Silicon Valley startup Tensor just unveiled a $200,000 luxury
electric SUV designed from the ground up to drive itself
without anyone behind the wheel. This isn't a Tesla.
This is better, actually. The company plans to deliver the
first consumer owned Level 4 autonomous vehicle by late 2026,
meaning the car handles all the driving in approved zones
without human supervision. And Tensor packed this thing
with over 100 sensors, 8 NVIDIA processors, and a folding
steering wheel that disappears into the dashboard when you're
not using it. This thing is like a
transformer. But will people be willing to
actually trust a machine enough to hand over the keys to a
$200,000 investment now? Lyft just reserved hundreds of
these robocars for its own fleet, and that deal includes
something I haven't seen before. And we're going to cover the
hardware that separates this vehicle from anything that Tesla
or Waymo offers. Now there's a regulatory maze
that Tensor still needs to navigate and why Lyft's purchase
could change how we think about owning a car.
And we'll get right into that right after this very short
break. Now, Tensor's robocar enters a
market where no company has sold a Level 4 autonomous vehicle to
individual buyers. The startup spent nearly a
decade in stealth mode, building proprietary technology after
walking away from robotaxi operations in China.
Now this thing is a sleek crossover SUV, and it is covered
in lidar sensors and cameras. No drivers needed.
That's the product that Tensor wants to put in your driveway.
Production will be handled by Vietnamese automaker Vinfast at
its factory in Haipong, which will deliver them starting in
the United Arab Emirates before reaching American customers.
Now let's start with the hardware, though.
Tensor fitted the Ribbocar with 37 cameras, 5 custom lidar
units, 11 radars, 22 microphones, 10 ultrasonic
sensors, and 16 collision detectors.
That sensor count puts pressure on every competitor, and lighter
is the spinning laser system that creates a 3D map of
everything around the car. The rooftop unit scans 360° and
detects objects nearly 1000 feet away.
Cameras mounted underneath the chassis address a blind spot
that has caused problems for other autonomous systems, and
that is something that I haven't really seen too much of.
The primary lighter unit, called Tensor Halo, emits 25.6 million
beams per second. That creates what the company
describes as a 360 degree safety shield around the vehicle.
Four additional blind spot lidars cover areas the main unit
cannot reach. 6 Hyper radars detect both stationary and
moving objects across all distances using 4D tech imaging
for external microphone overlays.
Locate emergency vehicle sirens before they become visible so
the car can pull over safely without visual confirmation.
Most autonomous vehicle developers retrofit existing car
platforms with sensors bolted on afterwards, and Tensor designed
every surface to optimize sensor placement from the first sketch.
Now 8 NVIDIA Dr. EGX 4 chips sit inside what Tensor calls an
onboard supercomputer. The system processes over 53
gigabits of sensor data per second.
For context, that's roughly 1000 times faster than typical home
Internet speeds. The AI runs on transformer based
models trained on data from expert human drivers.
A separate visual language model handles edge cases and
unexpected scenarios. And edge cases are the weird
situations that normal driving patterns don't prepare you for.
If there's construction on the road, maybe there's a cone in
the middle of the road and they have to go around it, that's one
of those weird situations and maybe the cone is tipped over or
maybe there's like some bigger rocks in the road or something,
some random stuff in the road. Tensor engineer this
supercomputer for 10 years or 180,000 miles of operation.
That's really good. Advanced liquid cooling
maintains peak performance across extreme temperatures.
There is a dual power architecture that's provides
full redundancies with multiple power sources ensuring
continuous operation, and every computation happens locally on
the vehicle. There's no cloud, and Tensor
designed the system to work without cloud connectivity,
storing all travel data exclusively on the car itself.
