Tech
Figure Left Spartanburg. The Sheet Metal Task Is Manual.
Two Figure 02 robots ran BMW's body-shop loading task for eleven months, failed at the forearm, and shipped back to Figure's facility. Today BMW says it is 'evaluating' Figure 03, and the sheet-metal task is back on human workers.
BMW Manufacturing confirmed in November 2025 that no Figure AI robots were operating at Spartanburg and that no timetable existed for bringing them back.
The two Figure 02 units that preceded the statement had run the plant's sheet-metal loading task for eleven months. They picked blanks from bins and placed them on welding fixtures at 5-millimeter tolerance, 10 hours a shift, Monday through Friday. Figure's own account puts the tally at more than 90,000 parts loaded across 1,250 runtime hours, contributing to 30,000 X3 vehicles.
The forearm was Figure's named top hardware failure point. Microcontroller PCBs, thermal management, and dynamic cabling packed into a limb requiring three degrees of freedom caused repeated breakdowns. Figure 03 eliminated the distribution board and the dynamic cabling, redesigning the wrist around that failure.
BMW's workforce at Spartanburg expanded during the same eleven months. The plant employed roughly 11,000 workers when the pilot launched and more than 12,000 by early 2026. Two robots on one supplementary task did not move that count.
BMW spent $200 million on a new Spartanburg press shop in June 2024, a separate capital commitment for traditional stamping equipment that added 200 jobs. BMW disclosed no cost for the Figure deployment. Figure operates on a subscription model rather than robot sales, leaving whatever BMW paid in an operating line neither company has published.
BMW's February 27 announcement moved Spartanburg no closer to a contract. Figure 03 was described as under evaluation for additional use cases. In the same release, Hexagon Robotics' AEON system at Leipzig carried the designation "long-standing, established partner," language absent from the Spartanburg section.
The distance between "evaluating" and "long-standing, established partner" changes the math on Figure's $39 billion September 2025 valuation. That number, built on disclosed revenue near zero, needs BMW to move from supplementary task to fleet-wide displacement, at Spartanburg and across BMW's German plants. Eleven months of two robots on one task, ending with the task manual again, does not close that gap.
Figure's BotQ facility hit one robot per hour of production on April 29, targeting 12,000 units annually. BMW Leipzig's summer 2026 integration will show whether "evaluation" can become a priced contract. If it matches Spartanburg's outcome, the sheet-metal task at BMW's largest U.S. plant will have been manual for more than a year.