Chery's AiMOGA opens MOBO pre-orders with a 99-yuan deposit worth 2,999 yuan, no retail price yet

Chery Group's robotics unit AiMOGA launched MOBO, its first consumer humanoid robot, at an event in Wuhu, Anhui on Oct. 21 and opened global pre-orders the same day. AiMOGA's release states no retail price. According to two launch-day posts on Sina Weibo, a 99-yuan deposit counts as 2,999 yuan at official launch, the window runs from Oct. 21 to Nov. 13, and early depositors get a six-month extended warranty and priority assembly and delivery.

Sold like a car, before the sticker

The rest of the launch also borrowed from Chery's showrooms. AiMOGA general manager Zhang Guibing, who is also a Chery executive vice president, announced an initial 300 global experience centres and a leasing brand, 甲天下, starting from a leasing operation in Wuhu. His stated rule was to "use car-making cost logic" to build robots that can be mass-produced, delivered and sold at a profit, with robot and car purchasing pooled for scale.

The product is a 0.9-meter robot with 22 degrees of freedom for walking and body movement; the Weibo posts put its weight at 18 kg. Gasgoo describes it as designed for multigenerational households: object-recognition questions, stories and English practice for children, conversation and user-set reminders for older relatives, and more than 20 interaction languages. AiMOGA says its MoAgent system runs 16 tasks in parallel and responds to interruptions in under 0.2 seconds. Memories are tied to individual users through FaceID, and data sent to MogaCloud is anonymized and checked on the device first, the company says.

The demand number to beat

AiMOGA says more than 10,000 prospective users worldwide have shown interest since MOBO first appeared at the World Robot Conference in August. Thirty-five "angel users" were named at the event and get a year of free use.

The strongest argument for the dealer approach is that AiMOGA already sells robots. Zhang said its global sales exceed 3,000 units across more than 100 application scenarios, in more than 60 countries and regions, and the unit draws on 31 in-house labs and Chery's purchasing volumes.

The pre-order window closes on Nov. 13. By then AiMOGA will know how many of those 10,000-plus interested users actually put down 99 yuan.