A 300 kg robot you ride like a horse is not the surprise. The surprise is that it is sold in an online shop

DAX Robotics showed its Qiji rideable quadrupeds at the World Robot Conference in Beijing in August 2026, and the pictures travelled further than the facts. The machine that matters is Qiji X1: 300 kg, sixteen driven joints fed from a 165 V pack, a peak joint torque of 1400 Nm, 8 to 10 hours of work or roughly 40 km per charge, at a walking pace of 7 to 10 km/h. The rider sits in a saddle and steers with handlebars; balance and footing are the robot's problem, not the rider's. The number worth pausing on is the payload: 300 kg dynamic load, exactly what the robot itself weighs. A machine that carries its own mass is not a scaled-up robot dog, and DAX does not pretend it is a road vehicle either — with point feet and no wheels, the X1 is aimed at slopes, gravel, mud and unpaved trails. The faster wheel-legged sibling, Qiji XS, is quoted at 320 kg, over 40 km/h and 60 km of range, and the heaviest member of the line, the T1000 presented in Beijing in April 2026, is rated for a tonne of cargo on joints delivering more than 2000 Nm. The genuinely new thing is the sales channel. The series goes out under a three-year exclusive arrangement with JD.com — a consumer marketplace, with early-buyer sweeteners of the kind used for phones: discounts, five years of free servicing, free over-the-air updates. Heavy legged machines have until now been sold the way industrial equipment is sold, through integrators and quotations. Putting one on a retail platform assumes there is a private buyer at the other end, and reservations reported in July at over three thousand suggest the assumption is being tested rather than proven. One caution for readers who saw this robot elsewhere. Much of the international coverage put the machine at 180 kg and dated the launch to 8 September; the manufacturer's figure is 300 kg, and the Beijing show ran in August. The prices circulating — around 289,000 yuan — come from press reports, not from a DAX price list, and the company has published no evidence of series deliveries. In this catalogue the robot is therefore listed as a prototype, however open the order book may be.