California robotics firm Figure AI has officially retired its Figure 02 humanoid robots after an 11-month deployment on BMW’s assembly line in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The company says the robots worked long enough, hard enough, and close enough to real production conditions that each unit now shows scuffs, scratches, and grime from the factory floor.
The pilot project, launched to test whether humanoid robots could keep up with the pace and precision of a modern auto plant, expanded faster than expected. According to Figure, the F.02 fleet helped produce more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles and loaded over 90,000 sheet-metal parts during the trial.
Footage shared by CEO Brett Adcock shows the robots with visible wear, which the company framed as a direct answer to early skepticism that their BMW partnership was only a staged demo. The scratches act almost like a work log, demonstrating months of repetitive, high-stress handling tasks inside an active assembly environment.
Figure also released detailed performance metrics. After initial setup, the humanoids were moved onto the floor and began operating within six months. By the tenth month, they were running full shifts. Their main job involved pulling sheet-metal parts from bins and placing them onto welding fixtures with 5-millimeter accuracy. They averaged an 84-second cycle time, with 37 seconds allocated to the actual load, and maintained more than 99 percent placement accuracy.
In total, the robots logged over 1,250 hours of operation and walked roughly 200 miles inside the factory while working 10-hour shifts each weekday. The company says these numbers prove humanoids can sustain industrial workloads rather than just perform staged research tasks.
The trial also revealed failure points. The forearm was the main weak link, strained by the need to fit motors, cooling, and wiring into a compact limb. Constant motion stressed the microcontrollers and cables, prompting Figure to redesign these systems in the upcoming Figure 03. The new model removes complex wrist cabling and routes motor controllers directly to the central computer.
With F.02 retired, Figure says it is now focused on scaling up deployment with its improved Figure 03 humanoid.
