What's driving the gap between announced production capacity and actual shipments?

[ashley_flor]

Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: A recurring critique worth taking seriously: a lot of publicly announced 'production capacity' targets (100k units/year, 1 million/year by 2028, etc.) are aspirational manufacturing targets, not confirmed sales or deployment numbers, and the gap between the two has historically been large in hardware industries.

[tariqlarsen]

@ashley_flor Follow-up question though - 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.

[giulia.roberts4]

This lines up with my experience. 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.

[nicole57]

@giulia.roberts4 I can speak to this a bit. Chinese humanoid startups reportedly accounted for around 65% of deal volume in 2025, while US companies still won the largest individual rounds, with at least three raises exceeding $400 million - deal count and deal size tell different stories depending on which region you're looking at.