Soroush Salehian: Yes. Sure Suji, happy to answer that. So obviously with Daimler Truck, we’re first laser focused on delivering on our first program launch SOP for 2026, right? We’re acting at Tier 1 as the exclusive supplier for long range and ultra long-range LiDAR for the series production program. We are obviously working across the board on providing sensors and some of the perception software aspects that we talked about for that program. We’re also closely engaged with the Torc team, which is developing of course the autonomy stack. And overall, obviously, we see opportunities in the future to expand this partnership for potentially other markets, other regions and other applications. The whole point is that we’re building a foundation of a technology stack, which is really enabling highway autonomy at highway speeds.
This can be applied to a number of applications. As I mentioned earlier, you can see that not just commercial vehicle, but now also passenger vehicle OEMs are increasingly looking to expand their operational design domain to higher speeds. And with the NHTSA ruling that requires more than 60 miles per hour automatic emergency braking, we think that’s going to be important and kind of requirement for OEMs including passenger car side. So, the short answer is bottom line the developments we’re doing is not going to be limited just to a certain use on the commercial vehicle side. We see potential opportunities to expand from there. And as we have more that we can share in the future, if we were able to do that we would of course be talking about it.
But we do see opportunity to further expand our partnership here and we’ll continue to work together. I just want to mention also that obviously we have a couple of exciting events later this month both with the CEO of Torc Robotics later this week in London actually where we’re going to be on stage talking about the latest progress with our program on the production side as well as later this month at the end of the month with the Daimler Truck Head of Autonomous Group at ACT Expo in Vegas who will have some more exciting items to talk about. So, feel free to join at that time.
Suji DeSilva: No, that’s great. Great exposure for you guys obviously. I’m going to step back and ask a question about the kind of the process that you went through to win Daimler Truck. Maybe you could enumerate three or four key steps in that as you look back on it. And I’m asking the question in the and trying to understand your pipeline better. Which of those steps did you when you passed it, did you gain the most confidence that you would win this customer? And in the pipeline how many potential customers are maybe already past that phase just to get a qualitative sense?
Soroush Salehian: Sure. Good question. So, I can give you at a high level. Obviously, there is a number of steps and typically the process could take a number of months to one or two years right from the very beginning first conversations. But at a high level there is RFI, RFQ and then of course the final nomination and there’s a number of steps in between. I think one of the key milestones is first of all the transition from RFI to RFQ stage which is critical and that is where the final commercial bids as well as the key step which is manufacturing quality audit happen past RFQ stage. And there is kind of a down selection phase maybe sometimes happening during the RFQ phase in which the finalists are picked. So, there’s kind of three main, but two checkpoints after the RFQ.
So, there’s RFQ and two more checkpoints with the audit as well as the down selection. And with Daimler Truck, of course, we’ve gone through all of those and we were able to since we introduced it early in the year last year advanced to the RFQ stage and then from there, within a quarter or a few months after that we talked about passing the manufacturing audit. And then from there, we became the finalist and we won it just a quarter after that. So within two quarters from RFQ to manufacturing audit finalist and at work. We’re now talking about, okay, a number of other programs. There’s multiple others, as I mentioned, including passenger commercial vehicles. And we have advanced on a number of those past this RFQ phase. And as I mentioned with this top 10 passenger OEM, we have now crossed both RFQ phase.
We have now crossed the manufacturing auto phase. And we have now crossed the finalist being a finalist on that final phase of the RFQ to the nomination. So, we’re it’s been only a couple of months. We’ve made significant progress on this program and we’re pretty excited about that.
Suji DeSilva: Appreciate that Soroush. It’s very detailed. Thank you.
Operator: There are no further questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the call for today. [Operator Closing Remarks].
