Golden Week tourists are renting exoskeletons to climb mountains — ¥59 for three hours of ‘cheat mode’
Once confined to hospitals and factories, powered exoskeletons are having an unlikely consumer breakthrough in China’s scenic spots — and the rental math is starting to work.
China’s National Day holiday brought a new sight to some of the country’s busiest mountain scenic areas — Taishan, Huangshan and Huashan among them: tourists strapping on exoskeleton braces before starting the climb. The rental units look more like knee sleeves and waist supports than sci-fi armor, typically weighing 1.5 to 3 kilograms a set with 2 to 8 hours of battery life. Built-in sensors and AI read the wearer’s movement intent, adding an upward push on ascents and damping the knees on descents. At Baiyun Mountain in Guangzhou, operator Planck AI runs a fitting station charging ¥29 for one hour, ¥39 for two and ¥59 for three — the same price on weekdays and holidays — with fitting done in about three minutes, according to field reporting by Consumer Reports, published via Times Weekly.
The outlet’s survey puts typical single rentals at ¥80–200 (about ¥20–30 per hour), with promotional trials dipping below ¥10. The demand signals are striking: IDC figures cited in the report put China’s 2025 exoskeleton shipments at roughly 26,000 units, with consumer-assist models at 72.8% — nearly 19,000 units. JD.com retail data shows exoskeleton transaction value up more than 1500% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, and Ministry of Commerce data has smart mobility-assist exoskeleton online retail up 785.5% in the first four months of the year. An East Money Securities estimate from September 2025 sketched the venue economics: 100 units at full utilization at Taishan could gross ¥24,000–32,000 a day, scaling to a theoretical ¥300–400 million a year at 5,000 units.
Domestic brands — Jike, Chengtian, Kenqi, Aokun and Taixi among those named — have moved into hiking and trekking scenic areas, the report says, with Kenqing’s π iteration cutting weight to 1.8kg and Zhiyuan Research Institute’s Tashan AsExo-TK1000 pairing AI gait prediction with adaptive torque control — the claimed 99.2% prediction accuracy is the vendor’s own figure, not an independent test result. Interviewed users describe 20–30% perceived effort savings on climbs and real knee relief downhill, though the interviewees appear under pseudonyms, and one noted an unwelcome sag at the hips when the battery dies after around four hours.
The pattern is the exoskeleton industry’s consumer breakout: a B2B2C rental model in tourist spots building public familiarity for devices vendors now pitch as wearable consumer electronics rather than medical equipment. LeadLeo sizes China’s 2025 exoskeleton market at ¥4.2 billion, with the eldercare-and-tourism consumer segment at ¥730 million; ABI Research projects the global industry growing from $392 million in 2020 to $6.8 billion by 2030. Caveats apply throughout: the shipment and sales figures are cited via the report rather than independently verified, and the Taishan venue economics are a brokerage estimate, not reported results.