BMW, Toyota and the slow arrival of the factory humanoid

At Schaeffler's plant in Cheraw, South Carolina, a humanoid robot called Digit spends eight hours a day operating a stamping press behind a plexiglass enclosure. A human employee watches the entire shift, because Digit cannot yet reliably detect a person standing nearby and machine-guarding rules require someone who can. Agility Robotics, which builds Digit, told the Wall Street Journal in March 2026 that running the robot this way currently costs the plant $10 to $25 an hour. [1] Entry-level jobs at the same plant start at $20 an hour.

That arrangement, a person paid to watch a robot meant eventually to work alone, is close to the honest state of humanoid robotics in car manufacturing in 2026. A short list of automakers and suppliers is running real, quantified pilots on production lines: BMW, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and Schaeffler itself as a customer. A larger group is still trading on future promises. Lined up against each other's actual numbers, the two groups are not hard to tell apart.

01The working pilots

BMW's evidence is the most complete. Between 2025 and mid-2026, the Figure 02 robot, built with Figure AI, supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over eleven months at Plant Spartanburg, inserting sheet-metal parts in the body shop ahead of welding. BMW called the pilot a success and moved to a successor: Figure 03 now handles logistics sequencing, sorting unsorted components into trolleys for just-in-sequence delivery to the assembly line. "Plant Spartanburg is the birthplace of humanoid robotics in BMW Manufacturing's operational day-to-day activities," said Ulrich Wieland, BMW Manufacturing's vice president of production control and logistics, when the Figure 03 project was announced in June 2026. A parallel effort at Plant Landshut is building the AI software stack, combining fixed programming with vision-language-action models, that BMW wants to reuse across future deployments.

Our 11-month deployment of Figure 02 proved that humanoids are no longer lab experiments — they can be a valuable asset in establishing a flexible, reliable manufacturing workforce.

Brett Adcock, Founder and CEO, Figure AI, BMW Group press release, 25 June 2026

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada took about a year to reach a similar conclusion. After roughly twelve months evaluating three Digit robots at its Woodstock, Ontario plant, Toyota expanded the pilot to seven Digits in February 2026, which began feeding totes of RAV4 components onto and off an automated tugger in early April. [2] "After evaluating a number of robots, we are excited to deploy Digit to improve the team member experience and further increase operational efficiency," said Tim Hollander, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Agility's own chief executive, Peggy Johnson, was more guarded about what today's robot can do unsupervised, saying the next generation would be the first to deliver "a cooperatively safe humanoid robot to work alongside people", an acknowledgement that the current one is not.

At Mercedes-Benz, the pilot is older and public detail far thinner. Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz announced their partnership in March 2024, piloting the Apollo robot on parts-delivery and kitting work at the Berlin-Marienfelde plant. [3] "This is a new frontier, and we want to understand the potential both for robotics and automotive manufacturing to fill labor gaps in areas such as low skill, repetitive and physically demanding work," said Jörg Burzer, the Mercedes-Benz Group board member for production, quality and supply chain management, when the deal was announced. Neither company has disclosed a unit count or a production target since.

02Announcements outnumber deployments

Tesla's own numbers are the clearest illustration of the gap. In its Q2 2026 shareholder update, the company listed "Robotics & manufacturing AI" among six new-mobility ventures and classified it as "Announced", the only one of the six not yet marked commercial. Optimus's first-generation production lines remain under construction at the Fremont, California plant, while its Academy programme has only begun collecting training data. Research and development spending, meanwhile, rose 49% year on year to $2.37 billion, which Tesla attributed partly to humanoid robotics development alongside AI training compute and FSD software work. The company is spending like a business preparing to build robots at scale; its own disclosures say it has not started.

In July 2026, Hyundai Motor Group shareholders moved to buy out SoftBank's entire stake in Boston Dynamics, taking full ownership of the company behind the Atlas humanoid robot. Eleven days earlier, on 5 July 2026, Atlas had performed a goal-celebration routine at halftime of a FIFA World Cup match in New Jersey. It was a marketing appearance. Hyundai's own target is a factory able to build 30,000 Atlas units a year by 2028. [4] The robot would start there with repetitive, component-sequencing work, graduating to more complex assembly only by 2030.

At XPeng's Q1 2026 earnings call in May 2026, chairman He Xiaopeng promised the fastest timeline of the three: mass production of the IRON humanoid robot by the end of this year, with commercial customer deliveries starting in 2027, and called physical AI "a global strategic opportunity in the next 10 years." [5] Where IRON goes to work first is not a factory floor. XPeng's rollout begins inside retail showrooms, greeting and guiding store visitors, an assignment that has yet to ship.

Goldman Sachs, in research published this year, put the total addressable market for humanoid robots at $38 billion and shipments at 1.4 million units by 2035, naming vehicle assembly and component sorting among the most credible near-term uses. [6] Morgan Stanley's Humanoid 100 research goes further: 1 billion cumulative units and $7.5 trillion in annual revenue by 2050. The two banks agree the market will be large. They do not agree on when, or by how much.

03Half the cost is one part

Schaeffler sits on both sides of this industry: a customer running Digit at Cheraw, and a supplier now selling components into other companies' humanoid programmes. In August 2026 the company unveiled a new forming process for the wave gears used inside a humanoid's actuators. Actuators account for roughly half of a humanoid robot's total cost, Schaeffler says, and the established manufacturing method — precision machining that cuts material away step by step — creates a persistent bottleneck as the industry tries to scale. The new process presses the gear into shape in seconds instead of minutes, cutting production cost by more than 25% and material use by more than 75%. Series production is due to start in Germany in 2027, then expand elsewhere.

Cheraw makes the same point in dollars rather than components. Running Digit with its required human monitor currently costs the plant $10 to $25 an hour; call it $17.50 at the midpoint, MotorClaw's calculation from Agility's own range. Entry-level workers at the same plant start at $20 an hour, meaning the robot is, for now, barely cheaper than the job it is meant to eventually take over. Agility's co-founder Damion Shelton told the same reporter the company's target is $2 to $3 an hour, roughly a seventh of today's midpoint.

04Where each programme actually stands

Put the seven programmes side by side and the split holds up. Four have disclosed a working robot, a specific task, and a number attached to it, enough to call the work real, even if narrow. Three have disclosed mostly intent.