Li Auto will release a dual-wheel robot within this year.

Before the Chinese New Year holiday, Li Auto’s official account confirmed the departure of Lang Xianpeng, the former head of its “original” intelligent driving business, and at the time, Lang Xianpeng had just taken over Li Auto’s humanoid robotics business for less than a month. After Lang Xianpeng left, Li Auto said that Zhan Yifei would take comprehensive responsibility for the R&D and productization of the robotics business.

《21st Century Auto · First Look Auto》learned from multiple sources that, even before this round of adjustments, Li Auto’s humanoid robotics team already existed and had been secretly developing for nearly a year. The team’s internal codename was Nexus (meaning “connection” and “bond” in Chinese), and its leader was He Junpei, a hardware partner from Jiuguang Intelligent, a former robotics startup company.

Li Auto planned two products under its humanoid robotics team: one is a two-wheeled robot and the other is a biped robot. Currently, the two-wheeled robot product is ready; in an ideal scenario, Li Auto would release it in mid-year this year, mainly for factory manufacturing scenarios.

“Li Auto’s approach to building robots is also to reference Tesla: first iterate the technical capabilities in a closed scenario, and then gradually move toward consumer groups.” A person with knowledge of the matter told us.

Nexus Secret History: Start with Hardware

《21st Century Auto · First Look Auto》learned exclusively that in 2023, Li Auto’s CEO Ma Donghui had internally pushed to approve a robotics project. However, Li Auto’s CEO Li Xi at the time believed the technology was not mature, so the project approval was put on hold.

As late 2024 came to a close, Li Xi’s thinking started to shift. He believed robots still needed to be planned in advance.

In 2024, Tesla unveiled the humanoid robot Optimus at AI DAY and announced that two Optimus units had begun entering Tesla factories to carry out related battery sorting tasks. At the same time, under the influence of large AI models, the robotics industry in China developed rapidly. In the first three quarters of that year alone, financing cases in China’s robotics sector had already reached 196, with total financing amounts of 12.8 billion yuan.

An internal source close to Li Xi told us that Li Xi judged that if you don’t build the robot’s big and small “brains” first, and if open sourcing happens in the future, investing too early would be meaningless.

After internal discussion at last, they decided to first build the embodied body—to get the hardware done.

After the Chinese New Year in 2025, Li Auto officially initiated secret recruitment for a robotics team. The recruitment goal was: in automakers and robotics startups, find “someone with extremely strong hardware capability.”

He Junpei matched Li Auto’s recruitment target at the time. On April 30, 2025, on the last day before the May Day holiday, He Junpei’s onboarding approval was approved, and he officially joined Li Auto. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Jilin University, attended graduate school at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed his PhD at the Zhejiang Lab. He worked in the Xiaopeng “Pengxing Intelligent” team and at Unitree Robotics. Before joining Li Auto, He Junpei was a hardware partner at Jiuguang Intelligent, a robotics company, and had some experience in mass production.

According to public information, Jiuguang Intelligent was founded in September 2023. It has already successfully developed a third-generation humanoid robot. The product is benchmarked against Tesla. By November 2025, Jiuguang Intelligent has completed three rounds of financing with a total amount exceeding $100 million. The first batch of embodied intelligent robots will officially roll off the line in the first quarter of 2026, with an estimated annual production volume of 3,000 to 5,000 units.

After He Junpei joined Li Auto, Li Auto’s secret, in-house robotics R&D officially began. The team’s codename was Nexus (meaning connection). It was placed under CEO Ma Donghui, with a headcount of fewer than 30 people.

However, the team did not appear in the company’s Feishu organizational structure. It was an internal, top-level confidential project, and other departments also had no idea about the project’s progress. This also caused the outside world to mistakenly believe that the “Space Robotics” team—a secondary department established in the first half of 2025 and led by Senior Director Shu Yifan—was developing humanoid robots.

《21st Century Auto · First Look Auto》learned exclusively that the department was actually developing an L4 vehicle. This model is a new product that Li Xi defined from 0 to 1; it eliminates the steering wheel, and the release date is unknown. Its direction of development does not overlap with the humanoid robot R&D by the Nexus team.

Why is Li Auto’s first robot wheeled rather than humanoid?

In the current robotics industry, competing technical routes keep emerging. People have not yet formed a unified technical solution, and product definitions and deployment scenarios also differ. Without knowing what the future holds, most domestic players choose to “cross the river by feeling the stones,” just like the intelligent driving industry did 10 years ago with Tesla.

Tesla formally announced in 2021 that it had begun developing humanoid robots. In 2023, Optimus officially made its debut. As of now, it has already iterated to the third version. According to media reports, Tesla’s third-generation robot Optimus Gen3 will be unveiled in the first quarter of 2026, with the goal of achieving 1 million units produced per year. Tesla is also currently expanding recruitment for personnel to produce “Optimus” at scale.

Tesla is not in a hurry to push humanoid robots to the market. Instead, it first replaces assembly-line workers in the factory. A person working in the robotics industry told 《21st Century Auto · First Look Auto》that for a long time, the robotics industry would prioritize deploying specialized robots trained in vertical scenarios. Among all vertical scenarios, factory scenarios are relatively easier and faster to deploy.

The earliest new power following Tesla was XPeng. XPeng built four generations of robots. After exploring from “four-legged” to “biped,” it officially unveiled AI robot IRON in November 2024. This robot is 178 cm tall and can already “go into factories to tighten screws,” taking on production tasks such as assembly. XPeng’s plan is to start mass production of the next generation of IRON robots by the end of 2026. XPeng Motors CEO He Xiaopeng said that XPeng’s robots will first be deployed in scenarios such as navigation and shopping guidance, and will open up the SDK to developers around the world.

Li Auto also “crosses the river by feeling the stones” with Tesla, but its attitude is more cautious.

Recently, Li Xi updated his views on humanoid robots on social media. He believes that if humanoid robots are built for housekeeping scenarios, they could be in a thousand homes in as little as three years.

But for Li Auto, the first robot product to be deployed is not a humanoid robot. The robotics practitioner mentioned above said that the reason they chose to first deploy a two-wheeled robot in factory scenarios is that wheeled robots are more stable and reliable than humanoid robots, and they can also carry payloads. Most importantly, wheeled robots can meet the requirement for an 8-hour production line working period.

In 2024, publicly available information shows that Tesla has already started laying out wheeled robots.

“Most practitioners would probably think that humanoids are the final form, but that path is long. The maturity of the current supply chain and technology is not enough, and you won’t see any possibility of realizing it within the next decade. A pure pre-research logic won’t work. You can only learn by doing.” A mid-level manager at an automaker who works on robotics told 《21st Century Auto · First Look Auto》.