After delivering all but the finishing blow to Elon Musk's electric vehicle empire with cutting-edge companies like BYD and Li Auto, Chinese industrialists are now setting their sights on the South African billionaire's robotics ambitions.

Earlier this week, the Hangzhou-based tech company Unitree Robotics launched what Bloomberg calls one of the world's "first humanoid robots for under $6,000," the Unitree R1, at the relatively low price of just $5,900. While that's still a major chunk of change, it's substantially lower than the price for similar humanoid robots, like the Booster H1, which retails for over $75,000, or the AGIBOT A2, which goes for a cool $180,000.

And however expensive those units might be, at least they're actually on the market.

Musk's Optimus, the humanoid robot that Tesla's planning to sell for something around five times the R1's price, can't say the same. Since its initial announcement in 2021, Optimus has been plagued by the type of internal disasters and embarrassing PR failures that seem to have become the billionaire's calling card.

Despite Musk's claims that Optimus would be ready for production by 2023, the rollout is extremely rocky, with production shortfalls resulting in major bottlenecks on the assembly line.

For example, The Information reported last week that Tesla is lagging way behind in the production of the robot's dexterous hands, leading to a buildup of half-finished robots missing their digits.

While the R1 base unit doesn't come with dexterous hands, Unitree's $6,000 bot is said to have 26 separate joints, an 8-core CPU, 6 degrees of leg freedom, as well as voice and image recognition capabilities. The design decision speaks for itself: unlike Optimus, the R1 is currently enjoying its time in the world, showing off flashy tricks like cartwheels, walking on its hands, and roundhouse kicks.

The bots are also just fun. The R1's older cousin, the G1, which sells for around $16,000, has gone viral in stunts where it's paraded around public spaces rizzing up passersby, or sporting bright rainbow flag attire.

It all comes at a moment when China is surging ahead of the rest of the world in robotics production. Though consumer robots around the world are still in a primitive state, China's rollout of industrial robotics has skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2022 and 2023, China deployed over 276,000 factory robo-units — over half of all manufacturing robots installed throughout the globe.

Chinese companies aren't shy about those efforts either. A number of PR campaigns bragging up the People's Republic's advanced robotics have attained viral status abroad, including a "Real Steel" style robot boxing match, and an "Uncle Bot" which chronicles its adventures online.

To be fair, Tesla's Optimus has also gone viral — though not for stepping into the ring or roaming the countryside, but for serving popcorn while standing behind a counter.

During a recent earnings call with investors, meanwhile, Musk introduced his signature wild card to the already rocky Optimus production, hinting that when the humanoid robots finally ship, they'll do so with a completely new design.

Whether Tesla plans to cut back its ambitious dexterous hands design to get to market? That remains to be seen.

More on robots: Scientists Create Prototype of Robot Designed to Cannibalize Parts of Other Robots and Build Them Into Itself


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