Thirty-some years after making their debut¹ as cartoon characters, vehicle-morphing Transformers have finally become a reality, thanks to the efforts of a Turkish company out of Ankara.

 

《变形金刚》卡通形象问世30多年之后，能变形的汽车终于成为现实，这一切要归功于土耳其安卡拉城外的一家公司。
 

 

The R&D-focused company, called Letvision, recently wowed the internet with a presentation video for their prototype car-transforming robot, ANTIMON. The recently-released footage shows a red BMW M3 being unveiled and remotely driven toward the camera, where it proceeds to transform into a mighty² Autobot-like robot. The whole process takes a bit longer than in Michael Bay's CGI movies, but it's still mesmerizing³ to watch.

 

For fear of copyright infringement⁴ issues, Letvision chose to call its creations Letrons, but they're as close to real-life Transformers as they can currently get. The first video of ANTIMON shows that it can move its arm and head on command and while walking functionality has not been developed yet, the company claims it's doable if they can secure reasonable funding for a new research and development project.

 

On its official website, Letvision claims that ANTIMON was developed using an actual BMW M3, but it can only be control remotely, as the seating part of the car is currently taken up by the hydraulics system required for the awesome⁵ transformation⁶ into a Letron. However, they plan on making the vehicles drivable, which probably means integrating the passenger seat into the Letron as well.

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