a continuous learning machine. It continues to mine the data, train the neural network that we use, and basically improve the stack so that, you know, it's better and better and better as time goes on. There's a continual flywheel model, and then we can take that to other markets as well. The stack definitely is extendable into other markets. Okay. You know, earlier on when you mentioned, you know, 3 of the important points around customer experience, more in-app control and then reliability. Mm-hmm. You know, one of the questions I've always had about, you know, how quickly could you scale, how do you think about the idea of partnering with like a rideshare network that already has human drivers to fill in for a lot of the use cases, you could offer users and say, "If you'd like to have an autonomous ride that's at a fraction of the price within this radius, you can. We also have millions of people who can drive you anywhere, over time you can sort of expand the autonomous radiuses. Is Partnerships the way you think about, or is it more we wanna stay top of funnel? Well, I think, you know, we're open to partnerships, let me say that. Partnerships are kind of fundamental in the way we're approaching the business in different areas than the example you give. You know, I wouldn't necessarily rule it out. You know, just first on partnerships, you know, our ability to scale is really enabled through partnerships. We've got as we think about it and as we go to markets and as we scale, we think we can do this with, you know, minimal incremental spend because of the partnership. Infrastructure partnerships, you know, charging real estate, data offload, et cetera, as well as service partnerships, so maintenance, et cetera. Then, of course, we've got a big partnership with General Motors around the production of purpose-built vehicles. All those partnerships are kind of fundamental in the way we operate, and I think we do have a partnership model in our DNA. You know, as it comes to go to market, you know, there, I think, what we have and what we'll deploy shortly with our first purpose-built vehicle, the Origin, is, I think a much better product at a much lower cost. I think we ask ourselves, you know, with that model, does it make sense to partner or not, especially, you know, as we move into this. Because our experience to date, customers just love our R&D vehicles It's better experience, they're consistent. As we move into the Origin, you know, a few of us have had the pleasure of riding in it's, it's game changing. I truly believe we'll have a, you know, you fast-forward a year from now, we'll have a cult following around the vehicle. That's the form factor that we start to drive cost out of the business with. We look at those factors and we go, you know, "Why wouldn't we go to market ourselves? That's been our approach when we go to market. Okay. Let's talk about the technology a little bit, and I think we can then maybe go into sources of scale over the long term as well. There's a few different philosophies about the way to think about the technology behind autonomous, whether it's radar, lidar, mapping, no mapping, et cetera. Yeah. Just maybe to level set everyone in the room, just remind us of sort of where Cruise sits on each of those key areas, why you chose those, and then if you wanna go into sort of as you scale, what are the sources of leverage in the model. Yeah ... across those decisions? Yeah. Good question. I think as we think about autonomy first, you know, just philosophically the way we're approaching this is, we're looking to develop the driverless performance as quick as we can. That's kind of where we've, where we've emphasized. We'll look for basically, any, sensor feature that can accelerate that. We've, you know, we've deployed maps, you know, cameras, radar, lidar, you know. There's no one sensor does it all, so it's a combination of the suite to get the 360 view of the world. But we're always looking and iterating, right? The technology keeps developing. With that in mind, what we, what we've tried to do is accelerate the performance of the self-driving features in the AV stack. As we've been able to unlock the ability of cars to safely drive themselves in this environment, then now, the focus continues to be how then do we drive cost out of the business. Make the cars drive themselves, look at the tech, advance the tech, then how do we drive cost out of the business? As we've done that, of course, we've partnered with General Motors around the Origin vehicle, which is our, you know, purpose-built vehicle, autonomous vehicle, no conventional driver controls at all. Mm-hmm. That, that's truly remarkable. That is an unlock for us then to drive the cost out of the vehicle. As you play that forward, we'll continue to look at hardware, software, both in terms of component cost as well as the quantity of components that are on the vehicle, and continue to drive cost out as we move forward. Then, you know, we're also fortunate, we've got, I think one of, if not the only now, Founder CEO still at, you know, at a serious AV company. Kyle, our CEO, he's got a lot of superpowers, but, you know, one big one is that he really sees where the puck's moving in terms of the tech. you know, we're able to