Tesla Starts Optimus Production in Fremont

Tesla’s humanoid robot has moved off the prototype bench and onto a production line, according to the company. “Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines,” Tesla said in its third-quarter update, filed on Wednesday 21 October, adding that the robots coming off that line are “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured”.

The update gives no count of robots built and no date for selling them. Those answers came from Elon Musk on the earnings call that followed, and they were goals, not results: a line he says is built for a million robots a year, full speed at least a year away, and first deliveries to other companies around the end of 2027.

TSN follows SpaceX, xAI and Tesla news on its Musk companies hub.

What Tesla’s update confirms

The written update is brief on Optimus. Tesla says it will keep changing the hardware and the manufacturing process, but that “we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product”. In its table of installed capacity, the company lists Optimus in California as “Early Ramp” and Optimus in Texas as “Construction”. It gives no capacity figure for either, unlike its vehicle and battery lines. The outlook section repeats that production has begun for Optimus in Fremont, alongside the Tesla Semi in Nevada.

The rest of the quarter, including a 43% fall in net income, is in TSN’s results story.

Musk’s timeline: a slow start, then a year to full speed

On the call, Musk was more cautious than the update. He described the current stage as “what I’d call early production on our high-volume line in Fremont”, and said Optimus growth would follow an S-curve whose first part “has a shallow slope and is somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product”, according to the Motley Fool transcript.

“There’s like 10,000 things that have to go right for production of the robot,” Musk said. “But we do have the vast majority of a 1 million unit per line production line landed in Fremont right now. But I would expect that it takes us probably at least a year, maybe a little longer to get to that annualized rate to get to 20,000 units a week.”

He put the delay down to the robot itself. “There’s still parts of the design that are changing,” he said, and Tesla has to deliver a robot that is safe, reliable and long-lasting: “So it can’t, like, wear out after a month.” Asked later where the design was still changing, he said: “It’s mostly the hand and just kind of the fine-tuning of the hand design and the fingers.” He expects the AI, design and durability problems “to be solved around the end of next year. So that’s the time to expect when we’re delivering Optimus to companies outside of Tesla.”

Chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja said Tesla has also “started constructing a factory here in Austin, which would be able to do a lot more robots as compared to the Fremont one”. On cost, he said it was too early to say Tesla had hit its goal, but that “we’re trending closer to where we would say our Cybercab costs would end up being”. He gave no figure.

A video first, then a new chip

Before deliveries, Musk set two nearer milestones. “I think we may be ready to release like an Optimus video in a month or so,” he said, though he later stretched that to “maybe a month or 2”. He wants it to show “Optimus doing things that are not preprogrammed”, and said it would be “not like a canned demo”.

The second is Tesla’s next in-house chip. Musk said AI5 would be integrated into Optimus “if things go according to plan” in “approximately April of next year”, describing it as “an order of magnitude more compute, AI5 versus AI4”.

He also said the robot needs volume before it can learn. Unlike Tesla’s cars, Optimus has no large fleet gathering data, so Tesla needs to make “on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots” and have them practise through self-play, including in what he called an “Optimus Academy”.

Any of these dates may slip; Musk said himself there is “still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks”. He did not scale back his ambition, repeating that “Optimus will be the biggest product on Earth”. In the same opening remarks he said Tesla was “almost sold out of all Megapacks for 2027”.

The first checks come quickly. On Musk’s own estimate, the unscripted video should appear within a month or two of the call, and AI5 should be in the robot by April.