When you visit a car dealership, you quickly get used to one thing: the same car, split into seven or eight price tiers by configuration. Pay $20,000 more and you get heated seats; another $30,000 adds the advanced driver-assist package. What really determines sales is which tier lands on most buyers' psychological price point.
On September 20, 2026, Faraday Future held an EAI robotics launch event in Los Angeles, applying the same method to robots: five model families, nine configurations, and four industry solutions, priced from $9,990 all the way to $137,900, with sales and delivery opening the same day. Founder Jia Yueting described it on Weibo as "the Robot World 2.0 lineup is complete — 'one brain, many bodies, many bodies, many capabilities' is accelerating toward reality."
This is not one robot. It is a product shelf.
🏷️ From $9,990 to $137,900: Nine Price Tags Form a Ladder
Laid out side by side, the price tags and hardware reveal the product structure:
| Model | Form Factor | Key Specs | Price (USD) | |---|---|---|---| | FF All-New Futurist | Full-size humanoid | ~173 cm / 51 active DoF (71 with dexterous hands) / 1,152 Wh dual battery / ~8 hours standard operation / autonomous charging | 89,900 (incl. $10,000 skill pack) | | FF All-New Futurist Ultra | Full-size humanoid | Adds NVIDIA Jetson Thor, ~700 TOPS, VLA + world models for task planning | 129,900 (incl. $15,000 skill pack) | | FF Master Mini | Compact humanoid | ~95 cm / ~19.5 kg / 48 TOPS | 9,990 | | FF Master Mini Pro | Compact humanoid | 117 TOPS | 12,990 | | FF Master Mini Ultra | Compact humanoid | 200 TOPS | 17,990 | | FX Aegis Classic Ultra-W | Lightweight wheeled-legged | ~22 kg, security and companionship positioning | 12,990 | | FX Aegis Mega | Mid-size industrial wheeled-legged | 50 kg payload / 25 cm stairs / 80 cm single-step obstacle / hot-swappable dual battery / ≥5 hours unloaded | 74,990 | | FX Aegis Hyper | Large industrial quadruped | Extreme environments and heavy-load tasks | from 137,900 |
What this table says: the nine price tags map to three base platforms, differentiated by compute and form factor — the count does not equal nine distinct machines.
Two reporting discrepancies should be recorded as-is. For the Futurist's degrees of freedom, most Chinese media report 51 active DoF, upgradable to 71; some reports say "31 DoF for the whole body." Battery life also diverges: one figure is "about 8 hours under standard conditions," another "up to 6 hours." Neither side was cross-verified on launch day. *(Note: conflicting figures exist; sources should be cited with their differences preserved.)*
The broader lineup, per official materials, spans 11 models and 24 products under "EAI Robot World 2.0": the Futurist family (full-size humanoids for research, embodied-AI development, enterprise service, and industry), the Master family (compact humanoids for K-12 education and robot soccer competitions), the Aegis family (wheeled-legged and quadruped platforms for security, power, manufacturing, and mining), plus Navi and Faber wheeled-arm platforms.
🧠 "One Brain, Many Bodies": One Foundation, Four Body Types
FF's stated technical foundation is "one brain, many bodies": a single general-purpose EAI brain that uses VLA (vision–language–action) plus world models to adapt to humanoid, quadruped, wheeled-legged, and wheeled-arm bodies.
The term itself is not new — it has been circulating for the past two years. But reading it alongside the price tags reveals its real function: if there is only one brain, then splitting bodies into differently priced, differently shaped purchasing units becomes cheap. The marginal software adaptation cost is driven down, while hardware can be sliced and sold by scenario. *(Inference)*
Official materials state that motion control and EAI model training have entered engineering testing and delivery, and that the in-house EAI brain loop is "initially closed." This is a vendor claim, not backed by third-party reproduction or independent testing. *(Judgment)*
📦 Four Solution Packages: Selling Robots as Projects
Even more revealing than the price tags are the solution packages. Four industry productivity solutions target K-12 education, research, security, and inspection:
- K-12 education package: a three-tier Blockly → Python → ROS curriculum plus a competition system.
- Research package: the Futurist standard edition, positioned for full-size humanoid locomotion-control academic research.
- Security package: multi-robot management, autonomous patrol, multimodal perception, and alarm linkage.
