The Belt 
IM Motors opened pre-sales on 29 October for the LS8 NEO, the first model built under its NEXT 2028 strategy, with a benefit price starting at RMB 249,800. The five seat SUV goes on sale on 5 November and shares its stage with CATL, which supplies the battery across the range. Xu Yin, deputy general … Read more
The last redoubt of the German premium trio in China was the 56E class, the trio of the BMW 5 Series, Mercedes E-Class and Audi A6L that anchored the RMB 400,000 to 600,000 band for two decades. It is now trading below RMB 300,000. Dealers are offering discounts of up to RMB 100,000 across all … Read more
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the Washington lobby that represents almost every major carmaker selling in the United States, on 2 November pressed Congress to pass a bipartisan bill that would permanently bar Chinese vehicles from the American market. It wants the measure voted through in the short session before lawmakers break, once the midterm … Read more
NXP has told distributors it will raise prices on parts of its portfolio from 1 January 2027. It is the third such letter this year, and the bill lands on Chinese carmakers that are already earning less per vehicle than a mid-range laptop. The Dutch chipmaker cited persistent inflationary pressure across materials, energy, labour, logistics … Read more
A humanoid that can run, jump and backflip has demonstrated that its actuators work. That is a different achievement from gripping a machined part without crushing it, sensing a millimetre of binding halfway through an insertion, or stopping the force in time when the object in its hand is a glass. Every one of those … Read more
At the Shanghai auto show in April last year, a Unitree robot dog tumbled and bowed for the crowd and drew more attention than the cars. Almost nobody asked what was inside it. The part handling motion control and sensing came from a Fuzhou company called Rockchip. On 27 October Rockchip reported quarterly net profit … Read more
While humanoid companies search for a customer, a machine that makes coffee has found 1,600 of them. XBOT closed a RMB 200 million A round and a near RMB 400 million B round, the largest funding recorded in food-service robotics, and its founder is unusually blunt about why. The product is a sealed unit under … Read more
Wangyuan Technology received a filing notice from the China Securities Regulatory Commission on 30 October and is preparing a main board listing in Hong Kong, offering up to 12.69 million shares. If it prices, it will be the first pool cleaning robot company to trade publicly anywhere. The category sounds minor until the numbers arrive. … Read more
NXP has sent distributors a price adjustment notice covering parts of its distribution and direct supply lines, effective 1 January 2027. It is the third such notice the company has issued in 2026, after rounds in March and May, and all three cite the same drivers: materials, energy, labour, logistics and supplier inputs. NXP is … Read more
The entire embodied AI industry has spent two years collecting a few million hours of robot data. InSpatio opened a facility in Hangzhou on 30 October that it says will produce one million hours a month, at roughly a tenth of the cost of teleoperation per sample. If the number holds, it changes what a … Read more