BYD unveiled its Xiao Di humanoid — a working prototype with zero price attached
BYD, the world’s largest EV maker by volume, showed a working prototype of its first humanoid robot in early August at the company’s Di Space experience center in Zhengzhou. Xiao Di stands 1.61 m, weighs 58.5 kg and has 31 degrees of freedom — 7 per hand, 6 per leg, 3 in the waist, 2 in the neck — with a dexterous hand rated for 1 kg payloads and ±1 mm positioning accuracy. Real hardware, real specs, live demo. What’s missing is everything that determines whether you can actually buy one.
BYD has not published a price, an order channel or a production timeline. The plan so far is to place two or three units in each BYD dealership as a sales-floor greeter — explaining vehicles, running product demos, possibly opening doors and hoods during a pitch — not to sell the robot as a standalone product. Executives have talked about “robot sales advisors” being ready for real-world use “in the next year or two,” which is a target, not a shipping date.
That puts Xiao Di in the same bucket as XPENG’s Iron: a car company with serious manufacturing scale showing a credible humanoid with no commercial terms attached. The difference from Western “target price” announcements is that BYD isn’t quoting a number at all, even a soft one — a more honest way to signal “not a product yet” than throwing out a round figure that later gets treated as a quote.
One more wrinkle: the FCC’s new Covered List rule for Chinese robotics, in effect since late July, would require Xiao Di to clear a national-security review before it could be imported or sold in the US — on top of BYD’s own vehicles already facing separate US trade restrictions. Even if BYD decides to commercialize the robot, the US dealership network it might otherwise lean on isn’t there. We’ll update this entry the moment BYD publishes a price or opens orders; until then, Xiao Di sits alongside Optimus and Atlas in our not-for-sale column.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.
- XPENG: Iron — official product page (xpeng.com)