The Electric: In a Big Month, China's XPeng Will Unveil a Humanoid Robot and a Flying Car
China’s XPeng is best known for its electric vehicles, which have begun to take off in Europe. But later this month, the company also plans to introduce a new version of its humanoid robot, Iron, to be deployed in its factories and showrooms.
With the release of the upgraded Iron on Oct. 24, XPeng will join a global wave of humanoid robot announcements, including Tesla’s heavy promotion of its own robot, Optimus.
But XPeng’s plans also illustrate the ambitions of China’s auto industry at a time when most Western rivals are scaling back their aspirations, doubling down on combustion models and making little mention of any daring new technologies.
I wrote a long weekend profile of XPeng’s bet that the future of the car industry is to keep building EVs, but also to use artificial intelligence to push into products such as electric aviation and—like Tesla—humanoid robots.
Billionaire XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng bankrolled the startup in 2014, using cash from Alibaba’s acquisition of UCWeb, a mobile browser firm he co-founded. Three years later, He took over as CEO and chair, positions he has held since.
In 2018, XPeng released its first car, an electric SUV, in a splashy event at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While the company continued to throw showy product launches in the West and China, it struggled to sell cars and earn revenue until about a year ago, when it acquired Didi Global’s EV business, including the rights to the Mona M03, a $17,000 EV. The Mona has since become XPeng’s best-selling vehicle, and the company predicts it will help it achieve its first profitable quarter in the fourth quarter this year.
Meanwhile, XPeng has also been developing AI chips and humanoid robots. The company began working on them in 2020. Last year, it completed the first version of Iron, Sean Shi, director of strategic product planning at XPeng Robotics, told me. The version to be released on Oct. 24 will be its fifth generation of Iron. The company has plans to produce thousands of the robots next year, Shi said, and to begin selling them commercially.
In March, He, the CEO, told Reuters that humanoids would be a long-term business for the company and could ultimately require 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) in investment.
Amid predictions of humanoid robots swarming into factories and taking over the work of human workers, Shi suggested that the industry hasn’t yet produced robots capable of such performance.
The coming version of Iron, for instance, will still have somewhat limited capabilities in terms of work, he said. It won’t operate machinery but will interact with people, including patrolling XPeng factories. In the carmaker’s showrooms, it will greet customers, make product suggestions and respond to questions.
At this stage in the industry, Shi thinks those are realistic achievements because no one, including XPeng, has managed yet to develop anything close to truly humanlike robot hands. XPeng will continue to upgrade the robots in over the air improvements, Shi said. “When you have one of them, its abilities will grow,” he said.
XPeng’s share price has doubled year to date as investors have responded bullishly to the possibility that it will triple its car sales in 2025 to more than 400,000 units. They are also responding to the company’s talk of future robots and flying cars.
“Ultimately in China, the competition is so fierce that as a company, if I’m an institutional investor and I’m looking at autos or industrials, how do I differentiate them?” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a consultancy on China’s auto market. One way, he said, is: “Are they designing their own [chips]? Are they building robots?”