XPeng commissioned its humanoid robot production lines in Guangzhou on Tuesday and said the first IRON to complete assembly walked off the line on its own, a step the company described as “small” while holding to its target of mass production by the end of the year.
Late last month, the company’s robotics unit, Dogotix, raised more than $900 million at an implied post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, led by IDG Capital with Gaorong Ventures and with Tencent and Alibaba as strategic investors.
The lines, which XPeng calls “the world’s first automated production lines for advanced humanoid robots,” automate more than 80% of core processes and apply the quality systems of its car plants, according to company.
XPeng did not disclose the lines’ capacity, the robot’s price, or how many units have come from the small-batch trial production.
The schedule stands as stated since November. Mass production is slated for the end of 2026, first deployments in XPeng’s own stores and campuses, and an official launch with deliveries in China and overseas in 2027.
“The robot production lines were created from scratch with no precedent to follow,” founder and CEO He Xiaopeng said. “Today’s step is small, but XPENG is building the production lines for an entirely new product category.”
He Xiaopeng wrote on X that the company had launched the line “using robots to mass-produce robots, autonomously,” that the commissioning “means humanoid robots are now ready to scale up and step into the real world.”
Additonally, the founder said that the moment that “touched my heartstrings most” was watching the first robot “complete assembly and walk off the line on its own.”
He hung a staff badge on the robot at the ceremony, “symbolizing that it has officially become a member of the XPENG team,” and said the aim was “a new type of robot with full generalization capabilities that can truly become part of everyday life.”
The Guangzhou-headquartered brand said in July it was targeting capacity above 1,000 robots a month by year-end and showroom sales assistants in China in the first quarter of 2027.
Tuesday’s release repeats neither number, leaving unknown if the company maintains both targets.
What Walked Off the Line
The production IRON has 76 degrees of freedom across the body and 21 in each hand, three of XPeng’s Turing chips delivering up to 2,250 TOPS, and a “fully enclosed flexible lattice structure” that the company presents as balancing appearance and safety.
XPeng says the compute lets it run its Physical AI foundation model on the robot and “autonomously perform complex tasks without remote operation.”
Those figures are lower than the ones XPeng gave when it unveiled this generation on November 5, 2025, at 82 degrees of freedom and 22 per hand.
By the August 24 fundraising materials, XPeng had already switched to the lower figures, and Tuesday’s release uses them without explaining or commenting on the cut.
The release does not mention the battery. At the November launch XPeng said IRON was the first humanoid to carry an all-solid-state battery.
Earlier this month, Jipian Lab said that the production robot would instead use semi-solid pouch cells from a second-tier Chinese supplier after XPeng had failed to obtain all-solid-state cells from BYD, Gotion, CALB or EVE that met its installation requirements.
XPeng has not confirmed the report.
The Business Behind It
Dogotix is being carved out as a standalone subsidiary that XPeng will continue to consolidate, with the company’s stake at about 82% before dilution and falling to about 68% if warrants and the incentive pool are fully used, investors holding redemption rights.
XPeng said on Tuesday that the robot’s per-unit gross margin “is expected to be significantly higher than that of new energy vehicles,” citing “high technical barriers and limited high-quality supply,” and called robotics “the Company’s second growth curve” alongside cars and international expansion.
The company reported second-quarter revenue of 19.74 billion yuan, deliveries of 103,295 vehicles and a net loss of 1.34 billion yuan on August 24, the day of the raise.
Who Is Running It
He has run the robotics business personally since June, after the two executives who had led it left within a month of each other.
Product head Shi Xiaoxin, who joined the robotics effort around 2021 and became product lead for the IRON series after XPeng completed its acquisition of Pengxing Intelligence in 2023, resigned in early June, Chinese media outlets reported.
Business head Mi Liangchuan departed at the end of the month, according to 21jingji. XPeng’s chief then reorganised the unit into nine departments.
The robotics business dates to XPeng’s 2020 acquisition of Dogotix, a quadruped start-up founded by Zhao Tongyang, and moved to humanoids with the PX5 in October 2023 and the first IRON on November 6, 2024, which XPeng said was working on P7+ assembly and facility tours in Guangzhou.
At the November 2025 launch He said a year-long trial of screw-driving had proved uneconomic because the hands lasted about a month, and the strategy since has been service roles first.
Of the targets XPeng has attached to IRON, the end-2026 production date, attached to the robot since its 2024 debut and firmed in November 2025, has held through Tuesday.
