XPeng Unveils Iron Robot, Robotaxis, Flying Cars

Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng unveiled its next-generation humanoid robot, Iron, at the company's 2025 Tech Day event in Guangzhou on Wednesday, captivating audiences with its lifelike movements and prompting a live demonstration to confirm it was not a human in disguise.

The event, held at XPeng's headquarters, showcased Iron's ability to walk, gesture and express facial movements in a manner that closely mimicked human behavior. Standing about 5 feet 7 inches tall, the robot features a biomimetic design with 82 degrees of freedom across its body, including 22 in each hand for precise dexterity. It incorporates a human-like spine, bionic muscles and flexible synthetic skin, powered by a solid-state battery and three in-house Turing AI chips that deliver 3,000 trillion operations per second. These components enable Iron to handle tasks such as conversation, obstacle avoidance and object manipulation through an advanced vision-language-action model.

Doubts arose immediately after the reveal, as online viewers and attendees questioned whether the robot's fluid motions were achieved by a person inside a suit, reminiscent of past robotics demonstrations. To address the...