XPeng Says Its IRON Humanoid Is Coming to Europe in Late 2027

So basically: XPeng finally put a date on when its IRON humanoid robot shows up in Europe. CEO He Xiaopeng showed a slide at the company’s Paris Night event on Oct. 11, right before the Paris Motor Show. Mass production starts late 2026, deliveries start in the first half of 2027, and the European rollout is the second half of 2027.

Quick background on XPeng

XPeng is a Chinese EV company. Most people know them for cars, and they’ve been pushing hard into Europe. At the same event they said the L03 SUV already has over 12,000 orders in Europe.

But they’re not just a car company anymore. They’ve got flying cars, self driving stuff and now IRON, a humanoid robot that looks really human. Like, people thought there was a person inside it when they first showed it off.

The timeline

Here’s what the slide said:

• Late 2026: mass production
• First half of 2027: deliveries start
• Second half of 2027: European rollout

They already opened a production line for IRON in Guangzhou back in September. In Paris they showed an IRON unit finishing assembly and walking right off the line.

Before this, XPeng just said IRON would launch in China and overseas sometime in 2027. No region, no half of the year. So this is the first time they gave Europe an actual window.

What it’s gonna do at first

Don’t expect one in your house in 2027. The first jobs are commercial:

• Guided tours
• Helping shoppers
• Going along on security patrols

And the first places it works are XPeng’s own sales centers and company sites. Brian Gu, XPeng’s president, said robots will start greeting visitors and helping sales staff at their Guangzhou HQ by early 2027. After that it moves into stores and malls. Industrial and home use come later, and XPeng didn’t give dates for those.

IRON can talk in Chinese, English and German, it can recognize faces and it remembers past conversations. German being in there kinda tells you where they’re looking in Europe.

What we still don’t know

A lot honestly:

• Which European countries get it first
• How much it costs
• How it’s sold, like buy, lease or rent
• How many they’re making

So it’s a target, not a done deal. No orders announced in Europe yet either. And there’s no word on service, like who fixes it if it breaks down in a store in Germany. That stuff matters a lot more than people think.

Why it matters

Humanoid companies love giving dates. Not many actually hit them. XPeng is different because they already build and sell cars at scale, so they know how to run factories. That’s a big edge over a lot of robot startups.

Also Europe doesn’t really have a big humanoid company of its own. If XPeng gets IRON into stores over there before Tesla gets Optimus out, that’s a pretty big deal for them.

And it fits what’s going on in China right now. Guangdong just said it wants to make 80,000 humanoids a year by 2028, and XPeng is based in Guangzhou.

My take

I think it’s smart to start with their own stores. Low risk, easy to show off, and people walking in to look at a car get to see a robot too. That’s free marketing. And if it messes up in their own store, it’s their problem, not some customer’s factory line.

Late 2026 for mass production is only a few months away though, so we’ll find out soon if they’re for real. Would you trust a robot to walk you around a store? I’d probably just talk to it for fun.