BYD publishes a humanoid robot design in a Chinese patent

The user moment BYD executives have floated is a customer walking into a dealership and being greeted by a robot that can explain the car. According to Interesting Engineering, executives have previously indicated that BYD could deploy humanoids across its dealership network for tasks including greeting customers and explaining vehicle features ^[10]. Those are statements from executives, and the patent is a separate document about the machine's body ^[1].

The numbers attached to this robot need care. The report's headline says 31 joints ^[15]. Its text says the Xiao Di is reported to have 31 degrees of freedom and a dexterous hand with repeatable positioning accuracy of about 0.04 inches ^[14].

Those features could support tasks such as picking up objects and pointing out information to people ^[5]. The report adds that the published design does not show how dependably the robot would handle that work in everyday settings, or whether the same specifications would hold in a production model ^[6].

BYD has outside bets alongside its own team. It invested in Agibot in August 2023 and took a stake in Percibot in April 2025 ^[8].

A humanoid pilot comes down to a 2x2 built from two answers: whether the maker has reliability data from conditions like yours, and what one failure costs you. If a failure is cheap, a pilot is how you collect the missing data. A costly failure means the reliability data needs to be in hand before any pilot starts.

In our view a showroom greeter sits in the cheap row, and the report says dealership use would let BYD test routine customer-facing work without requiring major changes to existing facilities ^[11]. The tradeoff is visibility, because a greeter's failures happen in front of customers. Material handling on a factory line sits in the costly row. On the report's evidence the Xiao Di is in the no-data column for both uses, because the published design does not establish real-world reliability ^[6].