Figure retires Figure 02 after an 11-month BMW run tied to 30,000 cars, handing the job to Figure 03 and a 12,000-a-year BotQ line

Figure AI said on 19 November 2025 that it had retired its Figure 02 humanoid after an 11-month deployment at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg in South Carolina, where the robots contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. The disclosure came six weeks after the company unveiled its third-generation robot, Figure 03, on 9 October, and it is the most detailed public account any humanoid maker has given of a sustained shift pattern on a running car line.

According to Figure, Figure 02 worked 10-hour shifts from Monday to Friday, logged more than 1,250 hours of runtime, loaded more than 90,000 parts and took more than 1.2 million steps, which the company put at more than 200 miles. The station had an 84-second cycle time, of which 37 seconds were allotted to loading. Figure said the target was better than 99% placement success per shift, with parts set to a 5-millimetre tolerance in about 2 seconds, and that its goal was zero human interventions per shift. It named the forearm as the subsystem that failed most often.

What Figure 03 changes

Figure describes Figure 03 as built around Helix, its in-house vision-language-action model, and around use in the home. The company said the new camera system runs at twice the frame rate of the previous generation, with one quarter of the latency and a 60% wider field of view per camera, in a smaller package. Each hand now carries a palm camera with a wide field of view, and redesigned fingertips are softer and carry tactile sensors that Figure said can register forces as small as 3 grams. A 10 Gbps millimetre-wave link lets robots offload large volumes of data from the fleet for training.

The body is 9% lighter than Figure 02 and takes up noticeably less volume, Figure said, without publishing height, weight or payload. Hard machined covers have given way to soft textiles over multi-density foam at pinch points, and the fabric can be removed and washed without tools. The battery pack has protection at cell, interconnect, battery management system and pack level and has been certified to the UN38.3 transport standard. The robot charges by stepping onto a stand that delivers 2 kW by induction. Figure said the actuators run up to twice as fast with better torque density, and the speaker is twice the size and nearly four times as powerful.

The BMW write-up links one of those changes directly to the factory experience. Because the Figure 02 forearm was the weakest point, Figure said it re-architected the wrist electronics on Figure 03, removing a distribution board and the dynamic cabling that ran through the joint so that each motor controller talks directly to the main computer.

Built for volume

Figure said Figure 03 was engineered for tooled processes such as die casting, injection moulding and stamping instead of CNC machining, with fewer parts and assembly steps, and that it designs its actuators, batteries, sensors, structures and electronics in-house. Its BotQ plant will start with a first-generation line able to build up to 12,000 humanoids a year, the company said, with a goal of 100,000 robots over the next four years. Figure said each unit costs dramatically less to build than its predecessor but did not give a figure, a price or a delivery date.

The launch followed a Series C round that Figure announced on 16 September 2025, which drew more than $1 billion in committed capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation, led by Parkway Venture Capital, according to the company. That made it the most highly valued humanoid developer with a disclosed price among US peers, roughly 26 times the $1.5 billion that Skild AI disclosed for its 2024 Series A.

Rivals are pursuing the same customers with different bets. Tesla is building Optimus for its own plants, Agility Robotics has put Digit into logistics sites, Apptronik is working with automotive partners on Apollo, and 1X Technologies is pitching its NEO directly at households. Figure is the only one of the group that has published shift-level output data from a carmaker, although none of its numbers have been independently confirmed by BMW in the same release.

The technical choices map onto how a vision-language-action model learns. A policy that reads images and outputs joint commands reacts faster when frames arrive more often and with less delay, and palm cameras cover the moment when the hand blocks the head cameras during a grasp. Tactile fingertips give the model a signal about slip and contact force that vision alone cannot provide. Wireless charging and high-bandwidth offload remove two chores that otherwise need a person, plugging in the robot and pulling its logs, which matters for a fleet that is meant to train on its own data.

The gaps in the disclosure are material. Figure has not said what Figure 03 costs, when it ships, or who the first customers will be, and it has not published height, weight, payload or runtime. The BMW figures describe one station on one line, and the phrase contributed to the production of 30,000 cars says nothing about how many human workers the robots replaced or what the station cost per part. The home pitch also runs ahead of evidence, since Figure has not described any household deployment.

The next markers are whether Figure names a commercial customer for Figure 03 and puts robots back into Spartanburg, whether BotQ output reaches a disclosed four-digit annual run rate, and whether a home pilot with paying users is announced in 2026.