China’s electric vehicle (EV) makers are shifting more of their R&D toward humanoid robots, betting the next phase of AI competition will centre on physical-world applications rather than in-car systems. As US-China tech tensions rise, automakers including Xpeng, Chery, Nio, BYD, GAC, and Seres are using their EV engineering and autonomous-driving AI to develop robots with autonomous mobility and semantic understanding, positioning embodied intelligence as their next strategic arena.