I like that theory about it being like ‘investing’ in a car, where it’s not really an investment at all. And it seemed like ripping the tritium* (I looked it up, and it is currently being looked at for cutting edge robotics. The science in this show was so damn good compared to like 98% of everything, so fuck you Fox.) out and melting it down for reuse became a better investment than the bot as a whole, which is just so sad, especially since the little ‘soul’ probably went in the garbage.

I would imagine police androids are paid for (at least in the U.S. system) by a combination of municipal tax funding, bond programs, government subsidies of some sort, and donations. There’s probably yearly fundraisers and awareness campaigns for how much better life is with traffic drones and police androids.I bet most major metropolitan areas in the world have them in 2048. I bet whatever line is currently being used by police or military is kept as ‘classified’ as possible until those organizations move on to something else, which is why there were so many DRN derivative bots once Dorian was recommissioned, because everyone had had two+ years with the tech. I think we can assume smaller cities would have the up to date bots, but in smaller numbers. Towns might have very few bots or older bots or no bots at all, depending on the area. But I bet everyone has traffic drones. That seems like it’ll be an easier thing to implement. If there hadn’t been such a political smear campaign towards the DRNs I bet a lot of them would be alive and working in the little cities and towns.

My personal pet theory is the MXs are fundamentally cheaper than the DRNs, because wouldn’t that just be typical?

(I might just have to sit down and crunch some numbers with my Sib over the holiday, because they’re much more into robotics generally than I am.)