Why did engineers cut apart their robot on stage?

It’s understandable why audience members might have thought XPeng’s new humanoid robot Iron was actually a person disguised as a bot. When the robot walked onto the stage at the company’s event in China recently, it moved so fluidly that it really looked human.

It was so convincing, in fact, that XPeng felt the need to prove there was no human inside. After all, who can forget the time Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot in 2021, but it was really just a person in a bodysuit. So XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng called Iron back onto the stage to have one of the company’s engineers cut it up.

The team member cut through the robot’s fabric outer layers — the skin and muscle, as Xiaopeng called them — on the bottom of its left leg to reveal the mechanical workings underneath. And not a pound of human flesh in sight. The robot then walked off the stage just as calmly as before.