Figure Melted Its F.02 Humanoids in Finland; the BMW Record They Leave Behind Has No Fleet Size

Figure AI retired most of its second-generation F.02 humanoid fleet on September 30 by having the robots jump into a 75-ton electric arc furnace at a foundry in Imatra, Finland. Founder Brett Adcock wrote on X that day: "To be clear: we actually trained our robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel." The stunt got the attention. The number that matters here is not the furnace but the denominator missing from the deployment record the robots leave behind.

What Figure says the F.02 did at BMW

Figure's own write-up of the BMW deployment, dated November 19, 2025, covers an 11-month run at BMW's Spartanburg plant. The robots worked 10-hour shifts, Monday to Friday, loading sheet-metal parts for welding. Figure reports more than 1,250 hours of runtime, more than 90,000 parts loaded, and a contribution to more than 30,000 BMW X3s. It also reports about 1.2 million robot steps, or more than 200 miles.

The task spec was tight: an 84-second total cycle, of which 37 seconds was the load itself. The target was a placement success rate above 99% per shift with zero interventions.

Figure's reported F.02 metric (vendor-supplied)	Value
Deployment length	11 months
Runtime	1,250+ hours
Parts loaded	90,000+
BMW X3s contributed to	30,000+
Cycle time	84 seconds, 37 of them loading

None of these figures has been audited by BMW or anyone else in the pages The Terminal read. RoboMorrow, which covered the furnace stunt on October 2, labels the numbers "manufacturer figures, unaudited".

The arithmetic that the figures allow

Divide 90,000 parts by 30,000 cars and you get three loaded parts per X3, which is plausible for a welding-line fixture task and tells you the robots handled a narrow slice of each vehicle. Divide 90,000 parts by 1,250 hours and you get 72 parts an hour across the fleet.

Now set that against the cycle time. If one 84-second cycle loads one part, a single robot manages about 43 an hour. A fleet rate of 72 an hour would then need at least two robots working at once. Figure's write-up does not give the fleet size, so the reader cannot tell whether 1,250 hours is one robot's life or several robots' lives.

That gap matters for cost. A buyer comparing a humanoid with a fixed cell wants parts per robot-hour and downtime per robot-month. A fleet total with no fleet count supports neither.

1. One robot at the 84-second cycle43 parts/hour
2. Fleet average, 90,000 parts over 1,250 hours72 parts/hour

Source: Figure AI BMW write-up (vendor-supplied); rates calculated by The Terminal, accessed 2026-10-05

What broke, according to Figure

Figure's write-up names the forearm as the top hardware failure point at BMW. It cites tight packaging, three degrees of freedom and thermal constraints in a part that moves constantly. The F.03 fix it describes is an electronics change: each wrist's motor controller now talks directly to the main computer, which removes a microcontroller-based distribution board and the dynamic cabling from the F.02 wrist.

That is a specific, checkable engineering claim, and it is the most useful paragraph in the record. It also arrives from the vendor describing its own fleet.

Why melt them

Figure's reasons, as reported by RoboMorrow, are to protect proprietary hardware including custom actuators, and to avoid tying up technical staff in manual disassembly that would delay the F.04. The same report says foundries in the United States and Mexico declined to take robots with lithium-ion batteries, which is why the shipment went to Finland. Most of the fleet went into the furnace and a small number remain in storage, with steel bars shipped back to the United States for commemorative F.02 artifacts. Arnold Schwarzenegger took part in the presentation.

Interesting Engineering reports the process ran six melting cycles over 24 hours at roughly 20 minutes each. On autonomy, RoboMorrow's reading is the fair one: the jump was autonomous but purpose-trained, using stunt performers for motion references and simulation, and "the video does not show a general robot spontaneously understanding a steel furnace."

What the fleet record sits next to

For scale, the International Federation of Robotics counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold in 2025, as covered in The Terminal's report on the IFR figures. Boston Dynamics, meanwhile, designed its latest Atlas hand around a target of 100,000 units a year, per our report on the four-finger Atlas hand. Against those, 1,250 runtime hours at one plant is an early data point, not a fleet-scale one.

What would change my read is a fleet count. If Figure or BMW publishes how many F.02s ran at Spartanburg and what share of shifts met the 99% target, the 72-parts-an-hour figure becomes a per-robot productivity number. Until then, the next thing to watch is whether F.03 units at BMW come with the count attached. Interesting Engineering dates the F.03 to October 2025, with a redesigned sensor suite and hand.