Promobot self-destructs (reputation) with help of self-driving Tesla

A meme doing the rounds on social media sent me down a rabbit hole of clickbait articles strangely all converging to this ice-cream truck shaped android called Promobot.

Grey surveillance video showing a strange looking android robot standing still on the side of a road. A Tesla passes by and the robot tips over. A person runs across the street to bring assistance to the robot.

The meme mainly emphasized how Promobot made the news in 2019 when their inventor claimed a self-driving Tesla ran over it and “killed” it.

A robot doing seppuku with the help of another robot has quite a bit of meme power, I agree.

It gets strange when you read that Promobot is that same proud Russian droid that recognized and shook hands with Vladimir Putin a few months earlier.

Maybe those two events are related.

But it does not stop here. Promobot was also “arrested” at a political rally and, according to the company recount of the events, the “police tried to handcuff” it. Sure.

It’s that same robot that is sooooo intelligent, it “escaped form its lab” and blocked traffic for a few hours while its creators were busy taking photos of the incident.

You can’t make up this shit.