THE WORLD’S BIGGEST EV MAKER IS SECRETLY BUILDING HUMANOID ROBOTS — BYD’S HIDDEN PROJECT BREAKS COVER BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle giant that outsells Tesla in volume globally, has confirmed it is developing humanoid robots under an internal project codenamed Yao-Shun-Yu. The disclosure came from BYD Executive Vice President Li Ke in a recent interview, pulling back the curtain on a program that has been running quietly since 2022 inside the company’s 15th Business Unit, a division focused on electronic integration and intelligence. The logic behind the move is not complicated. BYD has deep manufacturing expertise in motors, batteries, precision hardware, and the kind of embedded electronics that robots require. It also has a 4,000 engineer autonomous driving team whose software, according to Li, ports directly into robotics with minimal adaptation. That combination of hardware depth and software capability is exactly what most Western humanoid companies are still scrambling to build. Li suggested BYD might eventually sell robots through its global dealer network, treating the humanoid as a consumer product in the same distribution chain as its cars. The humanoid robotics space already has Tesla, Figure AI, and Boston Dynamics. BYD entering the race changes the manufacturing and cost calculus entirely. No company on earth is better positioned to build complex physical hardware at massive scale and bring the price down to something a consumer can actually afford. Keywords: BYD humanoid robots, embodied AI China, BYD Yao-Shun-Yu, Chinese AI hardware 2026