This BMW Robot Wants Your Clothes, Your Boots And Your Motorcycle

BMW says it’s trialling this robot to see if it can work in its factories, but we’re concerned it’s going to take over the world and force us all to drive 2-series Active Tourers

Mike Bartholomew

Updated: 09 Aug 2024

Robots. Depending on your point of view, they’re brilliant creations that will help lead us towards the utopian future we’ve all been promised, or a dangerous avenue to go down that will result in all of humanity becoming pawns in whatever big, electronic game of chess they have planned. BMW, for what it’s worth, reckons they’ll be handy in car factories.

Yes, we know what you’re thinking: robots have been a thing in car factories for ages. Yes, but they’re just big mechanical arms programmed to perform repetitive tasks. This… thing, clearly, is different.

It’s the Figure 02, a humanoid robot developed by Californian robotics company Figure, which BMW is trialling in its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. There, the company produces a number of its SUVs, rather aptly including the XM, itself as questionable as this sinister version of Bender from Futurama.

BMW has released a short video of the robot doing its thing, and we don’t know about you, but the way it moves its torso and flexes its fingers at the beginning genuinely makes our skin crawl. Naturally, it uses AI to actively learn from mistakes (of course it does, it’s 2024), just in case you weren’t already scared enough that it’s going to become self-aware and start vandalising Mercedes and Audi dealerships.

Admittedly, the fear factor goes away quite a lot once we’re treated to a shot of it walking like it had seven pints of motor oil and a robo-vindaloo the night before. Bipedal mobility, it seems, is still best handled by pathetic, fleshy humans.

While BMW says it currently has no timeline for the actual introduction of these robots to its plants, BMW production board member Milan Nedeljković said: “With an early test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialisation.”

Thankfully, the robot’s design was handled by Figure rather than BMW. Although we’re not sure if it would have been more or less scary with a weirdly angular head and a massive pair of nostrils.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.