Optimus production: Tesla's new robot line comes online

Tesla has kicked off a new chapter in its robot manufacturing, a move that could change how the company's humanoid robots are made and used. The company is now producing Optimus bots on a new high-volume line at its Fremont factory, and it says the first units coming off this line are the first ones it has built that meet the standard for a real product. In its third quarter shareholder letter, Tesla stated that “the bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured” and that it has “proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product.”

This new line is set up in the space that built the Model S and Model X until this spring, and Tesla cleared out the old vehicle line in just 46 days to make room for robot production that is scaled for one million units a year. On its earnings call on Wednesday, Elon Musk said that most of the equipment needed to reach that capacity is already at the Fremont factory. He said that output is set to climb to roughly 20,000 robots a week as the line ramps up. Musk described this ramp as a classic S curve, noting that “the growth of Optimus is an S curve, but the initial curve is a shallow slope.”

The company is now working on refining the robot’s AI, electromechanical design, reliability, and service life, with Musk expecting that work to be finished by the end of next year. At that point, Tesla plans to start delivering Optimus to outside companies for jobs that are dangerous, repetitive, and around the clock.

A key part of the plan involves how Tesla will train these robots. While its cars gather real driving data from millions of vehicles, Optimus has no fleet like that to learn from. To solve this, Tesla will use an Optimus Academy, where 10,000 to 20,000 robots will practice a wide range of tasks and feed what they learn into the next version of the model. Every unit off the Fremont line becomes a source of that training data.

The company is also working on new hardware for the robot. Tesla plans to put its AI5 chip into Optimus next year, and Musk said a new video showing the robot completing tasks driven by AI rather than preprogrammed motions should arrive within one or two months. He also criticized rival humanoid demos that only run scripted routines, stating that those would not hold up in the real world.

The supply chain is lining up behind the program. In September, Tesla certified Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua as mass production partners for Optimus components. A far larger Optimus factory is also rising at Giga Texas, where drone footage from Joe Tegtmeyer showed the steel frame nearing completion, and Musk has pegged that plant’s long-term target at 10 million robots a year.

Tesla executives also said that Optimus production costs are trending toward the expected manufacturing cost of Cybercab, a sign the robot is being engineered for volume from the start. The hands remain the toughest piece of the design, a point Musk also made at the X Takeover event earlier this month, and that is where much of the current engineering effort is focused.