Illustration: AI-generated · Inside China AI
Why Carmakers Are Building Robots — and Why Europe’s Aren’t
In January, Chery delivered more than 300 humanoid robots in a single month — the first carmaker in the world to ship humanoids at scale. In August, BYD unveiled its first humanoid, Xiao Di, built by an embodied-intelligence team it has quietly staffed since 2022. XPeng is breaking ground on a 110,000-square-metre robot factory in Guangzhou and calls itself a “global embodied intelligence company” now. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics has Atlas in serial production, with every 2026 unit already committed. The world’s carmakers are becoming robot makers — and the way each region is doing it tells you who understood the assignment.
Who is building what
XPeng’s IRON is the most ambitious: 82 degrees of freedom, hands with 22 degrees each, currently in factory training, targeting mass production by end-2026 at over a thousand units a month — deployed first in XPeng’s own dealerships, overseas from 2027. Chery’s Mornine, built by its robotics subsidiary AiMOGA, already works showrooms and factory inspections in more than 30 countries; the M1 model sells on JD.com for 285,800 yuan (~$41,400). GAC’s GoMate starts on the company’s own Trumpchi and Aion production lines this year. BYD’s Xiao Di begins customer-facing in its Di Space centres. And Hyundai — the one non-Chinese carmaker moving at China speed — designed its Georgia Metaplant around humanoids from the ground up, with Boston Dynamics targeting 30,000 Atlas units a year by 2028.
Why a carmaker is the natural robot maker
The logic is industrial, not visionary. First, the supply chain is the same: an EV and a humanoid share motors, reducers, batteries, thermal management, sensors, and wiring — BYD’s vertical integration and XPeng’s harmonic joints are automotive competencies wearing a new body. Second, the factory is the first customer: deploying robots on your own lines generates ROI and training data simultaneously — the flywheel GAC and Hyundai are explicitly building. Third, the software transfers: an end-to-end autonomous-driving stack and an embodied-AI stack are converging into one discipline — XPeng’s VLA 2.0 spans cars and robots, and Xiaomi’s open-source MiMo-Embodied handles driving and robotics with a single set of weights. Fourth — the part Europe’s industry should study hardest — the dealer network is the distribution channel: Chery sells robots where it sells cars, and XPeng’s first IRON deployment is the showroom floor. Nobody else on earth owns thousands of physical retail points staffed to sell complex machines.
The European contrast: piloting instead of building
Europe’s carmakers are engaging — as customers. Mercedes-Benz pilots Apptronik’s Apollo in intra-logistics at its Berlin-Marienfelde digital factory campus and in Kecskemét, Hungary, with commercial quantities expected from 2027. BMW runs Figure robots in sheet-metal handling at Spartanburg, with pilots extending to Munich, Regensburg, and Leipzig. Both programs are serious and well-run — and both source their robots from American startups. No major European OEM has announced a robot of its own, a robotics subsidiary, or a factory designed around humanoids. The pattern is familiar from batteries and EVs: Europe pilots what others productise. All seven Chinese makers, profiled: China’s Humanoid Seven.
Why it matters for Europe
The uncomfortable arithmetic: if the humanoid is the “second product” of the automotive supply chain, then the region that builds cars but not robots will watch its supplier base — actuators, sensors, harnesses, power electronics — reorganise around Chinese, Korean, and American robot programs. For European suppliers like ZF, Schaeffler, and Bosch, humanoid components are a genuine second life; the window to become the industry’s actuator bench is open now and will not stay open. For dealers and retail groups, Chery’s Mornine — a robot that sells cars in showrooms across 30 countries — is a preview of a question arriving faster than expected. And for OEM strategists, the lesson from the EV decade applies unchanged: piloting a technology is not the same as owning it. Europe’s carmakers still have the plants, the suppliers, and the engineering depth to build robots. What they lack, so far, is the decision.
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