really play that out forward, you know, and then help understand what tech should we be pursuing, how should we apply it? Because everything's about application, you knoW in what we're doing. It's not just building tech for tech's sake. It's how do we apply it and really have a disruptive business in the process. Mm-hmm. You sort of talked the hockey puck analogy and sort of, you know, how slippery is the ice and how fast the puck gonna move the next few years? Yeah. I guess maybe let's take a look back a little bit. You know, I think that autonomous driving generally probably hasn't progressed as fast as a lot of us thought the last five years for a variety of reasons. What in your mind are sort of the one or two key reasons why things have gone slower than some would've expected in the past? Going forward, what are sort of the key macro gating factors? Sure determine how fast we get to autonomy? Yeah. Great question. look, I You know, again, I've been in the business a little over two years, but from my perspective, it's damn hard to make the cars drive themselves, right? You know, we've been able to accomplish that, right? I mean, you can go for a ride tonight and see it- Yep ... if you haven't already. The tech is here. It works. I think, you know, I, as I look at it, you know, we've got an execution DNA at Cruise, you know. Part of it, I think there's a mix, a special mix of things that lead to success. Gotta have the tech, right? You gotta have the talent. Gotta have capital and partnerships, which you gotta be able to execute. I think combination of all those things are pretty powerful. If I look at where we're at now, tech works. You know, that's been, in my opinion, the biggest variance in the whole thing. Last year was a big year for us, right? We launched full driverless for the first time. We were the first company to ever launch a commercial paid ride-hail in a major US city. 1 million miles now complete driverless. Really for us, it's, there's a lot of barriers to entry behind us now. A lot of that variance is in the rearview mirror, so to speak. As we look forward, I really think this year is really pivotal year for us, and I think we basically work through most of the remaining barriers of entry this year. The way I would describe them first is regulatory. We should finish out all the federal as well as the California regulatory requirements, so that's a big check. Scale is another big one. you know, scaling's hard. It really is. A lot of lessons, but, you know, we're, we've, I think developed a playbook that we've demonstrated as we move from San Francisco to Austin and Phoenix in less than 90 days from scratch and stood those up. We know the tech can move into more markets, and, we've also developed playbook on how we do that through partnerships to scale. Really the next big. Of course, all that means, you know, more rides, more deliveries. We're in the, not just the ride-hail space, but the delivery space. We start to really start to increase our revenue flywheel. The other big unlock for us this year is landing the purpose-built vehicle, the Origin. You know, I would say probably, right after making the cars drive themselves, the next toughest thing is to build a purpose-built vehicle. You've kind of got a partnership between a tech company and an OEM, both a lot of real strengths, but the way I've looked at it is they run at different gearing ratios, right? That there's some magic to put those together and really credit, you know, GM team, Kyle and the Cruise team, you know, to be able to make that work. It wouldn't happen without, you know, Mary Barra and the GM leadership's team top-down support to make things work. It's really hard to design and develop a purpose-built vehicle. You know, we've not only done that but, you know, we've got the supply chain. There's been investments at Factory Zero at in Michigan to build the vehicles. It's tooled up. It's ready for full scale production, right? We're in the al stages of certification. You know, regulatory, scale, purpose-built vehicle, and then all that effectively is a combination to unlock most of the barriers to entry for us as we go forward. Then, you know, fast-forward through the years and it's more the same, and we just continue to add zeros. We scale from, you know, hundreds of vehicles to thousands of vehicles this year. I think this is a real pivotal year for us that I think will really transform not just Cruise, but the whole perception of autonomous vehicles. As you've rolled out the full driverless in San Francisco, I remember over the years there was discussion about sort of the psychological barriers for rider to feel comfortable taking a driverless car on the highway- Yep ... in heavy traffic, you know, going 80mi an hour, et cetera. Yeah. What can you share with us about sort of user behavior or cohort behavior as they've gotten more comfortable with the idea there's no one behind the wheel, quote unquote? Yeah. Yes. Great question. How many of you have actually taken a ride? All right. See if this fits with your experience. Virtually everybody I've talked to that's been in a car, which is now a growing number of people, after about 15 minutes, you're almost back on your cell phone again. You know, it normalizes quickly, which