BYD confirmed on Tuesday that its humanoid robot will formally debut in August, telling Chinese financial outlet Cailian Press that the product will be shown at its ‘Di Space’ experience venues.
‘Di Space’ is BYD‘s network of offline immersive brand venues, positioned as new-energy science centres rather than as dealerships.
The Zhengzhou site was the first to open, running to four floors and roughly 15,000 square metres, and functions as a launch pad for new technologies and products.
Further venues operate in Tianjin and other cities.
BYD established a dedicated humanoid robotics lab in late 2024, recruiting postgraduate researchers into an embodied intelligence team, and has since signed academic collaborations including one with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The Teaser That Preceded It
The WeChat account of the Zhengzhou venue published a suspense poster on Saturday carrying the line “in early August, a new friend wants to meet you,” alongside imagery of a humanoid robot.
BYD‘s Hong Kong-listed shares closed on Monday down 0.1% at HK$88.55, effectively unmoved by the poster alone.
The company’s rose sharply in Tuesday trading after the confirmation, gaining more than 2.0% intraday.
What Executives Have Said
Executive VP Stella Li has been the company’s public voice on robotics since early June, when she confirmed development in an interview reported by Yicai.
Her most concrete commitment concerns retail rather than manufacturing.
“My goal is to place two or three robots in every store,” Li said, describing machines that would explain products to customers, create atmosphere and demonstrate vehicles.
Li has said robot sales assistants could become practically viable within one to two years, and that humanoids for households and the service industry represent a large market for the company.
She has also set a limit on the ambition, saying showroom robots cannot replace the emotional connection between human salespeople and customers, and that human staff remain necessary.
BYD intends to pursue two commercialisation routes in parallel, developing robots in-house while building an open platform for collaboration with partners, and would use its dealer network for distribution should the products reach households.
Li has framed the technical challenge in geographic terms, arguing that Chinese robots are strong on hardware and weak on intelligence while US robots show the reverse, and that BYD aims to balance both.
The Unofficial Specifications
A post from the same Zhengzhou account was published in error and deleted shortly afterwards, and screenshots circulated on Chinese platforms through accounts including Di Fans before being picked up by local outlets.
Reported figures put the robot at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilograms, with 31 degrees of freedom distributed as seven per hand, six per leg, three at the waist and two at the neck.
Dexterous hands are described as positioning to within one millimetre and gripping objects of around one kilogram, with sensing covering 360-degree vision, dynamic real-time environment modelling and triple recognition of faces, gestures and lip movement.
An interaction system reportedly supports real-time translation across six Chinese dialects and six foreign languages.
None of the above has been confirmed by BYD, which has published no technical specifications, no design details and no full product name.
What BYD Denied in June
Coverage of the programme carries a complication that most English-language reporting has not addressed.
During June, a detailed account circulated describing a project codenamed Yao Shun Yu, a seventh-generation prototype undergoing field tests at the Shenzhen and Changsha plants, around 150 units already working, and a target of 20,000 internal deployments during 2026.
BYD rejected each of those claims specifically, stating that the codename, the prototype field tests and both unit figures were untrue, while confirming that humanoid robot development is under way.
The denial did not extend to the programme itself, and Chinese media have continued to treat the industrial track as active while noting that the company remains cautious about deployment numbers.
Carmakers x Humanoid Robots
The company has pursued robotics since 2024 through investment as well as internal development, backing AgiBot and PaXini, the latter having raised more than 1 billion yuan in March at a valuation above 10 billion yuan.
BYD is also already a humanoid customer, operating machines from UBTech and Unitree inside its plants for logistics, inspection and collaboration with driverless transport systems.
Among carmakers, Chery has moved furthest commercially, positioning its AiMOGA unit against Optimus and selling the Mornine M1 openly online at 280,000 to 285,800 yuan.
XPeng is targeting monthly output above 1,000 units by the end of this year, with showroom deployment in China planned for the first quarter of 2027.
Xiaomi said in March that a self-developed humanoid had worked autonomously for three hours in the die-casting workshop of its vehicle plant.
Tesla has converted its former Model S and Model X lines at Fremont to Optimus production, and Elon Musk told investors last week that no company has yet built a humanoid capable of general-purpose autonomous work, describing most public demonstration videos as scripted or remote-controlled.
Two Chinese automakers are now aiming humanoids at customers before factories, a sequence that inverts the deployment logic Tesla and Western manufacturers have followed.
