Figure's F.02 Robots Jumped Into a Furnace. The BMW Numbers Say More Than the Stunt.

Figure AI retired its F.02 humanoids by having them leap into a 75-ton electric arc furnace in Imatra, Finland, Electrek reported on October 3. The stunt has gathered the clicks. The deployment record behind it, published when Figure ended the BMW pilot, is the more useful document.

Why the F.02 fleet went into a furnace

According to Electrek, the robots were trained from motion capture of stunt performers and learned to jump from a second-floor landing at Figure's San Jose campus. Figure said foundries in the US and Mexico refused to let a robot with lithium-ion batteries jump into their equipment, which is why the work went to Finland. The metal is being recycled into a limited series of artifacts.

The practical reasoning is less theatrical. A retired humanoid is full of proprietary actuators and electronics, so selling the fleet on risks handing a competitor the design. Scrapping it on camera solves that and doubles as marketing. The engineering sits in the deployment record.

What 11 months at BMW Spartanburg produced

Humanoids Daily's account of Figure's retirement figures gives the deployment at BMW Manufacturing's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The fleet ran 11 months and logged more than 1,250 hours. It loaded more than 90,000 sheet-metal parts, contributing to production of over 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles.

Measure	F.02 at BMW Spartanburg
Deployment	11 months
Operating hours	more than 1,250
Parts loaded	more than 90,000
BMW X3s contributed to	over 30,000
Placement tolerance	5 mm
Placement accuracy	above 99%

The number that matters is not 90,000 but the hours. Divide 1,250 hours across 11 months and the fleet averaged about 114 working hours a month, which is under three 40-hour weeks. The robots eventually ran 10-hour shifts, Monday to Friday, so the average hides a long ramp and a lot of downtime. Figure's sources here do not say how many robots were on the line at once, so a per-robot utilisation figure cannot be computed.

1. Loading step37 seconds
2. Total cycle target84 seconds

Source: Humanoids Daily, summarising Figure's F.02 retirement report, accessed 2026-10-03

The loading step took 37 seconds inside an 84-second total cycle target, with a 5-millimetre placement tolerance. Those are Figure-supplied figures; BMW has not published its own.

The forearm and what F.03 changes

The forearm was the top hardware failure point, according to Humanoids Daily's reading of Figure's report, because it packed three degrees of freedom alongside thermal and cabling constraints. Figure says it re-architected the F.03 wrist electronics, removing the distribution board and the dynamic cabling so that motor controllers talk directly to the main computer.

Boston Dynamics made a similar choice in its new Atlas hand, which has no tendons or cables crossing the joints. Two humanoid makers are moving cabling out of the joints within a week of each other.

The money behind these machines is large; FieldAI's reported term sheet values a robot-software startup at $10 billion, and the round has not closed. Runway's open-weight world action model is the software side of the same race. The test for Figure is no longer whether a humanoid can load parts at a BMW plant, which F.02 did. It is whether F.03 posts higher hours per robot per month, and Figure has not published that number.