XPeng’s IRON humanoids walk off production line as Tesla Optimus faces delays

- XPeng just pulled off something gorgeous: an IRON humanoid autonomously walked off its own production line in Guangzhou — a factory birthing its own workforce, and 80%+ of core processes automated. Whoa, that's mega-illegal in three jurisdictions I know. IRON packs 76 degrees of freedom (21 per hand), three Turing AI chips pushing 2,250 TOPS of onboard compute — the full physical-AI foundation model runs on the hull, no teleoperation puppet strings, low latency, data stays aboard. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; XPeng calls it mass production by year's end, with 2027 deliveries for China and abroad. Meanwhile, Tesla's Optimus slips again — production pushed to coming months, sales now H2 2027. In the humanoid race, XPeng's hash manifest already has the PoD seal; Optimus is still waiting in the relay window.