BYD has told China Securities Journal it will unveil its first humanoid robot in August following Stella Li’s comments in June hinting at an upcoming announcement.
BYD will show its first humanoid robot to the public in August. CnEVPost’s Phate Zhang broke the story, reporting that BYD confirmed the plan directly to China Securities Journal on Tuesday, with the reveal set down for one of the company’s Di Space venues.
Di Space is BYD’s network of offline science and experience centres, built for hands-on displays rather than press conferences. The WeChat account for the Zhengzhou Di Space centre posted a teaser image on 25 July, pointing to an early August debut. The promotional copy that went with it skipped the spec sheet entirely, promising something closer to a slow reveal you’d want to walk up to rather than read about. Given how Di Space venues are set up, that points to a physical prototype on a stage rather than a slide full of numbers.
I walked through the BYD DiSpace Zhengzhou Centre myself in 2025, the venue where this announcement appears to be taking place.
BYD DiSpace Zhengzhou is a massive 4 floor New Energy science museum and exhibition centre that showcases BYD’s technological advancements since its inception. I posted a walkthrough video of the venue mid last year:
Li’s been saying this for months
Executive vice president Stella Li confirmed BYD was developing humanoid robots in a June interview, picked up locally by Yicai. Her framing was straightforward: the real fight in robotics comes down to manufacturing capability plus software and hardware strength, and automotive AI shares enough of its DNA with robotics that carmakers start several steps ahead. She’s said before that shifting complex automotive software across into a robot is comparatively straightforward for a company already running that software at BYD’s scale.
Her take on the wider competitive picture is blunter still. China’s robots, in her view, still don’t have a properly developed brain. The US side has bodies that lag behind. BYD’s stated goal is to be the company that gets both right at the same time. She’s floated an open platform strategy too, building BYD’s own robots while leaving room for other companies to co-develop hardware on the same base. If humanoid robots ever make it into households, Li has said BYD would sell them through its existing dealer network, the same showroom footprint that already shifts extraordinary car volumes every month.
Nearer term, she’s talked about every BYD store eventually running two or three robots as demonstrators, with robot sales advisors possibly ready for real-world use inside a year or two. She was careful to add that a robot won’t replace the relationship between a human salesperson and a customer, which is either sound instinct or good PR, quite possibly both.
The investment came before the robot
BYD has been investing into the sector for well over a year. The company backed Shanghai-based Agibot first, then took a more targeted strategic stake in April 2025 in Shenzhen’s PaXini Technology, a maker of tactile sensors, dexterous robotic hands, and its own humanoid robot called Tora. PaXini’s other backers include JD.com and SenseTime, and the company raised more than a billion yuan in a March round that pushed its valuation past 10 billion yuan, with a Hong Kong listing now reportedly on the table.
Agibot has moved further still. The company said it had shipped 15,000 robot units by June, and it’s now chasing its own Hong Kong IPO at a targeted valuation of HK$40 to 50 billion, with Tencent and Hillhouse Investment on its cap table alongside BYD. BYD’s own in-house robotics team, working under the company’s 15th Business Division, was only set up in late 2024. The investing came first. The building came second. The August reveal is where the two threads finally meet in public.
China’s robot race already has a crowd
BYD is late to this by Chinese standards. Aimoga, the humanoid robot brand incubated by Chery, is already selling to consumers, priced at 285,800 yuan, or roughly A$60,500 at current exchange rates. SAIC-GM has wheeled humanoid robots working a Buick battery assembly line, an industrial deployment rather than a showroom novelty. Xpeng’s Iron is the most technically developed of the lot: hands with 22 degrees of freedom, a solid-state battery, a biomimetic spine and muscle system under a flexible synthetic skin, and a company that insists on building almost everything, chips included, in-house. Xpeng is targeting mass production by the end of 2026, with commercial deployment into stores and service roles from early 2027.
Not everyone’s convinced it’s worth the spend yet. Nio’s William Li said in March his company would keep its focus on selling more cars, ruling out an immediate move into robotics.
| Automaker | Robot | Status | Notable detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| BYD | TBC | Prototype reveal due August 2026 | Backed Agibot, then PaXini, before building in-house |
| Xpeng | Iron | Mass production targeted by end of 2026 | 22 degrees of freedom per hand, solid-state battery |
| Chery (Aimoga) | Aimoga | On sale to consumers now | From 285,800 yuan, about A$60,500 |
| SAIC-GM | Unnamed | Working a Buick battery assembly line | Industrial deployment only |
| Tesla | Optimus Gen 3 | Pre-production as of late July 2026 | Fremont line built for 1 million units a year, output yet to start |
Even Tesla’s still finding this hard
Tesla’s Optimus, the program every one of these Chinese efforts gets measured against, has missed its own targets more than once. Elon Musk’s goal of 5,000 units for internal use by the end of 2025 landed well short, with independent estimates putting actual output at only a few hundred units. As of Tesla’s own Q2 2026 shareholder update on 22 July, formal production at the converted Fremont line still hadn’t started, with the company’s own guidance sitting at a vague timeframe of later this year. If the best-funded robotics program on the planet is still stuck at the installation stage, I’ll believe BYD’s one-to-two year sales advisor timeline when I see one working an actual showroom floor.
Beijing’s bigger show comes a fortnight later
BYD’s timing isn’t an accident either. The World Robot Conference opens in Beijing on 19 August, China’s biggest robotics showcase, expecting more than 300 exhibitors and over 150 product debuts this year. An early-August reveal at its own Di Space venues gets BYD its moment in the spotlight before that circus rolls into town. Sensible, and about as on-brand as it gets for a company that’s rarely been shy about owning a news cycle.
Lei Kang’s reporting for CnEVPost back in June is where most of Li’s direct comments first surfaced, worth reading alongside Zhang’s piece for the full run-up to August.
