BYD Announces Home Solar-Powered Humanoid Robot for $10,000!

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Last Updated on: 1st April 2025, 11:54 am

Well, as has been the trend lately, BYD is telling Tesla and everyone else in the market, “What you can do, I can do better, and cheaper.” With 110,000 R&D engineers, who is surprised? BYD may have delayed entry into the humanoid robot market, but that it’s coming in with the biggest bang imaginable.

The Chinese EV and battery giant has just introduced a general-purpose robot powered with advanced AI that can reportedly do difficult and nuanced tasks for you, like do the laundry, fold your clothes, vacuum, rake leaves, and even scrub the bathtub and toilets.

Whereas Tesla has a long-term goal of one day producing 1 million Optimus robots a year, bringing the cost down to $30,000 each, BYD is introducing this new humanoid robot at $10,000, with deliveries beginning in December 2025. That’s still a healthy chunk of cash, but it’s much more accessible to large portions of the population — the upper middle class or possibly even middle class, given the utility of the robot.

Going one step further, this BYD robot, named “BoYoboD,” is solar powered! It comes with a solar power charging kit that you place outside. When the robot gets low on battery — you can set that to be 10%, 20%, or whatever you prefer — it goes and plugs itself into a portable solar panel plus battery system that charges it up. So, yeah, BYD is going one step forward yet again and really building our dreams.

Naturally, the robot can also plug in your electric car for you. However, BYD has clarified that the robot can’t drive (yet).

Of course, the $10,000 price noted above is a translation from the Chinese price — 73,000 yuan — and the robot will only be available in China initially. One would expect it will make its way to other markets before long, but one would also expect that major barriers in the US would mean that several other markets will get it first.

It’s not clear if the robot can cook. That seems like a more difficult, nuanced task, and the BoYoboD surely can’t taste food as it goes along. Perhaps it will be useful for cooking very simple meals with easy enough recipes and cooking instructions.

Aside from doing laundry, vacuuming, doing yard work, and cleaning the bathroom, what other tasks would people really like from their robots? (Also, side note, RIP Roomba/iRobot.) And how does that $10,000 price tag sound? (Or the more likely price tag of $15,000 in places like Europe or $20,000 in the US, I presume?)

We don’t have pictures of this new BYD robot yet. Those are going to be revealed in July. You can pre-order blindly at a discounted price of 70,000 yuan starting today, or will have to pay 73,000 yuan starting in July when the robot is shown to the public. Why was this humanoid robot from BYD announced a few months before being shown? I don’t know, but it may have something to do with today’s date. Perhaps BYD wanted to get ahead of others in the market with coming announcements, build up enthusiasm and consumer interest for the full unveiling event, or just tease us. Stay tuned for more.