Kawasaki Just Unveiled a Ridable Headless Horse Robot

Kawasaki has revealed a concept video for a four-legged robotic horse…thing that looks less like a vision of our future and more like test footage for a Horizon Zero Dawn movie.

The device is called a Corleo. It kind of looks like those Boston Dynamics dog robots that their social media team makes look cute and adorable. Even though it’s absolutely going to be used to murder people one day.

But instead of being autonomous, Corleo can be ridden like it’s a muscular little metal wolf and steered with what looked like ATV handlebars. Come to think of it, the whole thing looks like an ATV with legs.

Kawasaki Unveils Concept Of A Ridiculous, Ridable Robotic Horse

It’s just a concept video, so I doubt there’s been a whole lot of thought put into how this thing would function, but it would be fascinating to see how some of the actions Corleo performs would be controlled by the person riding it.

For instance, how would you command the machine with legs that you’re riding to leap over a gap? How do you tell it to place its left foot on a specific sturdy rock and then replicate that command with the remaining three legs?

These are questions the trailer does not answer because it feels more like a movie trailer than it does a product demonstration.

2. The Kawasaki CORLEO is a concept prototype unveiled at the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo.pic.twitter.com/uzclXSnreB

— Poonam Soni (@CodeByPoonam) April 6, 2025

Corleo, which made its debut at the recent Osaka Kansai Expo, is theoretically powered by a 150cc hydrogen engine. I say theoretically because absolutely nothing in the video is real, which should be obvious.

The CGI isn’t especially good, and the whole thing seems to exist solely to act as a proof of concept. When it was revealed to expo attendees, as seen above, it didn’t do a whole lot of moving. Mostly just a lot of standing around, looking like a tiny Zord from Power Rangers.

All this fakery and bullshitary is par for the course in the world of outlandish vehicle concepts. Every year, every major automotive company, from BMW to Toyota to Ford, releases either concept art/footage or builds a physical showroom floor version of a wild harebrained idea that will never, ever, ever make it onto the consumer market.

In a sense, it’s the automotive engineer’s version of some of the wild outfits you see on haute fashion runways. Just as a high-end fashion designer like Tom Ford or John Paul Gauthier can make clothing that’s more art than something that is intended to be worn every day, so too can engineers design a robot wolf you can ride like it’s a boss from a Metal Gear game with little to no actual intention of ever making it real.

I imagine it must be fun to be an engineer at one of these major companies like Kawasaki and every once in a while you get to dream up some bullshit that will (probably) never be real.