Boston Dynamics retired its hydraulic Atlas in April 2024 and, in the same week, introduced a fully electric replacement. The company presented it as a product decision rather than a research one. Its announcement said the new robot was “designed for real-world applications” and would be tested first with Hyundai, which is Boston Dynamics’ majority shareholder.

Two and a half years later, the electric design is in production. Boston Dynamics unveiled the product version at CES on January 5, 2026, said it would start building robots at its Boston headquarters immediately, and said all of its 2026 Atlas deployments were already committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind.

What the company says electric actuation buys

Boston Dynamics has given three engineering reasons. In a March 2026 history of the program, it wrote that electric actuation “was important to enable reduced complexity, quieter operation, and improved energy efficiency.” The 2024 announcement added that the electric robot would be stronger than earlier generations, with a broader range of motion.

The company also tied the change to manufacturing. Zack Jackowski, then general manager of Atlas, said at CES that the new generation “significantly reduces the amount of unique parts in the robot.” Fewer unique parts matter more to a company planning volume production than to a lab building a handful of research machines. In the same announcement, Boston Dynamics named Hyundai Mobis, a car-parts maker, as the supplier of Atlas’s actuators.

None of those benefits has been published as a measurement. Boston Dynamics has not released energy-use figures, noise levels or part counts comparing the hydraulic and electric robots, so the reasons are best read as the company’s design goals.

What has happened since

In 2025 the team concentrated on one application, part sequencing in car plants, and in the fall tested Atlas at Hyundai’s Metaplant in Georgia. On September 21, 2026, Boston Dynamics opened a permanent training site at that plant, the Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC), which The Robot Report described as a testbed for integrating Atlas into Hyundai’s factories.

Jackowski, now chief product and technology officer, told The Robot Report that the hardware has matched the team’s expectations so far:

“The biggest thing we’ve been finding is actually that the design assumptions we made for the production version of Atlas have been very close to right on.”

Zack Jackowski, Boston Dynamics, speaking to The Robot Report (September 21, 2026)

He said the bigger lessons were about the work around the robot, including “how we might modify fixtures and packaging to make them easier for humanoids.” That is the company’s own assessment, not an independent test.

Boston Dynamics plans to add customers beyond Hyundai and Google DeepMind in early 2027, and to move RMAC into a building about ten times larger next year. Hyundai has said it will deploy Atlas across its plants, beginning with 25,000 units at Hyundai and Kia factories over the next few years. The first numbers that would test the electric bet are simple ones: how many robots ship, how many hours they work between repairs, and what each one costs to run. Boston Dynamics has published none of those yet.