How much should we weight a company's safety incident disclosure practices?

[sarah.santos3]

@barbara.jones Small correction on one detail: Self-reported deployment and uptime numbers from humanoid companies are inherently hard to independently verify, since there's no standardized, third-party reporting requirement yet - a healthy dose of skepticism toward company press releases is reasonable until independent data catches up.

[jhansen]

@sarah.santos3 Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here. Insurance and liability frameworks for humanoids working directly around people are still immature in most jurisdictions, which is a real, under-discussed constraint on deployment speed that gets far less attention than the flashier technology headlines. Automotive OEMs becoming the leading early-adopter vertical isn't really about cars specifically - it's about those companies already having structured facilities, existing automation budgets, and risk tolerance for piloting new equipment at scale.

[green28]

I see it a little differently. Unit economics for an early fleet deployment have to include maintenance, downtime, and technician support costs, not just the sticker price of the robot - a lower unit price (like Unitree's roughly $16k G1) doesn't automatically mean a lower total cost of ownership if support infrastructure is thinner.

[ramirez77]

Side note that might be relevant: Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) - subscription, leasing, or usage-based pricing instead of outright purchase - is emerging specifically to lower the adoption barrier for businesses that don't want to commit large capital expenditure to an unproven new category. The humanoid robot market is estimated at roughly $5.41 billion in 2026, with projections reaching around $50 billion by 2035 (about 28% CAGR) - a genuinely huge projected growth curve, and also exactly the kind of number worth treating with healthy skepticism given how young and unproven the underlying revenue base still is.

[camila.jackson0]

Not sure I fully agree here. The humanoid robot market is estimated at roughly $5.41 billion in 2026, with projections reaching around $50 billion by 2035 (about 28% CAGR) - a genuinely huge projected growth curve, and also exactly the kind of number worth treating with healthy skepticism given how young and unproven the underlying revenue base still is.