BYD Company Limited

The world's top-selling EV maker, which unveiled the humanoid robot “Xiaodi” in 2026 for use in showrooms.

BYD was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 by Chuanfu Wang and others, starting in batteries before entering the auto industry in 2003, and is now the world's top-selling new-energy vehicle maker. According to its December 2024 campus-recruiting materials, its embodied-AI research team was formed in 2022 and had already built process, collaborative, and mobile robots for its own factories, and was hiring to work on humanoid, bipedal, and quadruped robots. In May 2026, executive vice president Ke Li publicly confirmed for the first time that BYD was developing a humanoid robot, saying she hoped every dealership could have two or three for greeting customers and explaining models; in June, online reports of a project codenamed “Yao Shun Yu” and plans for 20,000 units of internal use within the year were denied by BYD. In August, its first humanoid robot, “Xiaodi,” was unveiled publicly at the “Di Space” experience center in Zhengzhou, standing 1.61 meters tall with 31 degrees of freedom across its body, initially used for greeting customers, explaining models, and demonstrating in-car features.

ExampleAs Ke Li described it, an in-store humanoid robot would handle greeting, model explanations, and demonstrating car-infotainment features alongside sales staff, rather than replacing them.

Also called

BYD

Related

Automakers Entering Humanoid Robotics · Humanoid Robot · XPeng · Li Auto Inc. · Tesla · Autonomous-Driving Talent Moving into Embodied AI

Sources

比亚迪：「人形机器人代号尧舜禹」等消息均不属实（IT之家，2026-06） (Chinese)
BYD unveils 5.2-feet-tall Xiao Di humanoid robot on showroom floors in China (Interesting Engineering, 2026-08)
比亚迪全球招聘具身智能人才（量子位，2024-12） (Chinese)

As of

2026-08