Faraday Future's Nova Is a $2,490 Humanoid in Your Backpack

The Signal

For years, "humanoid robot" meant one of two things: a seven-figure research machine in a lab, or a six-figure factory prototype that could walk across a stage. On October 15, 2026, Faraday Future Intelligent Electric and its robotics unit FF EAI Robotics changed that math. They launched FF Nova at $2,490 — what the company calls America's first entry-level embodied AI humanoid under $2,500 — and a smaller FF Nova Mini at just $299.

The number that matters is not the price tag on its own. It is the gap. A device that 24 months ago would have cost you a used car now weighs 2.8 kilograms, stands 49.7 cm tall, and comes out of a schoolbag. FFR CEO Jerry Wang called the launch "an important step in bringing Physical AI from the laboratory to real-world applications accessible to developers, educational institutions, schools, and families."

FFR CEO Jerry Wang at the launch, in front of the FF Robot World 2.0 lineup. The October 15 event followed the definitive agreement to fold FFAI's robotics business into FFR. (Image: FF EAI Robotics)

What's Inside Nova

Nova is not a toy robot with a sticker. It is a compact developer platform. The 2.8 kg body carries 20 full-body degrees of freedom — two in the head, six split across the arms, twelve in the legs — enough to walk, turn, wave, and stand back up after being knocked over.

Its sensor stack reads like a scaled-down industrial unit: a top-mounted 2D LiDAR, a roughly 4-megapixel wide-angle camera, a 3D time-of-flight depth sensor, and a three-microphone ring array that supports sound-source localization and voiceprint recognition. Onboard compute runs at 10 TOPS with 8 GB RAM and 32 GB storage; a 2-inch face display, dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 round out the package. It pairs with a large voice AI model for natural conversation, and accepts AI Agent integration so a cloud-based agent can operate the physical body.

Movement comes in two modes. Indoors, Nova walks bipedally at about 0.1 m/s. For longer trips, it docks onto a detachable wheeled base that rolls at 0.8 m/s and clears two-centimeter obstacles. The developer stack matters as much as the hardware: a fully open SDK, a native ROS 2 workflow, over-the-air updates, and an open Sim2Real reinforcement-learning pipeline backed by NVIDIA Isaac — with a planned Skills Store where developers can build and sell new robot capabilities.

Two Robots, Two Rooms

FFR is selling two very different machines under one banner — "One Brain, Multi-forms, Multi-capabilities" — aimed at two rooms of the house: the developer's workbench and the classroom.

The Mini is deliberately simpler: a 0.94 kg bipedal frame on 17 servos that walks, balances, and can do a forward roll out of the box, with block-based programming, hand-guidance posing, and an AI coding tutor. It is built for K-12 classrooms and after-school programs — and the $499 curriculum that accompanies it is sold as an eight-week, 16-session small-group course, ending in students choreographing their own robot dance.

The Rollout & The Deal

Nova is not shipping to everyone yet. Phase One is a limited, invitation-only run of 100 units for invited developers and educational institutions, with the first 20 ready to ship immediately. Applications go through developer.ff.com in a seven-day window. Phase Two opens to all developers and schools; Phase Three is the full consumer launch. Products sell through FF.com, FF Mall, an official Amazon store, and a direct sales force for districts and universities.

The launch sits on top of a corporate reshuffle. On October 12, FFR and FFAI signed definitive agreements under which FFR acquires FFAI's robotics business in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $200 million — FFAI becomes the majority shareholder of the combined company, with an 18-month lock-up. FFR says the combined group is now effectively debt-light and ready to scale its robotics lineup, which already spans humanoid, quadruped and wheeled-arm forms from $9,990 up to $137,900.

The bigger signal is the price wall coming down. The International Federation of Robotics counted roughly 7,000 full-size humanoids sold for business use in 2025 — almost all of them priced beyond what a school or a household could touch. Nova and Nova Mini are the first credible attempt to put a real biped on a classroom desk without a grant application attached.

Warmcore View

When a bipedal humanoid crosses below $2,500, everyone in this industry feels it. For years the conversation was about whether humanoids were ready for factories. FFR's answer is that the more interesting question is whether they are ready for desks — and not just desks in research labs, but classroom desks and home desks.

We build bionic companions at Warmcore, so we read this launch through a specific lens. Nova is aimed at developers and students: open SDK, ROS 2, reinforcement learning, a robot you program rather than befriend. That is a different product from a companion — but it is moving into the same physical space. The home desktop is becoming contested ground. The winners will not be whoever has the most degrees of freedom; they will be whoever makes the machine feel worth spending time with.

That is why we keep going back to the same fundamentals: a face that reads emotion, memory that survives across sessions, and long-term interaction quality rather than a checklist of tricks. A $2,490 developer platform can walk and wave. A companion that remembers your voice, your mood and your routines is a different product category — and that category is about to get a lot more crowded, very fast.