Mitsubishi Motors is preparing to enter the humanoid robot race on an unusually ambitious scale. Together with University of Tokyo spin-off Highlanders, the Japanese carmaker plans to develop and mass-produce humanoid robots at its Kyoto plant, with production targeted for early 2027 and capacity eventually reaching up to 1,000 units a month.

The project goes well beyond testing humanoids on an automotive assembly line. Mitsubishi Motors intends to become a manufacturer itself, combining Highlanders’ robotics and artificial-intelligence expertise with its own experience in large-scale production, quality control, durability engineering, and factory operations.

Becoming Mitsubishi workers

The first robots will also become Mitsubishi workers. The partners plan to deploy humanoids in Mitsubishi’s own factories, where they can perform jobs that remain difficult to automate and generate real-world data to improve their artificial intelligence.

CEO Takao Kato has pointed to engine assembly in Kyoto, where compact work areas still include manual tasks such as part placement, as a potential first application.

The machine at the center of the project is Highlanders’ fourth-generation humanoid N. It stands around 1.75 meters tall, weighs about 75 kg, and has five-fingered hands, cameras, microphones, and onboard computing.

Its human proportions are deliberate. Rather than redesign factories around robots, Highlanders wants N to use workplaces, tools, and equipment originally designed for people.

Conventional robots remain better at repetitive jobs such as welding the same car-body joint thousands of times. Humanoids become interesting when tasks change frequently, objects are irregular, or factories cannot be rebuilt economically around dedicated automation.

Not the Mitsubishi robot giant

There is an important distinction. Mitsubishi Motors itself is not one of the world’s dominant manufacturers of automotive welding robots.

The Mitsubishi name is well established in factory automation, but that business belongs mainly to Mitsubishi Electric, a separate company within the broader Mitsubishi group.

Mitsubishi Electric sells MELFA industrial robots alongside PLCs, servo drives, inverters, CNC controls, and factory software.

Its articulated range extends to the RV-80FR, which has an 80 kg payload. It is a significant automation supplier to the automotive industry, but not in the same position in heavy-body shop robotics as Fanuc, ABB, Yaskawa, or Kuka.

Fanuc’s R-2000 spot-welding robot, for example, handles around 210 kg, while ABB’s large automotive robots span roughly 150 to 310 kg.

Mitsubishi Electric’s own automotive documentation illustrates the difference. Its welding solutions include monitoring production equipment and even connecting Fanuc robot controllers to Mitsubishi PLCs.

Mitsubishi technology can therefore be embedded around an automated production line without the welding arm itself carrying the Mitsubishi badge.

For Mitsubishi Motors, Highlanders is consequently a genuine move into robot manufacturing, not simply another form of an existing robot business.

China is already moving faster

A capacity of 1,000 humanoids per month would equal 12,000 a year, putting Mitsubishi and Highlanders among the larger manufacturers if the target is reached. But the market is moving extremely quickly.

China’s AgiBot said its 15,000th embodied-AI robot had already rolled off the production line in June. In the US, Figure 02 says it accumulated more than 1,250 hours at BMW’s Spartanburg plant and contributed to the production of more than 30,000 X3S.

Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has meanwhile launched the production version of Atlas, with deployments scheduled at Hyundai and Google DeepMind in 2026.

Japan is in an unusual position. The country that gave the world Honda’s ASIMO and has enormous expertise in industrial robotics has so far been less visible in the commercial humanoid race than China and the United States.

Mitsubishi and Highlanders want to close that gap by combining robot development with something carmakers know extremely well: producing complicated machines repeatedly and with consistent quality.

Whether N can perform useful factory work reliably enough to justify producing 12,000 of them a year remains unanswered. No production price has been announced, and the 1,000-unit monthly figure is a capacity target, not an order book.

That may be precisely why Mitsubishi’s involvement matters. Highlanders gains more than an investor or test customer.

It gains a factory, manufacturing engineers, and a real automotive production environment in which its robots can learn. If the plan works, a former engine building in Kyoto could become one of Japan’s first large-scale factories for the workers intended to fill gaps left by its shrinking workforce.