- Inspection package: Aegis Mega for high-frequency campus patrol; Aegis Hyper for extreme and high-risk zones.
- From the 2014 car project through 2026, cumulative financing of roughly $3.21 billion (~RMB 23 billion).
- As of April 2026, cumulative FF 91 deliveries of 16 units, including leases.
- Since 2026, court-reinstated enforcement amounts approaching RMB 5 billion.
- Personal case-related total of about RMB 18.423 billion, with over RMB 9.2 billion unfulfilled and 47 consumption-restriction orders.
- Jia's own statement of roughly $2 billion in remaining domestic debt; the LeEco system's total liabilities exceeding RMB 45 billion.
The education line is the most easily overlooked part of the shelf. A $9,990 compact humanoid plus a Blockly-to-ROS curriculum and competition system sells an entry point: whichever company's robots students learn to program and compete with today may become that engineer's default choice a decade from now. *(Inference)*
The research line is more direct: the Futurist standard edition is billed as "the first full-size humanoid in the US natively compatible with NVIDIA's Sonic full-size locomotion control system," with the selling point that it is "especially suitable for publishing related research papers" — selling the robot as consumables for first-author papers, one paper at a time. The "first" claim is the vendor's own.
Placing two facts side by side reveals some awkwardness: the same company markets a $89,900 academic platform while reaching for the education market at $9,990. These two price bands correspond to entirely different procurement processes, budget cycles, and acceptance criteria. *(Judgment)*
A same-day price benchmark worth noting: SW New Material's subsidiary Qiyuan Robotics launched two consumer robots, Q1 and T1, in Shanghai, both starting at RMB 19,999 and aimed at home scenarios. One line pushes below $10,000 for education; the other under RMB 20,000 for home companionship. On the same day, both lines wrote the word "robot" into ordinary consumers' price perception range at scale for the first time.
🧾 The Delivery Ledger
Any shelf-style price list must ultimately be redeemed by deliveries. The public record, stated as-is:
One detail in the launch earns credit: per Pandaily, the promotion was stated to involve no stock or financing hooks. Advertising "no capital-market move" amounts to handing the evaluation criteria over to the delivery numbers in advance. *(Inference)*
🧭 The Shelf Is Stocked — Can the Goods Follow?
Placed in the embodied-AI landscape of September 2026, this is a new kind of sample.
Over the past two years, humanoid robot companies typically launched "one flagship plus one demo video." What this batch is doing is something else: commoditizing and finely splitting the hardware bodies, then pulling procurement decisions into pre-sales via solution packages. Price tags from $9,990 to $137,900 cover not just budget ranges but procurement complexity: schools, labs, campuses, and mines are four entirely different approval chains.
The risks are written into the same structure. Four observations:
1. Nine SKUs mean spare parts, repair, and upgrade paths across four form-factor classes, each requiring a different service network. 2. One brain across four body types means any form factor's failure feeds back into the same model iteration queue. 3. Solution packages depend heavily on local integrators, whose competence cannot be verified at a launch event. 4. The delivery ledger is the plainest test: within 90 days, how many of those $9,990 robots actually shipped.
What a robot costs — the price tag has answered. Whether it can do real work in real environments — the price tag cannot answer that.
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References
1. Pandaily, *Faraday Future and Jia Yueting Launch Nine EAI Robots From $9,990*, 2026-09-20. https://pandaily.com/faraday-future-jia-yueting-nine-eai-robots-9990 2. Phoenix Tech, *Jia Yueting Launches 9 Robots Covering Humanoid and Quadruped Forms, Starting at $9,990*, 2026-09-20. https://www.163.com/dy/article/L78S3JF90556I485.html 3. TechWeb, *Jia Yueting Releases 9 Robots in One Go*, 2026-09-20. https://www.163.com/dy/article/L79H931405119MAU.html 4. Sina Tech / Tencent News, *Jia Yueting Releases Nine Robots, Most Expensive at RMB 920,000*, 2026-09-20. https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260920A0BZNW00 5. CNMO / Phoenix, *Jia Yueting Launches Nine EAI Robot Configurations Starting at $9,990*, 2026-09-20. https://h5.ifeng.com/c/vivoArticle/v002b8xitAkg3bDUG81wQdVsCA8fkGt2pcbOT--vXae4o2n0