Humanoid robots head to car factories, and workers are striking over it

Hyundai auto workers began leaving their shifts two hours early at the company's Ulsan production complex from July 13 to July 15, according to The Korea Times. After 15 rounds of negotiations failed, the union planned four-hour strikes from July 20 to 22. The dispute is not about pay alone. It is about a two-legged robot called Atlas.

The numbers behind the walkout are not small. Hyundai wants to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas robots across Hyundai and Kia plants, The Korea Herald reported. Each unit costs an estimated $130,000. It may pay for itself within about two years of operation, according to Samsung Securities analyst Esther Yim, speaking to Bloomberg. If the cost falls to $100,000, Macquarie Securities Korea analyst James Hong suggested the operating cost could drop below the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 and significantly undercut a typical auto worker's salary. That gap is what makes the talks so hard.

Atlas is made by Boston Dynamics. It is the US robotics company that is about to become a wholly owned Hyundai subsidiary. It stands more than 6 feet tall and can lift more than 100 pounds.

Union pushback started as soon as Hyundai Motor Group showed the latest Atlas at the start of this year. The Hyundai Motor union represents more than 39,000 South Korean workers. It has demanded that the automaker shift production workers' hourly pay to a fixed salary to protect against automation-driven cuts in work hours. It also wants the retirement age raised from 60 to 65 and bigger bonuses, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Georgia first, and Georgia is not unionized

Hyundai plans to start deploying Atlas in its US factories in 2028, beginning at Metaplant America, the electric vehicle plant outside Savannah, Georgia. It has not disclosed a timeline for other sites. The company may face less organized resistance there because the Georgia workers are not unionized, though the United Auto Workers, which represents about 400,000 autoworkers across the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, has been trying to organize the facility.

Metaplant America is already the most heavily automated automotive factory in the United States. It has more than 850 robots unloading auto parts, stamping steel, putting together frames and installing doors, according to IEEE Spectrum. It also uses 300 automated guided vehicles to move parts to work stations while avoiding people. Boston Dynamics' four-legged Spot robot is already on site doing what the company calls exterior quality inspection in the weld shop. During a July 2026 visit, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter watched the robotic dogs probe their sensor-embedded noses to sniff out defects.

Jerald Roach, a general assembly executive at the Georgia plant, told the AJC that the humanoids won't threaten the human workforce. He described human hands, with their sense of feel and touch, as necessary for handling soft car parts such as hoses, wires, carpets and trim panels.

Hyundai has committed to employing 8,100 full-time human workers at Metaplant America by 2031 under its economic development deal with Georgia. State and local leaders put together an incentive package worth an estimated $2.1 billion. The AJC found the facility already employed more than 3,800 workers by the end of 2025.

The robots would start with sorting and organizing automotive parts when they arrive in 2028.

A pattern across the industry

Hyundai is one of several automakers trying to put humanoid workers on factory floors. Tesla is developing its Optimus robot for its own EV plants. BMW has run pilot tests with humanoids made by Figure AI at its plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Chinese automakers including BYD are trying out humanoids and sometimes building their own.

This sits on top of a much older automation trend. The global automotive industry has been a leading adopter of industrial robots for decades. More than 1 million robots were already in automotive factories worldwide by 2021, accounting for one-third of robots across all industries, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The United States had deployed 38,000 industrial robots as of 2025, with the automotive industry alone installing 13,500 units.

The pitch for humanoids is different from the fixed arm. Industrial robots usually perform one specific task. Robotics companies argue that humanoids powered by the latest AI models could eventually handle a wide variety of tasks while fitting into workplaces designed for humans. That vision still requires solving multiple problems in AI training and hardware before humanoids become general-purpose autonomous workers.

Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics announced at CES in January that Google's Gemini Robotics model would be deployed on Boston Dynamics machines, including Atlas and Spot. The companies plan to test Gemini-powered Atlas robots at Hyundai auto factories in the coming months. "The real value going forward is for our robots to be contextually aware of their environment and able to use their hands to manipulate any object," Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter told WIRED ahead of the announcement. "And we think manufacturing environments, like in Hyundai factories, are a perfect place to deploy that today."

Carolina Parada, senior director of robotics at Google DeepMind, told WIRED that Gemini was designed to be multimodal, making it suited to learning about the physical world, and that automotive is a starting point rather than the end goal.

The union side is watching more than Hyundai. The UAW recently criticized General Motors for installing about 50 new robot arms at its flagship EV factory in Detroit after laying off more than 1,300 workers as a supposedly temporary measure. At the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit in June 2026, president Shawn Fain also warned against automation without worker protections, according to Ars Technica's account of the convention.

The data problem behind the factory floor

What the strikes and pilots share is a bottleneck that has little to do with robot legs. Humanoids need training data, and that data has to come from somewhere. In China, local governments have funded more than 40 robot data collection centers, according to the intelligence firm Interact Analysis, with about two dozen already operating. At these facilities, human trainers wearing VR headsets and arm exoskeletons repeat everyday movements such as folding clothes or opening a microwave door so robots can learn them. A trainer in Shanghai, speaking to Rest of World under the pseudonym Kim, called himself and his colleagues "cyber-laborers" and described the work as "a fine gig, though a bit boring."

One of the largest centers, in suburban Beijing, was launched by the local Shijingshan government with the humanoid company Leju. It covers more than 10,000 square meters and offers 16 training scenarios, including a mock car assembly line, a smart home and an elder-care setting, according to a government statement. A spokesperson for the project, cited in that statement, compared it to "teaching children how to walk with lots of practice."

Not everyone is convinced the approach scales. Marco Wang, an analyst at Interact Analysis, told Rest of World there are "some potential bubbles" in the infrastructure buildout. Goldman Sachs estimates the worldwide humanoid market could be worth $38 billion by 2035, with some 250,000 shipments as early as 2030.

The gap between a robot that can run a straight line and one that can safely sort parts on a live assembly line remains wide. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, held from August 22 to 26, robots broke human records in the 100-meter sprint and standing high jump, but also crashed into barriers, broke at the waist and in a few cases caught fire, Ars Technica reported. In a firefighting scenario, only three of 12 teams completed the full challenge. Many competitors were still teleoperated by humans, with score penalties for remote control.

Dipam Patel, a PhD student in computer science at Purdue University, told Ars that the games show real progress in whole-body control but that the machines remain far from general-purpose autonomy. "If you cross the finish line, that's the goal," he said. "It doesn't matter if you stop and it doesn't matter if you fall into different pieces."

For Hyundai workers in Ulsan, the relevant question is not whether Atlas can finish a race. It is whether it can be stopped in time, and who decides.