One of Tesla's Chinese rivals has a unique strategy for building its humanoid robot: make it huggable (www.businessinsider.com)

Chinese EV maker Xpeng announced plans to begin mass production of its humanoid robot "Iron" by the end of 2026 and aims to sell 1 million units a year by 2030. Xpeng’s CEO said the company deliberately designed Iron to be "highly human-like," adding fake muscles and "bionic skin" to make the robot touchable and even huggable; demos showed male and female body variants and customizable physiques, and employees cut into the flexible skin to prove there’s no person inside. Xpeng expects early deployments in retail and as tour guides (it plans to trial Iron in its stores next year) as it races Tesla — which targets Optimus production in 2026 — to commercialize humanoid robots. For the AI/ML community this signals a shift from lab prototypes to user-facing, socially aware robots where human-robot interaction (HRI), tactile materials, safe actuation and perception are as important as locomotion and control. Xpeng’s emphasis on soft exterior and anthropomorphic form highlights trade-offs between social acceptance and durability/maintainability, and raises scaling challenges for manufacturing, sensing, and safety validation at million-unit volumes. The move also tightens competitive pressure in robotics commercialization, reinforcing that advances in perception, real-time control, and embodied AI will be central to any viable humanoid platform.