The companies that make cars, now making robots.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on where robots and the auto industry are colliding: the factory, the supply chain, and — the dealership.

• BMW. In Spartanburg, a Figure 02 humanoid worked the body shop for ten months — ten-hour shifts, five days a week — moving 90,000+ sheet-metal parts across ~1,250 operating hours while the plant built 30,000 X3s. This summer the program crosses the Atlantic: Hexagon’s AEON starts a full pilot at Plant Leipzig, the first humanoid in production in Germany, working high-voltage battery assembly. BMW even opened a Center of Competence for Physical AI in Munich. This is no longer a demo; it’s a department.

• inding now. Hyundai will put Atlas robots to work at its Georgia plant from 2028 (parts sequencing first, assembly from 2030) and is building a factory to make 30,000 robots a year — remember, it owns Boston Dynamics. Schaeffler signed for a four-digit fleet of wheeled humanoids across its plants by 2032, starting December 2026, on a Robot-as-a-Service model. The twist: Schaeffler will also supply over half the actuators for those robots — a seven-digit number of joints through 2031. The customer IS the supply chain.

• China runs different. UBTech has begun mass delivery of Walker S2 — the first batch of several hundred, 500 targeted this year — against ¥800M+ in orderss, with capacity headed to 5,000/yr this year and 10,000 next — already on lines at BYD, Geely, FAW-VW, Audi FAW, Dongfeng Liuzhou and BAIC, with Airbus testing them for aircraft assembly. AgiBot rolled its 10,000th humanoid off the line this spring; its robots already work inside Minth’s parts plant in Jiaxing. TrendForce sees China’s humanoid output growing 94% this year; per Omdia, all six of 2025’s top shippers were Chinese. Tesla says Optimus V3 production starts this summer — though even Musk concedes the early pace will be slow.

Why factories first? Three reasons: the environment is structured and measurable ; three-shift economics plus RaaS turn robots from capex into opex; and the buyers are also the builders — “a smart car is a mobile robot,” as Chery’s chairman puts it.

Now the honest part. UBTech itself says today’s humanoids run at no more than half a human’s efficiency. Current deployments are material handling, not precision assembly, and most still need the vendor’s engineers on site. And yet — the contracts keep getting bigger. Automakers aren’t buying labor savings this year; they’re buying optionality on labor, data, and their own next product line. BofA expects ~90,000 humanoids shipped in 2026, and 1.2 million by 2030.

Next,Part 2: why carmakers are built to build robots — the supply-chain genes, from battery housings to actuators, where Europe’s humanoid robot plant is rising on an auto-parts campus.

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