Chinese automakers are turning to humanoid robots to add a new growth engine to the increasingly narrow profit area in electric vehicles. XPENG’s robotics unit this week Investment of more than 900 million dollars While receiving the company after the investment round Valuation over $6.3 billion reached. Chery, BYD, GAC, Changan, SAIC, Li Auto and Seres are also advancing in the same field with their own robot projects. Tesla’s approach of bringing automobile, artificial intelligence and robotics technologies under one roof, which it has been advocating for several years with Optimus, is thus spreading to a much larger group of manufacturers in China.
XPENG is taking one of the most concrete steps in this race with IRON. The company offers 76 degrees of freedom in the robot’s body, uses 21 movement points in each hand, and is powered by three Turing artificial intelligence chips. 2,250 TOPS It provides processing power up to . XPENG also transfers the chip, control system, production infrastructure and supply chain experience it has developed in electric vehicles directly to the robot business. Company IRON aims to start mass production by the end of 2026It aims to start deliveries in China and other markets in 2027. The first robots will take over tasks in XPENG stores and corporate campuses.
Tesla also uses the physical infrastructure left over from automobile production for Optimus. The company allocated the space previously used for the Model S and Model Tesla announced that it has developed the Gen 3 design for mass production at the beginning of 2026 and that the annual capacity of the first line will be increased in the long term. to 1 million robots He announced that he aimed to remove the However, when the company shared its second quarter results in July, it removed the phrase “volume production” that it had previously used for Optimus from the text, and Elon Musk said that the production increase would be slow at first due to new parts and the supply chain that was not yet established. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between Tesla’s scale target and its short-term production capacity.
On the Chinese side, the picture is not limited to XPENG. While Chery’s robotics subsidiary AiMOGA is preparing for its IPO, the company sees its automobile sales network as one of the commercial uses of robots. GAC, on the other hand, gathered its humanoid robot studies, which it started in 2022, under a separate company this year and launched its robotics initiative in August. over 100 million yuan secured new financing. SAIC has moved on to an even more direct use case, with a humanoid robot handling cell handling and feeding tasks on the production line the company developed in partnership with General Motors. BYD also introduced its own humanoid robot project in August, increasing the number of participants in the robot race of automobile manufacturers.
Automobile technology provides a direct advantage to robot production
In fact, automakers’ entry into the robot business is not only due to the search for a new product category. Electric cars and humanoid robots share many basic technologies such as batteries, electric motors, power electronics, sensors, artificial intelligence chips and motion control. In its latest investment statement, XPENG clearly emphasizes that its electric vehicle R&D studies and existing production infrastructure will provide IRON with mass production capability with automotive-level quality. While GAC uses its own developed motors and autonomous driving algorithms in GoMate robots, Tesla is establishing a new supply chain from chip to mechanical parts for Optimus. Automobile factories provide these companies not only with a production facility but also with a ready-made test environment where they can test robots in real workflows.
At this point, it should not be concluded that robots will replace human workers in factories in a short time. Reuters’ latest research on the humanoid robot industry in China shows that More than 150 companies that it is working in this field and that government institutions will only enter the sector in the first half of 2026. over $230 million It shows that you cited the source. However, current humanoid robots lag behind classical industrial robot arms in terms of precision, decision-making and adaptation to new tasks in variable production environments. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also pointed to the same technical limit in July, saying that many robot demonstrations you see online use pre-programmed movements or remote control. Therefore, today’s race reflects the struggle of companies to establish production scale and artificial intelligence data early in the market they expect to emerge in the future, rather than a ready-made and highly profitable robot market.
Chinese manufacturers look beyond auto profits
XPENG’s financial prospect clearly shows the economic side of this strategy. Brian Gu, the company’s co-chairman, thinks the robotics business could be more profitable than automobiles over time. The Wall Street Journal He conveys the company’s expectation that gross margin on the robot side can exceed 50 percent. In comparison, the gross margin in XPENG’s automobile division is 12.1 percent. The harsh price competition in the Chinese automobile market directs manufacturers to new sources of income that will make this difference more important. XPENG’s $900 million investment round, Chery’s IPO preparation for AiMOGA, and GAC’s new financing show that this pursuit is now moving beyond prototype demonstrations.
However, Tesla, XPENG, or other manufacturers are not generating car-scale revenue from the robot business today. The next critical threshold will be for companies to move humanoid robots out of controlled demonstrations and have them reliably do the same job every day in environments such as stores, factories and logistics. XPENG is targeting delivery in 2027, GAC wants to scale up small-scale GoMate production in 2026, and Hyundai is gradually introducing Boston Dynamics Atlas robots into its production processes. These developments show that automobile companies do not want to remain just vehicle manufacturers and are trying to transform their existing production technologies into a new commercial platform for robotics. Whether robots are truly the “next big profit machine” will be determined by mass production costs and the price real customers will pay, not the prototypes.
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