How China’s US$150,000 robotic start-up beat Tesla boss Elon Musk in 2 years

The odds seemed impossible: a shoestring Chinese start-up founded in 2023 with just 1 million yuan (US$142,000) taking on Elon Musk – tech legend, disrupter in space and CEO of Tesla – who is valued at half a trillion dollars.

But in less than two years, EngineAI Robotics, led by CEO Zhao Tongyang, created the T800 – a robot that delivers Bruce Lee-style roundhouse kicks with the force of a small car – and, under the instruction of smiling engineers and scientists, tried it first on the boss himself.

That is why when Musk’s Optimus recently “set a personal record” by jogging a few steps, Chinese web users shrugged and laughed. The scepticism deepened when, during a live demo, Optimus fell backwards while trying to hand over a water bottle.

EngineAI launched its first model, the SA01, last year. Its T800, which boasts 450 Newton metres of peak torque, humanlike dexterity, and a solid-state battery enabling four to five hours of intense operation, will be ready for mass production by 2026.

Backed by China’s vast engineering talent pool and the Pearl River Delta’s plug-and-play supply chains, start-ups like EngineAI are turning sci-fi into reality at breakneck speed.

While American robots remain mostly in labs, Chinese firms are field-testing theirs across stadiums, factories and martial arts arenas in an industrial revolution fuelled by scale, speed and system.