You Can Buy A Rideable Five-Tonne Japanese Robot On Amazon For $1.2 Million

Good news, everyone! You can now buy a functioning, real life, 3.8 metre, five-tonne, BB-shooting hunk of metal for a cool AU$1.2 million.

The future is now.

The slightly creepy robot — which has actually been on sale since 2013, but began doing the rounds online today — features BB guns that shoot 6,000 rounds per minute, and are controlled by the pilot’s facial expressions. This means that you could effectively program it to trigger when the pilot smiles, which isn’t terrifying at all.

On the plus side, its top speed is only 10km/h, so the chances of this potential PR nightmare going rogue are pretty slim.

To be honest you’d hope that there’s some sort of restriction on who can buy it; then again, we are talking about the company that brought us Unicorn Meat and the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure.

The robot is a the passion project of one Japanese welder, Kogoro Kurata, and it took several years to complete. Not content with inferior bots such as ASIMO and parents’ nightmare/’90s kid status symbol PooChi, the Mech’s creator couldn’t wait until mainstream technology caught up with his giant robot dreams. Based on the slightly camp ‘80s anime cartoon, Armoured Trooper VOTONs, an army of these ride-on Transformers would scare the living crap out of small towns everywhere more than Godzilla ever could.

Kurata laughed off people’s concerns in a 2012 interview with The Verge: “It’s funny to see the panicked emails come in from people abroad, saying they thought it was a joke.”

In the vein of a typical ‘90s toy commercial you’d catch during Saturday Disney, the robot’s arms (and batteries) are sold separately — though you’ll be happy to know that gift wrapping is available. Kurata’s company, Suidobashi Heavy Industry, hopes to mass produce them — so if I were you I’d start saving that pocket money.

If you still can’t quite get your head around “the vehicle of everyone’s wildest dreams”, here’s a handy instructional video they prepared earlier:

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Visit the bot on Japan’s Amazon here.