Xiaomi's humanoid robots sort car parts — and, its founder says, build its cars
From the Robots digest for Nov 4, 2026
Thread: robots — Xiaomi factory humanoids · new
What happened: Xiaomi released a video showing two of its humanoid robots sorting center console side covers for its cars through a full eight-hour shift at its EV factory, with the company saying the robots worked on their own, catching and fixing their own mistakes along the way. Founder Lei Jun announced that the same robots manufacture Xiaomi's cars, and the demonstration set off a broad rally in China's embodied-AI stocks, with the Shanghai Composite up nearly 2% and the ChiNext Index briefly climbing 6% on November 4.
What's genuinely new: A named factory task with a stated duration, an explicit production-floor claim from the company's own founder, and the market verdict on all of it in one day. The confidence levels differ sharply: the video is a company demonstration, the autonomy claim ("on their own, fixing their own mistakes") is the company's word, and the coverage notes Xiaomi left out the performance numbers that would let anyone check it.
Watch: Whether the video shows autonomous walking and handling or teleoperation, whether robots appear in Xiaomi's car production line at scale, and any independent verification or published metrics for the eight-hour run.
Links: Interesting Engineering · 36Kr · BigGo News · Electrek · The Verge · Nov 4, 11:23 AM ET