Now you can upgrade over the cloud, of course, over the air
upgrading, that's a thing, and that's going to be happening
with the Tensor vehicles. But all the data for your own
vehicle never gets shared in the cloud, and owners can disable
remote access entirely and control data through an
encrypted smartphone app. Physical cameras can be covered
and microphones can be switched off, and that can all be done
with the app too. Now, I've been digging through
the analytics of this show and noticed that 37% of you are
following this channel. For you, I am forever grateful
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Now, there's 63% of you that probably listen to an episode or
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thank you so much. And you probably just forgot to
hit the follower subscribe button, and that's OK.
But I just ask you if you could do that real quick.
I've been doing this as an independent journalist covering
Elon Musk, SpaceX, Space Flight and tech for the last six or
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next 10 years, and I need your help.
And all I ask from you is one second of your time.
I'm going to give you 10 more years of mine.
All you got to do is hit the follower subscribe button on the
platform you're watching on right now, and I'd be extremely
grateful and blessed to have you here if you do that.
So thank you. Tents are built a $200,000 SUV
with over 100 sensors, massive onboard computing, and a privacy
first architecture that keeps your data away from big tech.
Now let's talk about what this thing actually looks like.
Inside there's a folding steering wheel.
The dash opens up and the steering wheel retracts into the
dash. If you don't want to drive, this
thing can drive you anywhere you want.
You can ask it to drive you to the store.
So if you want to spend a bunch of time shopping, like 2 hours
shopping and you live 10 minutes from the store, but you don't
want to walk because you have a bunch of bags and you know
you're going to be there for a few hours.
You don't need your car to sit there for two hours, right?
So you send it home, you can say drop me off at the store, I'm
going to be there for two hours, pick me up two hours later, go
home for now and the car will do it.
It's just crazy, right? There's no pedals because they
disappear into the foot bed. The center display slides over
to face the former driver's seat, which becomes a reclining
lounge chair with massage, heating and cooling.
If you just want this thing to drive you around and it's going
to be luxury all the time, a massage chair in your car and
you're just sitting there hanging out.
Tensor claims 29 storage compartments fold flat seats for
items up to 10 feet long in a dedicated pet mode that lets
your vehicles transport animals without you even being there,
that's pretty wild. The vehicle targets a luxury
crossover segment, though with dimensions matching a full size
SUV. A112 kWh battery provides an
estimated 250 miles of range. The 845 Volt architecture
enables charging from 20 to 80% in roughly 10 minutes at peak
power, around 400 kilowatts. That opens up long distance
travel in ways current E VS struggle with.
Tensor developed compatibility with robotic charging systems
from Roxys and Bros, allowing the car to plug itself in
without human intervention. Run flat tires.
Let the vehicle continue driving up to 45 mph for an hour after a
puncture. That gives the autonomous system
time to reach a safe location and pull off RGB mini LED
display panels on the exterior communicate the vehicle's
intentions to pedestrians and cyclists.
Coach style doors feature radar based obstacle detection too.
You have soft closed motors and they can de ice themselves too.
Now we have to talk about Lyft too because remember when I said
that in the beginning of this show, Lyft is going to be a
partner for this crew here. Lyft's partnership adds a
economic base for Tensor. Tensor will ship from Vietnamese
manufacturer Vinfast with Lyft's platform pre installed.
That changes everything completely.
You can deploy your personal vehicle on Lyft's rideshare
networks in markets where Level 4 autonomy is permitted.
The car earns money while parked in your driveway.
You can let it go wild. Say if you're going to the
store, you know you're going to be there for two hours.
Tell it, hey, shift into lift mode, go get some, go make some
money. So whenever you're just doing
those two hours of drives, it makes the money back for the
things that you buy. So it's a way for you to make
residual income. Maybe you'd let your car do the
work for you. Remember when Elon Musk said
this a while ago, years and years ago, Probably 10 years
ago, he would say you could just leave your car in the parking
lot all day, right? But with a Tesla, you could let
it do a robo taxi for you and Uber people around for you and
make money for you while you're at work.
You're working for 8 hours. What's your car doing?
