How seriously should we take '1 million units per year by 2028' style targets?

[barbara50]

Side note that might be relevant: 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.

[tariqlarsen]

@barbara50 Not sure I fully agree here. 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.

[thomas65]

Appreciate the detailed answer. 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.

[nicole57]

@thomas65 Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here. Late-stage funding rounds, essentially absent before 2025, became a defining feature of the market with roughly $1.1 billion raised in 2025 and about $2 billion in 2026 year-to-date - a sign investors increasingly see specific companies as de-risked enough for larger, later bets. Anyway, good thread - following for more.