You have twenty seconds to comply: meet the self-driving ‘Robocar’ you can buy

We could simply spend 250 words trotting out lines from RoboCop, but as fun as that might be, this one’s quite simple: it’s a new self-driving car dubbed ‘Robocar’ from a Californian company called Tensor.

Obviously you’d buy that for a dollar, but we suspect it’s a bit pricier. The key however, is that you can actually buy it – Tensor’s offering it up for private consumption. It’s apparently been designed and built from scratch precisely for autonomous driving, not a hacked existing platform.

As such, Tensor claims more than 100 sensors on board the Robocar, all geared up for Level 4 autonomy: cameras, lidar, radar, microphone, ultrasonic, heck, even smoke detectors. Will it protect the innocent, serve the public trust and uphold the law? You’d certainly hope so.

Naturally, the entire thing is powered by AI, not a gunned-down Detroit police officer’s brain, and because it’s powered by AI, it can apparently perform its own checks and even maintain itself. Its makers claim you can even talk to it and have “conversational interaction”. Probably about TJ Lazer.

There’s little details about the actual chassis and propulsion bits, but we do know it uses chips from Nvidia, will be built by VinFast (remember them?) in Vietnam, and offered in the US, Europe and the UAE. More as we get it.