Among foreign component suppliers, Schaeffler has been unusually forward-leaning on robotics. Its latest quarterly results put the humanoid-robot order backlog at 350 million euros, a figure it discounts heavily, applying at least a 50 per cent haircut to customer forecasts borrowed from automotive life-cycle maths. That 350 million covers only three OEMs. One is named: … Read more
Cui Dixiao joined autonomous-truck startup PlusAI in 2017, straight from a lectureship at Xi’an Jiaotong University, where he earned a doctorate under autonomous-driving pioneer Zheng Nanning. Seven years later, in 2025, he left as chief scientist. What he learned reshaped how he sees the industry. ‘I underestimated the complexity of autonomous driving,’ he says now. … Read more
On 1 August, fourteen carmakers published July sales. The picture splits cleanly between camps. Among new-energy startups, three more than doubled year on year: Leapmotor at 101,300 (up 102 per cent), Zeekr at 35,800 (up 111 per cent) and Arcfox at 23,500 (up 150 per cent). Leapmotor, the sales leader among startups, set a record … Read more
China’s long-awaited mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving has finally got a launch date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened the draft compulsory safety standard for autonomous driving systems to public comment. The standard replaces a voluntary guideline and, for the first time, sets a legally binding floor for … Read more
Great Wall Motor and Chery Group have each been out-sold in China’s domestic market by a younger rival. The July sales sheets, published in early August, hold a striking detail. Leapmotor delivered 101,300 vehicles globally in July, up 102 per cent year on year and its first month above 100,000, making it the first Chinese … Read more
Horizon Robotics has released HSD V2.0, the latest version of its assisted-driving software. The headline change is the addition of a world model and end-to-end reinforcement learning on top of what the company calls a one-stage end-to-end architecture. HSD V2.0 was tested on a 12-kilometre route through Beijing including Sanlitun. (Source: Leiphone) Leiphone joined a … Read more
The embodied intelligence sector has moved from demo videos to live work tests. The first real proving ground is not the home or the coffee shop. It is the warehouse. Figure’s 03 robot sorted nearly 250,000 packages over 200 hours of live streaming. (Source: Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence) In May 2026, Figure live-streamed its Figure 03 … Read more
Huawei’s Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance has launched its first MPVs above the million-yuan price point. The Maextro V680 starts at 648,000 yuan and the V800 at 766,000 yuan. A special “Yunshui Tianqing” design package adds 150,000 yuan, taking the top V800 Navigator edition to 1.166 million yuan. The V800 is 5.495 metres long and aimed … Read more
Linghou Robotics, a Suzhou-based supplier of core components for embodied intelligence, has raised a Series C round of more than 100 million yuan. The round was led by Chendao Capital, the industrial investment platform linked to CATL, and joined by the Industrial Machine Tool Investment Fund, a fund backed by Henan Information Industry Investment, a … Read more
In China’s embodied AI sector, 20 billion yuan has become the new threshold for admission to the top tier. At least five companies, ZhiPingFang, ZiBianLiang, XingHaiTu, QianXun Intelligence and Galaxea, have crossed that valuation line. The number is striking because private-market funding across China fell 32.65 per cent in the first half of 2026, and … Read more