A list that caught a vacuum On 28 July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its Covered List with two new categories: foreign-made advanced robot devices (including humanoids, quadrupeds and other mobile robots) and networked power inverters. No company is named, but the definition lands squarely on China’s most exportable robot categories. The telling … Read more
A second act, from cars to bodies On 29 July, reports said Li Auto was planning two-wheeled and bipedal robots, and its shares rose 10 percent that day. XPeng’s own share rallies have likewise tracked robot news. The pattern shows a shift in the underlying story: the three newcomers, NIO, XPeng and Li Auto (collectively … Read more
From Optimus to Atlas, and on to the humanoid pilot running inside BMW plants, carmakers have become one of the main forces pushing embodied intelligence towards industrialisation. Behind the different routes they have chosen, a contest over the future of manufacturing has already started. The past decade put the car industry through electrification, intelligence and … Read more
On 28 July BYD confirmed to Chinese media that its humanoid robot product will officially go to work in August, marking the company’s shift from a carmaker into a broader ecosystem technology group. The same day, the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list landed. BYD displaced Tesla as the world’s top electric vehicle seller and became … Read more
China has finally fixed a date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened public consultation on the approval draft of a mandatory national standard covering safety requirements for automated driving systems. It replaces a recommended standard with a legal floor for L3 and L4, and it is scheduled to take effect on 1 … Read more
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published the 410th batch of its road vehicle production catalogue on 7 August. The filing is a compulsory disclosure rather than a marketing event, which is why the industry reads it so closely. Dimensions, motor outputs, battery chemistry and cell suppliers all appear before a car is launched. … Read more
Five days separated the two events, and nearly ten thousand kilometres. On 27 July Baidu’s Apollo Go began public-road testing with nobody in the vehicle at all on Hong Kong’s airport island, the first fully driverless deployment anywhere in a left-side, right-hand-drive traffic system. On 28 July its sixth-generation RT6 appeared on the streets of … Read more
Unmanned-delivery vehicles are suddenly everywhere in China, and the question for 2026 is whether this is real scale or another bubble pumped up by capital and industry hype. The trigger was not a 2025 technology break but an economic case that finally started to close. Three years ago a single vehicle cost 200,000 to 400,000 … Read more
July sales data from China’s carmakers delivered a quiet shock. Leapmotor, founded in 2015, delivered 101,300 vehicles globally in July, its first month above 100,000, and about 84,300 of those were domestic. Great Wall sold 108,100 in July, with roughly 46,100 domestic. Chery Group sold 276,800, about 74,300 domestic. The result: in the core home … Read more
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has put its mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving out for public comment. The draft, Safety Requirements for Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Automated Driving Systems, would replace the old voluntary standard and for the first time set a legally binding floor for L3 and L4. … Read more