Skeptic says Unitree's car-lifting H2-X had a jack
Unitree's new H2-X promo claims about 8 hours of endurance, but the lifting shot is getting a frame-by-frame reading.
Unitree introduced the H2-X "Kung Fu Legend Guardian" with a claimed maximum endurance of roughly 8 hours, and the clip that got attention shows the humanoid lifting a car. Humanoid Scott, who posts as @goingballistic5, says the lift is not what it looks like.
His reading is that the video itself is not faked, but that the car was already supported. He points to the wheel sitting at its lowest extension, which is what you see when a car is hanging off the ground rather than resting on its suspension, and says the car was jacked during the lift itself. He also doubts the robot's joints could take the load at all, naming the wrist, shoulder, waist and ankle.
What he actually spotted
In an earlier post he went at it through sarcasm, saying he was impressed the bumper fascia could hold the load of the lift without detaching, and more impressed that the robot could lift a car with only one foot on the ground. He added that Unitree might want to check the front suspension because the shocks seem to be frozen in place. Frozen shocks are the tell he is building on. A car being lifted by its bumper would normally show the front suspension moving as the weight shifts.
He also noted the robot was wearing what he called hook hands for the shot.
Shown versus claimed
This is one person reading frames, not a test, and not a measurement of anything. Unitree's own post does not claim a car lift payload. It claims the endurance number and describes the robot as a guardian, and the lifting shot sits inside a promo video rather than a spec sheet. Nobody in the sources has published a load figure for H2-X's arms or waist, so the gap between what the clip implies and what the hardware can do is still unmeasured.
Unitree has not responded to the jack claim in the sources. Until it does, what exists is a promo clip, an 8 hour endurance number from the company, and one skeptic's frame-by-frame argument that the car was held up by something other than the robot.
The pattern is familiar for anyone who watched the field this month, where a Tesla robot clip drew researchers asking what was real in the footage. Short promo videos are now read the way car crash footage gets read, one frame at a time, by people who know what suspension travel looks like.
Video is real, but car is clearly already on a jack, as wheel is at lowest extension, and jacked during “lift
the robot can lift a car with only one foot on the ground!
Sound like you were at the demo
One email a day. Under three minutes. The demos, the deployments and the part the press release left out.