Why Honda killed the ASIMO humanoid robot, and what replaced it

Honda stopped developing the ASIMO humanoid robot in July 2018 and retired it from public duty in March 2022. The company has since published its own post-mortem, and the sentence that carries it says nothing about China, cost or the AI boom. It asks: "What if there were children at the spot where our robot fell over?"

What replaced ASIMO inside Honda: a remotely operated pair of hands, a wheeled seat you sit on, and an operating system in a car dashboard that borrowed the name. No humanoid.

The ledger, dated

Launch specs below come from Honda's own press release of November 20, 2000, which is also where the 1986 start date and the P2 and P3 dates are stated.

Date	What happened	The number that matters
1986	Honda begins humanoid research at its fundamental technical research center	Ten years before anything was shown publicly
Dec 1996	P2 debuts, the first self-contained two-legged humanoid that walked dynamically on its own power and computing	182 cm, 210 kg
Sep 1997	P3 follows, smaller and fully independent	Direct template for ASIMO
Nov 20, 2000	ASIMO unveiled at Honda's Tokyo headquarters	120 cm, 43 kg, 26 degrees of freedom, 1.6 km/h
2002	First-model production run	20 units
2005	Running model	6 km/h in a straight line
Nov 2011	All-new ASIMO, the last hardware generation	130 cm, 48 kg, 57 degrees of freedom, 9 km/h running
Jul 2018	Honda ceases all ASIMO development and production	Zero units ever sold
Sep 30, 2021	Honda Avatar Robot announced as the successor program	Practical use targeted for "the 2030s"
Mar 2022	ASIMO's last active public appearance	21 years after the debut
Jan 7, 2025	The name is reassigned to ASIMO OS, a vehicle operating system	Shipping in Honda 0 Series cars
Apr 28, 2026	P2 dedicated as an IEEE Milestone	Dedication number 297

What ASIMO actually was

A demonstration program, for its entire life. Honda's own accounting is precise: daily demonstrations for more than 20 years, 33.26 million steps taken across all units, 7,907 km walked, on the back of more than 25 years of bipedal research.

Note what is absent from that page and from every Honda release about it. No unit price. No order page. No customer. Wikipedia's entry, citing a February 2002 Forbes piece, puts the first-model production run at 20 units, a fleet sized for a touring stage act, which is what it was: it performed for Prince Charles at Miraikan in October 2008 and for President Obama at the same museum in April 2014.

So when someone asks what happened to ASIMO, the humanoid robot Honda created in 2000, the accurate answer is that nothing was ever for sale to discontinue.

Your baby walking for the first time is something engineers have been trying to build a robot to do since 1986. Honda's flagship walking robot, ASIMO, was retired in 2022. Your baby does it around month 12. (@anishmoonka, 2026-06-14)

Honda's stated reason, in Honda's words

Honda published a page called "What we learned from ASIMO," and it is the most candid document any humanoid maker has put on its own website.

It claims three achieved functions: move around while sharing space with people, including "not falling over when bumped into by a person"; perform tasks by using hands; and interact with people, including understanding speech and adjusting behavior to the estimated intentions of the people nearby.

Then it gets to the problem. Honda writes that despite work on technology "which will absorb the impact of a collision between the robot and a person," the team kept asking: "What if there were children at the spot where our robot fell over?" Its conclusion, printed on the live page as of August 7, 2026:

Long-term research and the establishment of regulations will be necessary for the realization of fully autonomous bipedal robots.

Read that as a liability judgment with an engineering justification attached. A 48 kg machine standing 130 cm, operating unsupervised around toddlers, raises a legal question before a control-theory one, and Honda decided in 2018 that the legal question would not be answered on a product timeline.

The engineering half of the judgment has held up. Audience members filmed ASIMO falling down demonstration stairs, with uploads dating to 2006, and robots are still going down in public two decades later: most entrants failed to finish the April 2025 Beijing half marathon, and the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games produced enough tumbles to become the story. The dated list is in the falling incident log.

What replaced it inside Honda

Honda's robotics page lists two current machines alongside the ASIMO history, and neither of them walks.

