Ionut Budisteanu developed a car that drives itself.

Ionut Budisteanu, 19, traveled all the way from Romania to enter his self-driving car into the Intel International Science and Engineering Festival In Arizona in May 2013.

Other folks are working on self-driving cars (most famously, Google), but the technology used to power them is expensive. Budisteanu's design brings the cost down to a mere $4000.

Most of the systems the big guys are working on make use of effective but expensive high-resolution 3-D radar (which is what is mounted on the roof of the car). But Budisteanu says a lower-resolution radar will still detect the big dangers — trees, cars, and pedestrians — while inexpensive cameras can do the rest of the work, like seeing lane lines and curbs.

His design is not perfect, but it is promising. He has already attracted some interest from investors in his native Romania, according to Darren Quick of Gizmag. But it doesn't sound like he is in this for the money.

"I want to be a researcher and university professor to make research to help the world to develop," Budisteanu said at the Intel ISEF awards ceremony (see video below). "This is the purpose of mankind — to create some inventions and to create some projects in order to help the entire population and the entire world."

Here is a video he made showing how his system works: