Welcome to FinTech TV.
I'm Remy Blair.
Silicon Valley-based Tensor announcing what it expects to be the first ever Level 4 autonomous vehicle available for personal ownership.
Well built in partnership with Vass Tensor's luxury robocar promises fully hands off driving and could hit the roads by late next year.
Well, joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange to talk about the autonomy race is Hugo Faati.
Who is chief business officer at Tenor.
Hugo, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Well, when it comes to autonomous driving, there's still many hurdles left, but tell me what's going on at Tensor.
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
So what we've done is we've built the world's first Level 4 vehicle that you can own.
It's been designed and built from the ground up.
This is very, very key for scalability, for safety.
Um, it's very different from what's happening in the world today with Robotaxis.
It's also very different from other vehicles that are offering more of an ADAS, or assisted driving, you know, more of a level 2 system, but this is real level 4, meaning that when it's in level 4 mode, we take responsibility.
The other thing which is really amazing is it has we have the world's first foldable steering wheel.
Inside of the car so you can drive it when you want to, you know, there's, I'm sure we can't recall anyone who enjoys driving in traffic and so you know the average American spends about an hour a day commuting.
This is dead time.
This is, you know, productivity which is lost.
This is a decrease in GDP.
This is terrible for society and so we've designed this so people can get their time back.
They can be driven when they're busy.
And then if they want to, I mean, I'm a car guy and when I want to drive, I want to drive.
I think a lot of people in America around the world enjoy, you know, the privacy of their own car.
They like to drive and they can do so with the tensor as well.
Yeah, and Hugo, I think you and I, we grew up in the era of watching, say, the Jetsons or other sci-fi movies where we can actually relax and watch the world go by when we're trying to get from point A to point B.
But tell us what's under the hood, because while looking at some of these specs here, I was pretty impressed.
There's a lot going on under the hood, right?
Yes, absolutely, and this is, this is really key.
What's underneath the hood is very, very important because otherwise.
What happens is, you know, the vehicle doesn't handle right or it's not, you know, let's say the performance of the vehicle is not made for level 4, and this is a problem.
It needs to be made for level 4.
So for example, there's a very big importance on the sensors.
So we're one of the only companies, one of the very few companies that has designed its own LIDAR, for example.
LIDAR is very key for safety, for scalability.
Um, so we have 5 LIDARs, we have a long range liar.
We have several around the vehicle, so we have zero blind spots with our LIDARs, with our cameras as well.
These are all proprietary sensors again, very, very fundamental.
The other thing we have is, for example, We clean all the sensors.
It's very important just like your glasses when you're driving, you want to have clear glasses or not have obstruction.
So if there's any issues that happened to any of the sensors, we have wipers, so we have a big storage tank, a water storage tank, a massive one that can clean all the sensors at any time.
We also have redundancy, which is very, very key.
Redundancy is probably one of the most important things, so we have.
Many layers of redundancy and redundant braking, redundant steering, redundant power, redundant sensing, redundant compute.
This is, this is absolutely fundamental and to power all of this is actually the world's most powerful supercomputer ever put inside of a vehicle.
So this is about 8000 tops, so 800.
1 trillion operations per second.
We've done this in conjunction with Nvidia's latest offering, which is their tour offering.
I think the closest compute power is probably about 2000 tops from other car companies, but this is really the most powerful ever put inside, which is fundamental given all the, all the data, given all the imaging, everything that we're processing at once for safety, it's very, very key.
Yeah, and Hugo, you brought up a lot of key names there and based on what you just said with processing, with data, with technology, of course I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but privacy as well as regulatory concerns.
So give us an idea of what some of the hurdles are given that there are So many moving parts.
Yeah, look, I'm glad you asked.
You know, at Tensor we really believe in autonomy.
We really believe in privacy and ownership, and this is why we've actually developed the world's first vehicle that has end to end encryption.
So all the communication between You know, the vehicle's agentic, so you can text it, you can talk to it, you can do, you know, it's an agentic device, the largest device that you can own, and all the communication is with end to end encryption, which is very, very important, because all the data.
Stays inside of the vehicle at the chip level.
This is very, very important.
We don't believe in monetizing people's data.
I think in this world of AI where you have sensors everywhere, you have data everywhere, it's not, it's not good for human society that all of this data is being monetized.
So we've taken the opposite approach.
Everything stays locked down in the vehicle.
Every camera inside of the vehicle can be closed.
We have physical kill switches for audio for camera.
This is, this is very, very important.
Yeah, yeah, and Hugo, as you were mentioning this, I was thinking of a recent sci-fi movie that I saw, and obviously when it comes to data privacy, consumers might be concerned.
So how long do you think before we see one of these Level 4 vehicles on the road?
Well, we're actually going to be live next year, 2026.
So we have, we have many, many vehicles on the roads today that are testing.
Um, some are, some are undergoing, you know, some are, some are testing already, and so we plan to commercialize next year.
People can already have it in their garage.
OK, here you go.
Well, great having you on the show.
Thank you so much for joining me here at the New York Stock Ex.
Thank you for having me.
