Key Takeaways:
Xpeng's CEO is personally running its robotics business, adding 9 departments in a restructuring that mirrors how China's EV makers are racing to commercialize humanoid robots by 2026.
Xpeng is reorganizing its robotics center around 9 new departments with Chairman He Xiaopeng personally overseeing product development, as China's electric-vehicle makers pivot toward embodied AI as a mass-production target for 2026.
"This upgrade at the senior management level marks an important step in Xpeng's strategic transformation from a smart electric vehicle company into a physical AI company," He said in a June 10 internal letter, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The nine departments include embodied systems engineering, general foundation model, brand marketing, control and safety development, embodied intelligence, data closed-loop, product matrix and project management. He, who earlier this month appointed himself head of the robotics center, now also serves as product department head and directly oversees the heads of the other departments, the person said.
The restructuring reflects how China's EV startups are reshaping their organizations around robotics as 2026 is seen as the first year of humanoid robot commercialization. Competition has shifted from teams and demos to mass production and deliveries, with several companies already collapsing on the eve of large-scale manufacturing.
Shared DNA Between Cars and Robots
Xpeng's organizational overlap between its automotive and robotics units highlights a structural advantage that carmakers hold over pure-play robotics startups. Gu Jie, head of the embodied systems engineering department, also serves as Xpeng's powertrain chief and previously led the team that developed its super extended-range technology. On the software side, Liu Xianming, who leads the general foundation model department, concurrently heads Xpeng's general intelligence center.
The technical convergence runs deeper. VLA (Vision-Language-Action) models and world models serve both autonomous driving and robotics, allowing Xpeng to reuse AI infrastructure across both businesses. At the CVPR 2026 conference, Liu wrote that VLA learns from human behavior while world models learn from how the world evolves, calling the two approaches complementary.
Xiaomi's smart driving unit has taken a similar approach. Chen Long, head of Xiaomi EV's smart driving foundation model, built a unified architecture called Xiaomi OneVL that combines both capabilities for autonomous driving and robotics, describing the work as creating a shared technical foundation for both fields.
A chief technology officer at a humanoid robot maker said the AI infrastructure used to train autonomous driving models, along with the related experience, can equally be applied to robots, according to the report. For robots, AI infrastructure matters even more than the large model itself, the person said.
Li Auto has also moved in this direction. In February, the company restructured its intelligence division into three teams covering humanoid robots, software bodies and foundation models. By May, it added three more second-tier departments — embodied engineering, embodied interaction and embodied behavior.
The Race to 2026 Commercialization
A humanoid robot CEO argued that carmakers and phone makers have an edge in robotics because they have a better grasp of production cadence, standards and the broader balance of supply, manufacturing and sales, according to the report.
He said in his June 10 letter that the robotics business now integrates multiple core modules within Xpeng — including hardware, AI large models, supply chain, precision manufacturing and marketing. This high degree of complexity requires deeper overall collaboration at the critical moment of the mass-production campaign, turning the group's strengths into a powerful fighting force, he said.
Xpeng shares, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker XPEV, have gained about 12 percent year to date. The robotics restructuring signals that management views embodied AI as a core growth driver beyond its EV business, potentially opening a new valuation vector for the company as investors assess the timeline to humanoid robot revenue.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
