BYD enters the game of humanoid robots, a sector in which more and more car manufacturers are involved. Retail sale in dealerships is planned alongside the models of the Chinese company
The Chinese giant Bydcurrently the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles, has officially confirmed that it is working on the development of humanoid robots. The news, initially reported by the economic newspaper First Financial and later confirmed by the company’s executive vice president, Stella Lito the Chinese press, represents the most explicit public statement on the group’s ambitions outside the strictly automotive sector. According to the plans outlined by the company, if humanoid robots were to become a product for domestic use in the future, BYD would exploit its widespread network of car dealerships for retail. The Asian manufacturer’s approach to this sector has recent roots, with the first concrete investments and the first official discussions on the possibility of starting the production of humanoid robots emerging from 2024.
BYD ROBOT: WHAT IT WILL BE LIKE
—
At this time, the company has not released definitive technical specifications, market launch timelines or production goals for its future humanoid robot. However, senior management statements indicate that BYD intends to adopt aopen platform“. This strategy means that the group could decide to develop and build its own robot starting from scratch within its own research centers, or choose to collaborate with external entities, possibly arriving at buy a Chinese startup of robotics to accelerate the development of its first commercial products. In this regard, BYD has already made strategic investments in the recent past. The company is in fact among the main financiers of Agibot (also known as Zhiyuan Robotics), a Shanghai startup that began mass producing hundreds of humanoid robots for internal and customer use in 2024. Furthermore, BYD has entered into agreements with UbTech Roboticswhose industrial humanoid models, such as the Walker S1 and Walker S2, have already been tested within the automotive company’s assembly lines to collaborate with other autonomous systems in logistics activities and to accumulate data deriving from hours of real work.
WHY EVERYONE WANTS TO MAKE ROBOTS
—
The transition to humanoid robotics represents a coherent technological evolution for automotive companies, driven by a deep engineering affinity between the two sectors. As Vice President Stella Li explained, next-generation intelligent vehicles and robots share exactly the same same technological bases: Both require advanced sensors, batteries, computing platforms, electric actuators, and complex artificial intelligence models to manage environmental perception, autonomous decisions, and motion control. In other words, artificial intelligence developed to make a self-driving car move through traffic can be repurposed to govern a car designed to physically move on two legs in the real world, taking advantage of the so-called “embodied Ai“. Beyond Bydthis strong affinity has also pushed other Chinese automotive brands to explore the sector: Xpeng is connecting its artificial intelligence to robotic applications, while Chery has already started online sales of its own humanoid robot. Teslaas is known, closed the Model Y and Model S production lines to make room for the production of the Optimus robot. From an industrial perspective, electric car manufacturers already have the necessary experience in supply chain management and large-scale production, while battery manufacturers are looking at humanoid robots as a new, potential market for their accumulators.
Travel with Gazzetta Motori, experience the most anticipated circuits of the summer as a protagonist
TEN BILLION ROBOTS
—
The global race for humanoid robotics is part of a market whose future prospects have been anticipated several times by Elon Musk. Tesla’s development of the Optimus robot has been underway since 2021, and Musk has repeatedly said that the humanoids will become his company’s best-selling product ever. According to the entrepreneur’s projections, in the future the ratio between humanoid robots and human beings will be at least two to one, or at least one to one. This would translate into a global presence on the order of ten billion humanoid robots. The vision behind these estimates is that robots, once brought to an understood production cost between 20,000 and 30,000 dollarswill be able to perform virtually any physical task performed by humans, dramatically reducing the cost of products and services on a global scale.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED