A 9 September Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence roundup of automotive and supply-chain moves led with a milestone for Chinese humanoids: on 8 September, the XPeng group announced the world’s first high-end general-purpose humanoid automated production line, and the world’s first high-end general-purpose humanoid completed automated final assembly and walked off the line on its own. That marks XPeng’s robotics business crossing from R&D and trial build to line manufacturing.
What else moved in the roundup
On the OEM side, Zeekr rolled its 200,000th globally produced 7X off the Ningbo Meishan smart plant on 8 September, two years after first serial production, with the 200,000th order placed by a customer in Mexico. Volkswagen Group is weighing a sale of its Ducati motorcycle brand, one of about 600 businesses under review, though no decision is made. Zotye Auto hit limit-up at RMB 1.84, a RMB 9.28 billion market cap, after electing three non-independent directors; the company said the move and the price jump were not necessarily linked. Nio Energy and Yunnan Communications Investment put a new batch of highway battery-swap stations into full operation.
In supply chain news, CATL’s Choco Swap opened its first highway station at Laohekou in Hubei, a Huazhong corridor hub, with a plan for 1,000 highway swap stations by 2027 forming an 11-vertical, 9-horizontal national backbone. Huawei’s Qiankun driving and Harmony cabin passed 2 million app users; Qiankun mileage crossed 42.7 billion kilometres and the system avoided a possible collision 6.4 million times. GAC said it will not build rush jobs, holding a two-winter, one-summer validation cycle and a five-high, one-mountain, one-dust extreme test standard.
The humanoid line is the headline because it is the rare moment a carmaker’s robot arm moves from prototype to production. XPeng builds both the vehicle and the humanoid, and a shared manufacturing base is exactly the cost engine Chinese robotics needs to turn demo units into shipped product.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.
Translated and adapted from Gasgoo (https://www.gasgoo.com/apps/50640d4b55d5cba175fb84f15d679f19/robot/news/70471470-%E7%9B%96%E4%B8%96%E5%BF%AB%E8%AE%AF-%E5%B0%8F%E9%B9%8F%E6%9C%BA%E5%99%A8%E4%BA%BA%E7%94%9F%E4%BA%A7%E7%BA%BF%E5%90%90%E7%94%A8/).