is exactly what we want. You know, I think there's probably the first time you take a trip, there's certainly an anxiety. You know, I equate it to the first time I ever flew, you know. Right. It was, like, kind of an out-of-body experience 'cause suddenly this car with nobody in it pulls up, you get inside it with your phone, and it drives you away. You know, I was kinda like, "Ho. What is this about?" Honestly, quickly, it just normalizes. It's like, "Okay, this thing's got it. It's safe, you know?" It's, you know, it's able to navigate situations that human drivers would really struggle with. I think all of that, you know, I think it's something that really just normalizes in a hurry. Once you do, you know, certainly once you do one or two rides, it becomes normal experience. The nice part of that, I keep saying it's a better experience, but, you know, I think it's, and this, just with our Chevrolet Bolt that are here as R&D vehicles, certainly with the Origin it's at a completely different level. Just even with our R&D vehicles, it's consistent. You don't have another human in the car. You don't have the bizarre smells that you may encounter in some of these rides. I mean, it's definitely a different experience. I think that part coupled with the fact that you realize fairly quickly the car is, you know, safe and, has control of its behavior. Okay. Let me ask about the losses a little bit. You know, I think Cruise, you know, loses about $2 billion this year, maybe half of which is cash. How should we sort of think about the loss levels and sort of the cash investment levels as you go forward and sort of roll out the Origin and, or sort of scale to the unit numbers you were talking to earlier? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the way I would describe it, scale matters. Scale matters in our business. It drives revenue and ultimately profitability. You know, the sooner we scale, the sooner we overcome our overhead costs and reach profitability. We're positioned to scale is the bottom line. As we enter new markets and scale, you think about cost again, I think I mentioned it earlier, but not a lot of appreciable incremental cost for us to scale, 'cause we're doing it through partnerships, you know, other folks' capital. We're also driving, you know, disproportionately lower operating costs at the same time 'cause we're bringing scale to the table as well. As we enter new markets, we're able to do it efficiently. Also, the other big variable is vehicles and vehicle cost. I mean, we've already made the investment to develop the purpose-built vehicle. This isn't something we've gotta do, we've done it. We tooled up for it. There's a plant there, you know, so we're ready for full out production. Scale matters. We're positioned to scale, you know, quickly. You know, the economics are very strong as we start to reach scale. I think, the other thing I would mention is, you know, we're in two good initial business segments, so ride-hail as well as the delivery business. I think that they're primed for autonomous application, right? You take the driver out of the equation. You basically are driving, long life vehicles, so we're able to amortize our life over 1 million miles, as an example. Really we're able to drive a much higher utilization rate than the current models, right? I think the economics bode well. You know, I think, the tech really starts to expand as we drive costs, you know, out, further out of the business so that it starts to grow to the point that it starts to actually take some personal car ownership into the model. Okay. If anyone has questions for Gil. Raise your hand. We We have mic runners going around, so one of them. Sure front right here. Hi. Well, super interesting. It sounds like a lot of progress over the last 12 months from when we were here last year. Where does it leave Uber? Like, if you can go straight into, yeah, ride-hail and delivery with high utilizations purpose-built vehicles. I mean, how do you see the existing infrastructure in that space dealing with this new competitive dynamic? Yeah, I think, I mean, can't obviously speak for Uber. You know, just looking at it through our vantage point, you know, it does seem like the right go-to-market strategy for us. If you're a cost leader, you know, with a better experience, makes sense to go to market that way. I think, you know, we'll we're entering the first year of our rapid scaling, but it's a very big market, right? It's a global market as well. I think, you know, the first number of years, you know, it's a high-class problem, but we'll be supply constrained, you know. Even with the probably best partner that's been producing scaled vehicles for over 100 years, right? We've got it geared up, but still, you know, it takes some time to get critical mass. We're, you know, we're comfortable with our approach. From a product market fit standpoint, the customers love it, you know. I mean, we've got, you know, very high Net Promoter Score and star ratings, so I think the people that have tried it. For us, though, it's building the availability side of the equation out is the other part that we're very focused on. We know we've gotta have it when people need it, you know, round the clock, you know, in a geography