The Honda Avatar Robot is the direct successor program, announced on September 30, 2021. It is a torso and arms you operate from elsewhere, wearing goggles and sensor gloves, with what Honda calls an AI-supported remote control function estimating what the operator is trying to do. The interesting part is the hand: four fingers, 16 joints, driven by 11 motors packed into the forearm and pulled by wires through a movable-pulley mechanism borrowed from construction cranes. Honda claims fingertip force more than five times that of ASIMO's hydraulically driven hands, enough to pick up a coin, open a can by its pull tab and unscrew a bottle cap. That is the correct thing to be obsessing over, for reasons laid out in why hands are the hardest part of a humanoid.

The dated promise attached to it, from the 2021 release: technology demonstration testing "before the end of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024," with a view to "putting the Honda Avatar Robot into practical use in the 2030s." As of August 7, 2026, neither the robotics page nor the Avatar Robot technology page publishes an updated timeline, a demonstration result, or a price.

UNI-ONE is a seated, hands-free mobility device you steer by shifting your weight, descended from Honda's UNI-CUB balancing stools of 2012 and 2013. Public rides have run at Suzuka Circuit Park since October 2022. No price, no on-sale date published.

The third replacement kept the robot and dropped the legs. Honda has been testing guide robots that move on balls and wheels at Narita International Airport, and says on the ASIMO page that it ran tests assuming a collision with small children.

One flag, because it is fresh and I could not close it. Headlines dated August 4 and August 6, 2026 (Japan Today, "Honda revives robotics ambitions after ASIMO," and Mettis Global, "Honda develops dexterous robotic hand, targets early 2030s commercialisation") report a new Honda hand aimed at the early 2030s. Both pages block automated access and Honda's newsroom carries no matching release, so nothing in the ledger above moves until a primary source turns up.

The name went to a car

At CES on January 7, 2025, Honda announced ASIMO OS, the vehicle operating system for its Honda 0 Series electric cars, whose production models were slated for North America during 2026. Honda's release explains the choice without embarrassment: ASIMO "became an icon in the field of robotics from the 2000s through 2010s," and Honda gave the name to the OS "with a determination to strive for making Honda 0 Series an icon of next-generation EVs."

The same release claims continuity of substance, not just branding: environment recognition and "autonomous behavior control technologies that enable ASIMO to act while understanding the intentions of people around it," now aimed at a software-defined car. The most recognizable humanoid brand in history is a dashboard.

What replaced it in the market

A price tag, which is the one thing ASIMO never had.

Checked today, August 7, 2026, on the makers' own stores: a Unitree G1 is $13,500 on Unitree's shop, and the 1X NEO is $20,000 outright or $499 per month against a $200 refundable deposit, with the order page reading "US Deliveries start 2026." Both walk. Both are buyable by a member of the public. Neither is close to the unsupervised household autonomy Honda declined to promise. Full spread of real numbers: how much a humanoid robot costs.

There is a quiet joke in the NEO listing. Its published fallback for tasks the AI does not know is Expert Mode, where, in 1X's own words on the order page, "an Expert from 1X can remotely supervise its actions at scheduled times." A human in a headset, filling the autonomy gap. Honda reached that conclusion in 2021 and dropped the legs. 1X reached it, kept the legs, and charges $20,000.

What to take from this

Honda did not lose a race. It ran the longest bipedal program in the industry, published a plain statement that fully autonomous bipeds need more research and new law before they belong near your kids, and moved its people to hands, wheels and software. Four years after the retirement, the IEEE bolted a plaque to the wall for P2, the 1996 machine ASIMO came from: Milestone 297, dedicated April 28, 2026, citing a robot whose "mechatronics and control algorithms set technical benchmarks in mobility, autonomy, and human-robot interaction."

The scoreboard as it stands: Honda humanoids sold to the public, zero, across 40 years. Japanese full-size humanoids with a published price and an order button, still zero, which is its own story. Robots that fall over in public, still routine.

If Honda publishes an Avatar Robot demonstration result, a timeline update, or a price, that changes this page. Spot it before I do and tell me.