Xpeng will start mass producing its human-like ‘Iron’ robot from 2026

We’re getting closer to the vision the producers of I, Robot envisioned back in 2004... and what the rest of us have been having nightmares about ever since 1984's The Terminator. Xpeng boss He Xiaopeng intends to start mass-producing four-limbed robots called ‘Iron’ from next year.

The humanoid device is 178cm tall, and weighs 70kg with 62 active degrees of freedom because, in his words, "it'll learn best from humans and it'll need to learn from scratch". Considering the wealth of human history on offer, this sounds perfectly... fine.

He's invested over £5 billion (RMB50bn) into the venture as part of its AI network, which includes robots, flying cars, autonomous cars and 'other stuff'. Thusly, Iron will do all its learning via Xpeng’s Turing AI chipset. Developed in-house, the chip contains four cores operating different areas of computation, running 30 billion parameters at any given time. Yeesh.

Xiaopeng said: “After five years of development, we’ve concluded robots are way harder to make than cars. If the car doesn’t have intelligence, you can still drive it, but if a robot doesn’t have intelligence, it’s basically useless."

Time to down an espresso. He is so confident that Xpeng can get the human-like droid to L3 autonomy (the minimum internal standard to start mass production) by next year, the boss has invited factory owners to come and see the robot for themselves "and work out if it can work together with your human labourer to improve productivity". Mildly terrified? Yup, us too.

He admits there'll be several iterations before Iron can become a household product, giving us plenty of time to prepare for the ultimate twin-test – the one where Iron takes on Tesla's Optimus. That's when we're all doomed the one we're all waiting for, right? Right?