that makes it a dependable mode of transportation. We, you know, we see the path there, and we're gonna, we're going for it. Not to have you, I mean, ask one more and then, Gil, I'll go to you. Sure. Not to have you, I don't wanna have you talk to any specific competitors. Yeah ... but it's interesting 'cause we've seen other competitors sort of de-emphasize programs a bit more. You know, when you think about Ford with Argo, or even Waymo has had some restructurings. Yep ... and Alphabet has, quite deep pockets. Yep. Just sort of maybe stepping back, what are sort of some of the key competitive differentiators for you as you were sort of evaluating going to Cruise versus any of these other players at that point, do you think have sort of enabled you to not go down the path that some of the other companies have? Yeah, great question. First of all, the partnership, really important. I think it's probably, you know, I mean, it's a key strategic advantage to have a partnership with GM, and have the ability, again, to make the partnership work, is really important. I think it's key unlock for us on profitability. You know, again, it's one thing to develop the tech. It's hard. It can become your whole focus. To think commercially how to apply it is a completely different ballgame, and then have the ability to do it is even harder. The partnership's important for us. You know, I think, you know, I think you're seeing just the kind of the competitive landscape sort itself out naturally. I mean, it's a separation of the winners and the losers in the marketplace, right? I think, you know, folks with the right ingredients, you know, the talent and the tech and the capital and the partnerships are, you know, winning and accelerating while others are dying. I think it's just a cycle that fuels itself. We're seeing that happen. You know, again, I'm here to tell you, and there's plenty of proof points, if you walk around the city. Right the tech is here. It's now, it's deployed, now it's just a matter of scaling is the reality of it, and continuing to drive the costs down, you know, to produce the profits that, we're gonna produce. You know, I think that's, you know, that's the way I see it, is that at Cruise, what the proof points for me that, you know, had me take the leap was, the partnership and the execution DNA. It wasn't just about technology, it was about the application of technology, which I'm personally obsessed with. I think it's the right combination. It's huge markets. The economics at scale are, you know, it's incredible business. I think all the necessary ingredients are here, and the ability to execute it exists, so just happy to be a part of the team. Anything you guys shared all on the price per mile you'd have to charge in Denver that's gonna make it breakeven? No. I think, probably the way I would describe it, is, you know, we know that the markets open up really not just here, but everywhere. Right ... once you get into the, you know, $2, $1 a mile price point, right? You know, that's ultimately where we wanna be. I mean, we wanna be that level. We got a good line of sight to get there. You know, the team, you know, again, the talent and the team's great at Cruise. There's a lot of experience managing cost, managing both at the product level and the operating level, as well as utilization of assets. You know, I'm convinced, you know, we've got the trajectory to get there. That starts to open big markets up. It's not just traditional ride-hail, you know, it starts to grow the market from both ends at that point. Yeah. That's right. Question over there. Yep. Yeah. can you share with us, kinda edge cases and maybe out of your 1 million miles or total number of trips- yeah, how many have you had to have, like, human intervention or any type of, kind of disruption to the trips and then how that is improving? Yeah, great question. You know, we report all our safety statistics publicly. I think if you looked at the last annual report, I think it was 700,000 driverless miles at the time. You know, no, of course, no fatalities or near misses. On a safety standpoint, you know, we continue to improve and, or, have been happy with the performance. In terms of interventions, I'll just say that the AVs are err on the side of safety, right? When they encounter something and view it potentially as a safety event, they'll err on the side of safety. As an example, they'll pull over, put the flashers on, right? We're able to recover the vehicle either remotely or physically. In some cases, we may have to recover the vehicle. You know, that part of the equation continue, we continue to learn at. For us, I think, you know, in the grand scheme of things, these are relatively easy problems to solve on the reliability front. Keep in mind we've just got tremendous data coming in, so we're able to learn and continue to iterate and develop tools to manage this. It's really about now industrializing the vehicles so that, you know, we're able to really build that level of reliability that's important to the business. You know, there's a lot of focus around that really. Okay. All right. Well, Gil, thank you so much. Can we do the next steps? Thank you, Brian. Yeah. It's exciting. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.