It's just sitting there in the parking lot doing nothing, not
earning you money. So this is that, but before
Tesla, right? So Lyft and Tensor together,
Lyft just leapfrog Tesla and Tensor, if they actually do
this. By the end of 2026, if they ship
this and it actually works, Tesla has some major
competition. Even though it's a $200,000 car,
it is something that Tesla hasn't been able to do yet.
Now the car earns money whenever you want it to.
You're at work 8 hours? OK, cool, have the car pick you
up when you're done at work, drop you off at home, and then
go out and earn you more money. That would be amazing.
Lyft's fleet management subsidy, Flexdrive, will handle cleaning,
charging, and maintenance for owners who participate.
So not only do you get this vehicle that's going to make you
money, maybe it'll make your money back.
Maybe you'll make $200,000 in the first year that you do it
because this thing can run 24/7. Who knows how much money you can
make. But then Flexdrive, they'll
clean it, charge it, and maintain it for you so you don't
have to do any of that stuff. A $200,000 car normally
depreciates the moment it leaves a lot and sits idle 95% of its
life. It doesn't.
You don't really do anything with your car.
Like right now, my car's in my driveway.
It's not doing anything. A robocar generating rideshare
income could theoretically offset that decline through
productive use. The company reserved hundreds of
rebel cars for its fleet. Lyft did through its affiliates,
pending regulatory approval. Of course.
The marks a big shift for Lyft. Lyft previously focused on
facilitating rides through its app or providing fleet
management services. It never owned those vehicles.
Uber has signed more than a dozen agreements globally with
autonomous developers and pledged to deploy at least
20,000 Lucid and Neuro Robotaxi starting next year.
The Tensor deal gives a lift a vehicle specifically engineered
for rideshare duty with sensors designed for a decade of
commercial use. So even when you're done with
this car, say, if you upgrade to something else and you're just
like, you know what, I want to keep this car going so it can do
lift for me and I keep earning money with it.
Maybe you do that. There's so many options for you
now that you can actually do this.
Tesla hasn't done this yet. So everybody with a Tesla, and
if you aren't able to do this by the end of 2026, Tensor is ahead
of Tesla if that's the case. So what do we know about this
regulatory path I was talking about earlier?
Tensor holds a California DV permit for driverless testing,
but has not secured CPUC authorization to deploy vehicles
to the public without safety drivers.
CPUC is the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency
that grants commercial permits for robo taxis.
Only Waymo has obtained that permit that limits where Tensor
can launch. Initial deliveries will go to
the United Arab Emirates in late 2026 or regulatory frameworks
differ from the US American deliveries will follow in early
2027, pending approvals, and the company operates in geofence
zones for a fully automated vehicles, allowing manual
driving outside of approved areas.
So what's next for Tensor? It's a crazy ride already,
right? Tensor evolved from Auto XA
former MITPHTM Princeton assistant professor, known
professionally as Professor X Auto X operated over 1000
robotaxis across 5 Chinese cities during the pandemic.
That was one of the largest fully driverless fleets globally
at that time. The company established
manufacturing facilities near Shanghai and maintained
operation centers across 65 square miles of Shengzhen.
Now, Auto X began testing on public roads in California back
in 2017 and secured California's second ever driverless testing
permit in 2020. That gives Tensor years of real
world data that most competitors lack.
Now Auto X fully divested all China operations and
discontinued the brand to focus on American, European and Middle
Eastern markets. Tensor maintains headquarters in
San Jose with satellite offices in Spain, the UAE and Singapore.
The company claims ownership and controlled by US employees, with
majority investment for the UK, Japan, Korea and the United
States. Recent reports indicate Tensor
may raise 300 to $400 million in pre IPO funding while working
with Royal Bank of Canada, potentially listing on US
exchanges by late 2026 or early 2027.
Now that funding timeline aligns with vehicle deliveries, giving
investors a chance to bet on consumer adoption.
Personal autonomous vehicles before Tensor prove that the
market actually exists.