Xpeng’s ‘ET1’ Humanoid Hits Production Milestone as Race with Tesla and Hyundai Intensifies

Xpeng CEO He Xiaopeng announced a major milestone in the company’s robotics division this week, confirming that the first unit of the ET1 humanoid robot has officially rolled off the production line. The designation ET1, which likely stands for Engineering Test 1 or Engineering Trial 1, represents a shift from laboratory prototypes to a machine designed for industrial-scale manufacturing.

In a statement posted to social media on January 19, 2026, Xiaopeng He emphasized that the robot was developed to "automotive-grade standards," leveraging the company’s existing expertise in electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing. "This marks a critical step toward the large-scale mass production of advanced humanoid robots this year," He noted, following a full day of internal review with the engineering team.

Manufacturing Synergy: "China’s Tesla" Steps Up

Xpeng’s strategy mirrors that of its primary rival, Tesla, which has long been the benchmark for the "automotive-to-robotics" pipeline. Just as Tesla is mapping out an S-curve for the Optimus production ramp, Xpeng is betting that its high-volume EV production lines and proprietary Turing AI chips will provide the necessary infrastructure to industrialize humanoid form factors.

The ET1 rollout reinforces Xpeng’s ambitious 2026 roadmap, which includes:

• Mass Production Readiness: The company aims for full mass production of humanoid robots by the end of 2026.
• Automotive Standards: By applying the same rigorous safety and durability standards used for its cars, Xpeng hopes to avoid the mechanical failures—such as the "one-month" hand durability issue—that plagued earlier R&D versions.
• Commercial Deployment: Initial units are expected to serve as retail assistants and tour guides in Xpeng showrooms starting later this year.

A Crowded Field of Production-Ready Droids

The announcement comes at a time of intense competition within the "Physical AI" sector. While Xpeng is scaling up its ET1 trial, Boston Dynamics and Hyundai recently shifted the conversation from research to reality by launching the production-ready all-electric Atlas at CES 2026.

Like Xpeng’s Iron, the new Atlas is designed for "automotive volumes," with Hyundai planning to deploy tens of thousands of units across its global manufacturing facilities. However, where Boston Dynamics has leaned into an "alien" morphology to maximize industrial utility, Xpeng continues to prioritize a "most human-like" aesthetic for its platform.

Technical Foundation of the ET1

While technical specifics for the ET1 specifically were sparse in the CEO's announcement, it is believed to be the production-intent version of the "Iron" platform unveiled late last year. That model featured:

• A "Human-Like Spine": A 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) waist that allows for realistic hip sway and bending motions.
• Dexterous Hands: Next-generation hands with 22 degrees of freedom per unit.
• Advanced AI Brain: A multi-modal system combining Vision-Language-Task (VLT) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to enable autonomous decision-making.

The race to dominate the humanoid market is now moving into a hardware-focused "Phase One," where the primary challenge is proving that these complex machines can be manufactured with the same 99.9% uptime and reliability as traditional industrial automation. With the ET1 now hitting the production line, Xpeng appears positioned to be one of the first to test this theory at scale.