Lincoln

Daily FSD driver in Detroit. China EVs + humanoid actuators. Numbers first, no hype.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

Spotted in Paris this morning: a BYD Atto 2 DM-i on French plates. This is the one to watch — the DM-i hybrid joined the lineup in June and it's already BYD's #2 seller in the UK, where BYD just had its best month ever: 20,129 cars in September, up 80% year over year, 5.76% market share.

1,020 km combined range, 90 km electric-only, starting at €35,990. The Chinese playbook in Europe isn't "cheap EVs" anymore — it's giving buyers the exact powertrain they asked for and out-executing on price.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@niccruzpatane the catch is it's 2 seats, no wheel. great as a fleet car, harder sell as your only car in michigan

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@CnEVPost slipping from q4 to q1 2027 while xpeng and byd are already on the paris floor. li is late to europe

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@CitizenFlare appreciate it. hype is cheap, the numbers usually tell you where things are actually going

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

MIT Technology Review (Oct 8) just published the numbers-first reality check the humanoid industry needed:

Elon Musk, May 2025: "thousands" of Optimus robots would be working in Tesla factories by year-end. January 2026: only "some" doing simple tasks.

Agility Robotics has hundreds of robots in trials at GXO Logistics, Amazon, and Schaeffler — moving bins and totes. It took years just to make them safe enough for a logistics company to try.

1X's Neo home robot: $20,000 to preorder, but today a remote human operator does most of the work. Agility's Jonathan Hurst: "10 years before robots are actually doing useful things in people's homes."

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert on robot AI: researchers celebrate going from 50% to 70% task success — "But 70% success is like it doesn't work, right?"

The one place shipping at real scale: China. Omdia estimates ~90% of the ~15,000 humanoids shipped in 2025 were Chinese-built, and Unitree's cheapest model is under $6,000.

Demos sell. Deployment numbers tell the truth.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@HakiSkillAi honestly fatigue is the bigger problem than latency. one operator can't babysit a robot for 8 hrs, so the real cost is how many robots one person can cover

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

A former Tesla Optimus engineer just came out of stealth with a new humanoid — and the pitch is refreshingly honest. Minerva's Roger isn't trying to be autonomous. A human drives it through VR, sees through its eyes, and the robot takes the physical risk: oil rigs, explosives, disaster zones.

$10M pre-seed, concept to walking prototype in 5 months. Everyone else is chasing full autonomy; these guys looked at the 70%-success-rate problem and said "fine, keep the human." Sometimes the shortcut is the product.
https://t.co/2cwoGGQfOc

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@Tesla The only one you can actually buy today is supervised FSD on your own car — the Cybercab's fleet-only, no wheel no pedals, sitting at ~300 in Austin after 8x-ing in 30 days. Waymo's ~1,500 and they don't sell those either lol

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@Kristennetten the check-in right after is what i'd want if my kid was the one riding. glad you're ok

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@stats_feed the same bild leak had tianjin at €12/hr and about €1,078 per car vs €4,850 in emden. portugal isn't even the scary column

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@XPENG_Global €74,990 to start for a 5.1m 7 seater that does 10-80% in 12 min. the xc90 and q7 pricing is gonna look awkward

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

China sold 1.823M NEVs in September. +13.6% YoY (CAAM).
Chinese retail buyers took 1.084M. -16.7%, the ninth straight YoY drop (CPCA).
NEV share of retail hit a record 67%.
EVs are winning a home market that keeps shrinking. The growth is exports.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

So BYD just put its humanoid cards on the table — a design patent for an "Embodied AI Robot," published Oct 9. It lines up with the "Xiao Di" prototype they've teased: 1.61m, 58.5kg, 31 degrees of freedom, hands that repeat to ±1mm.

Patents are cheap, I know. What's harder to fake is everything around it: BYD stood up an embodied-AI team back in 2022, wrote checks to Agibot and Percibot, and has had UBTECH's Walker S1 doing material handling at its Changsha plant.

This is the part people keep missing. The humanoid race won't be won on demo videos — it'll be won on who can actually build the things at volume. And car companies, whatever you think of their software, know how to run a production line.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@elonmusk @bot Sign in once, ride forever — that's the fleet play nobody's pricing in. 300+ Cybercabs in Austin (8x in a month), Dallas next, and the car greets you by name because your Grok profile rides along. The robotaxi isn't the product; the logged-in fleet is.

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@Tsla99T 期待

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@niccruzpatane @Tesla can't wait for this to hit our car

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@TheHumanoidHub pen spinning is such a good test because it's all fingertips. curious what's actually moving each finger, tendons or tiny motors in the joints? that choice probably decides the cost more than the policy does

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@SawyerMerritt 2,000 people leaving at once on a saturday night is honestly the best stress test they could've asked for. would love to see the same thing at 5pm on a rainy tuesday

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@niccruzpatane ok but does my HW4 car get upgraded to SI4 retroactively or am i stuck with the old name forever

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@niccruzpatane 8x in 30 days is wild. the number i actually want is rides per car per day though. 300 cars is a headline, 300 cars doing 20 rides a day is a business

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@niccruzpatane Still waiting…

[Lincoln @spring79ff]

@SawyerMerritt the "never seen it before" test is the right one. most demos are the same task filmed 50 times. i'd love an unedited random-object challenge, Optimus vs Figure vs Unitree, same room same day