Filed under physical-ai.

BMW just put a number on humanoid ROI—and the rest of manufacturing is watching

BMW's ten-month, 30,000-unit deployment of Figure AI's humanoid at Plant Spartanburg has shifted the industry's central question from 'can it work?' to 'at what cost, and where?' With unit costs projected below $17,000 by 2030 and current ROI timelines compressing toward 14 months, humanoid robots are becoming a capital-allocation decision — not a research one. The constraint is now integration, not hardware.