Self-driving truck developer Plus to go public via SPAC merger

Autonomous trucking company Plus is set to go public with Hennessy Capital via SPAC merger. David Liu, Plus Co-Founder & CEO, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video Transcript

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MYLES UDLAND: All right, well it's been a busy year for the SPAC market and a number of autonomous play have come public via that route. The latest one, announced earlier today, is Plus. They will come public-- the autonomous trucking company will come public through a combination with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. V. And Plus co-founder and CEO David Liu joins us now to discuss the deal.

David, thanks so much for jumping on this morning. Congratulations on the deal. Let's just start with telling our audience a little bit about, you know, what Plus does, what your ambitions are in the trucking space, and where you guys are at in development today.

DAVID LIU: Thank you and good morning. Plus, we are a autonomous driving technology company. Our headquarter in Cupertino with offices in China. We are a unique company in the sense of our market focus, our differentiated technology, and our clear roadmap to commercialization. We focus on the $4 trillion long-haul trucking market where we can drive growth and have significant impact. Our autonomous driving technology improve safety, reduce costs, and save the environment. We have a highly differentiated technology platform built on software, hardware, and big data. Our technology is commercially validated by our customers and we have run driver our full autonomous pilot operation since 2018.

We also believe that big data is the primary driver for maturity and robustness of our system. Our ability to deploy technology commercially and scale really enable us to accumulate that data and that we expect to have eight billion miles of real world data by 2024. We'll use that data to continuously improve our technology. And lastly and most importantly, we have built a global ecosystem partners, and together we're able to start commercializing autonomous driving technology this year. And that really sets us apart from others in the automotive driving industry.

BRIAN SOZZI: David, let me just hit some of the numbers here. You're looking for-- in your investor presentation-- $1 billion in sales by 2023. This year you're estimating $16 million. That is a very large jump. What has to go-- does everything have to go right for you to hit those numbers?

DAVID LIU: So we are starting to commercialize our product at scale this year. So $1 billion is a large number, but in the grand scheme of things that the global long-haul trucking market is $4 trillion. So it's a drop in the bucket in terms of the impact we will be able to make when we deploy our technology to scale.

BRIAN SOZZI: Also, in the--

JULIE HYMAN: David, it's Julie here-- I'm sorry go

ahead, Sozz.

BRIAN SOZZI: No, I just wanted to follow up on that, David. In the deck, it mentions you have 7,000 truck orders. Who has placed those orders, and are those actual orders where money is changing hands?

DAVID LIU: So we have commercial contracts in both the US and China. So in the US, we've been working with some of the largest fleets here. And these orders are to be delivered by the end of next year. In fact, we have started to deliver on some of these units, starting in Q1 of this year.

And in China, we have obtained preorders of the volume-produceable truck that we will be releasing later in the year. So we have a joint venture with FAW, the largest truck manufacturer in the world, to coproduced autonomous trucks. And we have down through-- over the past two years we've been working on this truck. And it will be released in the later part of this year.

JULIE HYMAN: David, it's Julie here. As we have seen from some other companies, whether in the EB space or autonomous driving space, who have public through SPACs-- how much do you worry that you've come public before you're, perhaps, ready to. What lessons might you have learned from these other companies that have come public, and have sold off sharply because maybe they weren't quite ready for prime time?

DAVID LIU: Great question. Going public has always been our goal. We have evaluated a range of options on how to fund our commercialization effort, and scale our business effectively. Our board determined that they are pursuing a SPAC transaction. At the moment it made the most sense, because it provides us access to capital. And also brings us a partner in Hennessy, who share our focus on sustainable technologies and is aligned with our growth and value creation objective.

We look very much forward to working closely with Hennessy as we move to commercial deployment, and deliver value for our drivers, customers, and shareholders.

MYLES UDLAND: All right. David Liu is the co-founder and CEO Plus. David, thanks so much for jumping on this morning. Congratulations on the deal, and we'll certainly track your progress as you begin your journey as a publicly-traded company.

DAVID LIU: Thank you.