A Turkish Company Is Building Real-World Transformers

Real-life Transformers are apparently already a thing thanks to a Turkish company called Letvision. They can’t do battle with Decepticons, but they can turn their heads from side to side and move their arms and fingers and, erm, shoot smoke from between their legs. Oh, and they can do the whole changing from a 2013 BMW to an upright robot bit. That’s pretty cool, too.

But of course there’s a catch. Each of the four available Transformers (which Letvision gave the copyright-friendly name of “Letrons“) has a functional steering wheel, but you can only “drive” them remotely because Letvision stuffed the seating spaces with the hydraulics and electronics needed for the conversion. (And since you’d be stuck staring straight up at the sky, being inside during the moment of transformation probably isn’t the best of ideas.)

It can’t even walk, although Letvision points out that this could change provided “reasonable funding is provided for a new research and development project.”

Naturally you’ll want some “reasonable funding” yourself if you ever plan on owning one of these things. Letvsision doesn’t even include the price for its Letrons; instead they claim they’ll only work with potential buyers whose “project and reason to use” match up with their own unspecified criteria.