This startup wants to sell a fully self-driving car you can own, no supervision required

A little-known startup in Silicon Valley is pitching the world’s first autonomous car you can buy.

Tensor, a San Jose-based company, unveiled its self-driving car earlier this month, calling it “Earth’s first personal Robocar.”

To be explicitly clear, the company told Business Insider that the car is truly fully autonomous out of the box. The driver can take a backseat as a passenger; no human supervision is required.

“It is mind off, eyes off, hands off,” Hugo Fozzati, Tensor’s chief business officer, said in an interview.

The car’s SAE Level 4 driving system — a classification that indicates it can drive without human supervision — can only be activated in “approved” zones or within the “operational design domains” (ODD), Fozzati said — basically geofences, akin to those that corral robotaxis like Alphabet’s Waymo.

“So when it’s in our ODD, you’re free to basically press the Level 4 mode and then the steering wheel folds away, the pedal folds away, and that’s it,” he said.

Fozzati said once the autonomous driving feature is activated, Tensor takes full responsibility for what happens on the road. So if the car gets into a collision, Tensor could be on the hook.

Liability laws regarding fully autonomous vehicles are largely unsettled in the US. Recent cases involving Tesla’s Autopilot, an advanced driver-assistance system that requires human supervision, show that drivers assume at least some responsibility for what happens to the car.

California began implementing laws that would hold operators of fully autonomous vehicles like Waymo responsible for traffic violations.

Fozzati said teleoperators or remote support agents can also step in if the “Robocar” encounters an issue while the self-driving mode is activated — similar to Waymo and Tesla robotaxis.

Tensor executives didn’t say where the first set of autonomous zones would be located. Fozzati said, for now, think “major cities that really warrant this type of technology.”

Tensor’s cars will first drop in 2026 in Dubai, then Europe and the US in 2027, Fozzati said.

Bringing autonomous cars to the US poses more challenges since there isn’t a federal framework that regulates autonomous vehicles. Instead, companies face a patchwork of state-by-state laws.

Starting price is TBD. The car has a lot of sensors, which add to its weight and, most likely, to its price: 37 cameras, 5 lidars, 11 radars, 22 microphones, and 10 ultrasonic sensors.

Most notably, the car resembles Waymo’s robotaxis, wearing a lidar on the roof like a hat.

“We’re a very sensor-heavy approach,” Fozzati said. “All of these working together is very, very critical for scalability and for safety.”

Fozzati boasts that the car’s self-driving system is powered by the “world’s most powerful supercomputer” to be put inside a vehicle. The Robocar’s brain is powered by Nvidia GPUs and can process 8,000 trillion operations per second, he said.

A robot chauffeur

Tensor’s vision for Robocar’s customer experience sounds like something from “The Jetsons” or “I, Robot.”

The car will be able to deliver itself to the owner, and if a service is required that’s unrelated to the L4 driving system — e.g., a tire rotation — then the car can drive itself to the mechanic while the owner is at work.

“In the past, you’ve had to work for your car. Now the car is going to work for you,” Fozzati said.

Amy Luca, Tensor’s chief marketing officer, told BI that Tensor will also not collect data from its drivers, making safety and privacy some of the company’s pillars. Companies like Tesla or Mobileye collect driving data from personally-owned cars to help train their driver-assistance systems. Tensor executives say they won’t be doing that with Robocar unless owners provide permission.

“The car has its own hard drive,” Luca said. “It does not connect to a cloud.”

Tesla says it has collected billions of miles of driving data to train an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that the company says will eventually become fully autonomous. Waymo says it now has more than 100 million autonomously driven miles under its belt.

Spokespeople for Waymo and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

What makes Tensor different, Fozzati said, is that it’s the only company that built a car with autonomy in mind from the start — not a car with ADAS that’s trying to become autonomous or a vehicle retrofitted with sensors that support autonomy.

“I think something that’s purpose-built for Level 4, from the ground up,” he said, “for personal ownership is a monumental shift in history.”

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