BMW doubles down on humanoid robots after a U.S. test run

Every generation of workers hears that a machine is coming for its job. Sometimes the machine arrives. More often it just reshuffles the work, moving people from one task to another without the dramatic reckoning anyone braced for.

Factories have carried that worry longer than most workplaces. The modern assembly line has run on robots since the 1960s, when General Motors first bolted a mechanical arm onto a production line in New Jersey.

Those machines were caged, fixed to the floor, and built to repeat a single motion. They were strong and they were dumb, and they never pretended to look anything like the people working beside them.

That setup held for half a century. The robot stayed in its cage. The worker walked the line. And the boundary between what a person did and what a machine did barely moved.

Now it is moving. German automaker BMW (BMWYY) has spent the past year and a half running humanoid robots, machines shaped like people, inside a working American factory, and the results were strong enough that it is taking the experiment to Europe.

BMW doubles down on robots after a quiet US test

Photo by MICHAELA STACHE on Getty Images

Why BMW is betting bigger on humanoid robots

BMW confirmed in late February that it is putting humanoid robots to work at its plant in Leipzig, Germany, the first deployment of its kind in a European car factory, according to BMW Group.

The company also opened a Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production to push the technology across its global plants.

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The move follows an 11-month pilot at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where two humanoid robots from California startup Figure AI, which is privately held, worked a live assembly line. The robots loaded sheet metal parts onto welding fixtures, a repetitive job that grinds on human bodies over a full shift.

BMW frames the strategy as a people-first one, with robots absorbing the tasks that are repetitive, physically punishing or unsafe.

The mix of engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) opens up “completely new possibilities in production,” said Milan Nedeljković, who ran BMW’s production during the pilot and became the company’s chief executive on May 14, according to BMW Group.

The timing is not an accident. BMW and Figure are already evaluating the next-generation Figure 03 robot for more jobs, and the carmaker is running separate humanoid pilots at its German plants in Munich and Regensburg.

Related: Tesla’s Optimus robot plan hits major snag

What the South Carolina robot pilot actually proved

The Spartanburg run handed the industry its first hard numbers on what a humanoid robot can do in a real factory rather than a staged demo. Across roughly ten months of full deployment, the robots ran 10-hour shifts, five days a week, and hit the placement-accuracy and cycle-time targets BMW had set, according to Figure AI.

When I lined up the pilot results against the forecasts coming off Wall Street, the gap between robot hype and shop-floor reality looked smaller than I expected. Here is the scale of it, by the numbers:

The two robots helped build more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles during the pilot, according to Figure AI.They moved more than 90,000 sheet metal parts across roughly 1,250 hours of run time, according to Assembly.The humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2035, six times an earlier estimate, according to Goldman Sachs Research analyst Jacqueline Du.The wider humanoid economy could be worth $5 trillion by 2050, according to Morgan Stanley Research.

Manufacturer interest in humanoid robots climbed from 8% to 13% in a single year, according to a January 2026 survey from the Association for Advancing Automation, as reported by IIOT World.

Cost is the variable that decides how fast this spreads, and it is dropping fast.

A humanoid unit in a Western factory pilot runs roughly $90,000 to $100,000 today, a figure Bank of America projects could fall below $17,000 by 2030, as reported by Humanoids Daily.

Figure has said its newer robots already work at about $25 an hour at BMW, a number that starts to read like a line item a chief financial officer can defend rather than a science project.

What a trillion-dollar robot market means for your job

In my analysis, the number that matters most here is not the market size. It is the labor gap these machines are built to fill. Goldman Sachs has estimated humanoid robots could cover a real slice of the projected US manufacturing labor shortage by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs Research, and plants across the country already struggle to staff the physically brutal jobs younger workers keep walking away from.

That is the comfortable version. The blunter one is that the moment a machine proves it can do a task at $25 an hour with no pension and no fatigue, the math around the human standing next to it gets harder to ignore.

BMW’s own framing, that robots free people for work needing judgment and creativity, is the optimistic counterweight, and it is not wrong. It is just not the whole story.

For an investor, the same pilot reads as a signal that physical AI is moving from pitch decks to purchase orders, the kind of shift that tends to surface in supplier earnings before it ever reaches the front page. 

Where humanoid robots go from here

The Leipzig pilot ramps up over the summer, with two robots targeted for full production work by the end of 2026, according to BMW Group. Figure, for its part, has already retired the Figure 02 units that did the Spartanburg work, scratched and scuffed from the line, and moved to its third-generation model.

The open question is no longer whether a humanoid robot can survive a factory shift. Spartanburg settled that. The question now is how fast the price falls, and how many plant managers decide the machine costs less than the alternative.

If you build cars, own the companies that build them, or expect to send a kid into a manufacturing economy a decade from now, that is the number to watch. BMW just told the rest of the industry it likes the early answer enough to spend more. The companies that move next will not announce it nearly as loudly.

Related: BMW CEO has blunt new message on Trump’s tariff threat

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