Dongfeng to trial humanoid robots in factories from October

Dongfeng's move places a legacy automaker, not a robotics startup, among the first to trial humanoid units on its own production lines, which matters because automotive plants offer the kind of repetitive, high-mix tasks that are hard to automate with fixed arms. The staged timeline — limited stations this year, human-parity capability targeted by the end of next year — signals the company itself treats this as an experiment, not a deployment. Whether such pilots stay confined to sorting and inspection, or spread to other manufacturing sectors, is the open question worth tracking.