This electric self-driving potato is the Tesla of shitty robots

Tesla is about to face some stiff competition: One unusually resourceful tinkerer has built a futuristic potato robot that has the capacity to drive autonomously – and charge its own battery.

Built by developer Marek Baczynski, the quirky mini-vehicle uses a pair of electrodes to generate its own power. Baczynski also hooked an energy-harvesting chip and a supercapacitor to the potato in order to accumulate enough energy to make the robot move.

Thanks to these two additions, the device could store the electrochemical energy it produces and then use it to power its own movement once it reaches a certain voltage.

According to Baczynski, the electric potato needs approximately 15 minutes to charge the capacitor, which is enough energy to make the device move forward by approximately eight centimeters. This equals to a total of about seven and a half meters per day.

To make the mini-car truly drive itself though, the recreational inventor also installed a miniature control board, which enables the potato to autonomously choose in which direction it wants to move.

And in case your potato happens to have fully exhausted its electrical capacity … Baczynski has some sage advice on how to avoid waste – so make sure you watch the video till the very end.