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Wuhu, China — May 7, 2026. Chery wants to sell more than cars. At its 2026 Global Innovation Conference in Wuhu, the automaker presented a humanoid home robot, a Level 4 robotaxi, a long-range electric aircraft, autonomous farming equipment and a bidirectional charging station as one connected product family. The shared foundation is CheryMind, a foundation model the company has built for “physical AI,” and its self-developed Ziwei chip line.
Chery did not frame these as separate experiments. Executives described them as different machines sharing the same digital brain. The same perception, planning and control software can be adapted for a passenger car, a two-legged robot or a rotorcraft, while the chips provide the computing power to run those workloads on board. Chery says the platform is designed to learn from each device and improve the whole family over time.
Aimoga Robotics, the robot unit behind the display, has delivered more than 3,000 robots to more than 60 countries and regions. It says about 70% of its robot R&D comes from Chery’s automotive technology. The Mobo humanoid, built for home companionship, was shown alongside public-service robots designed for reception, patrol and delivery.
That approach has cost advantages. Robots need motors, sensors, batteries and perception systems; Chery already buys these in high volumes for cars. Sharing supply chains allows Aimoga to avoid the small-batch component prices that burden many robotics startups. The company did not announce a pricing or launch date for Mobo, but the breadth of its robot lineup suggests it has moved beyond the concept stage.
Chery unveiled a robotaxi built on a normal production line, rather than as a research prototype. It uses the Falcon Pilot driving system and handles passenger pickup and drop-off automatically. The car can also work with autonomous charging robots, which is a sign that Chery is thinking about fleet operations, not just vehicle hardware.
Chery did not say which cities will get the robotaxi, did not name a ride-hailing partner, and gave no service launch date. Chinese robotaxi operators such as Apollo Go and Pony.ai are already operating paid services in several cities, so Chery will enter a crowded market. Its factory-built approach, however, could help on cost and scale if it finds the right partner.
The Lingxiao J506 passenger eVTOL is the most ambitious item in the lineup. Chery says it is designed for a top speed above 350km/h and a range of more than 1,000km. Those numbers put it far beyond the short urban hops targeted by Archer Aviation and most other eVTOL developers. A 1,000km range would make the aircraft more like a regional air taxi than an urban airport shuttle.
Chery gave no certification schedule, no flight-test results and no production timeline. It also did not say whether it has filed with China’s aviation regulator. Until a full-scale prototype demonstrates that kind of range, the specifications are engineering targets, not product promises. The company may be showing the design to position itself for future approval routes rather than immediate sales.
Chery also showed autonomous farming equipment that has worked more than 66,700 hectares of farmland. The machines use the same visual recognition and path-planning technology as the cars, adjusted for rows of crops rather than lanes. Farm automation is a less glamorous use of the platform, but it may be the easiest way for Chery to prove CheryMind in a commercial environment.
Chery demonstrated a vehicle-to-grid station that combines solar generation, battery storage and megawatt-level charging. During the day, solar panels charge the battery and parked vehicles; at peak hours, the station can send power from vehicle batteries back into the grid. Chery plans to build 20,000 such stations globally by 2029 and is already running a solar-plus-storage microgrid in Spain, where diesel generators were replaced at an electric heavy-truck site.
The V2G plan could become a strategic moat. In markets with weak grids, a network of Chery stations would make the company part of the local power system, giving buyers another reason to choose Chery vehicles. Twenty thousand stations is an aggressive target, but Chery’s export scale gives it the distribution channels to attempt it.
The most concrete advantage Chery showed may not be any single product; it is the Ziwei chip family. By designing its own semiconductors, Chery reduces its reliance on foreign suppliers. That has become more important as Washington restricts advanced chip exports to China. Ziwei chips are meant to handle AI workloads on the car, robot or aircraft itself, reducing the need for constant connections to cloud data centers and making the CheryMind platform easier to deploy in places with poor connectivity.
Chery is hardly the only Chinese automaker moving into physical AI. Xpeng has also called itself a technology company and is working on robots and flying vehicles; other peers have shown similar hardware. The idea is that automotive scale makes other machines affordable to develop.
But the scale of Chery’s ambition is easier to present than to execute. No live robotaxi rides or robot demonstrations were offered to the media at the conference, and no launch dates were attached to the eVTOL or the robotaxi. Chery’s domestic vehicle market is still under pricing pressure, so spending on robots, aircraft and energy infrastructure could stretch its engineering teams.
The counterargument is Chery’s export business. It is China’s biggest car exporter, and it has sales and service networks in dozens of emerging markets. Those networks can be used to sell robots and energy equipment, not just cars. If CheryMind works even partially, it could turn the automaker into something like a hardware platform company, with vehicles as just one product category.
