Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Wednesday that the Optimus humanoid robot has entered “early production” on a high-volume line in Fremont but will take “at least a year, maybe a little longer” to reach a rate of 20,000 units a week.
Musk reaffirmed that deliveries to companies outside Tesla should be expected “around the end of next year.”
“We’ve started what I’d call early production on our high-volume line in Fremont,” Musk said on the third-quarter earnings call, adding that the ramp would be “somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product.”
He described the initial part of the growth curve as having “a shallow slope” and said “there’s like 10,000 things that have to go right for production of the robot, and it’ll move as fast as the slowest, least lucky of the 10,000.”
Tesla has “the vast majority of a million-unit-per-line production line landed in Fremont right now,” Musk said, “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.”
Twenty thousand a week is about 1.04 million a year, the Fremont figure Musk gave on the first-quarter call in April.
The reason, he said, is that “there’s still parts of the design that are changing.”
Tesla has “to tweak” the design so the robot is “safe, and reliable, and has long duration,” he said, “so it can’t, like, wear out after a month,” and “there’s still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI in the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks.”
“I do expect these issues to be solved around the end of next year,” Musk said. “So that’s the time to expect when we’re delivering Optimus to companies outside of Tesla.”
He said he did not want to raise expectations given “we still have a lot to get through, and it’s about a year or so that it’ll take us to get through all that stuff,” while adding that he remained “convinced that Optimus will be the biggest product on Earth” and that “there is no one that is even close to Tesla with respect to a general-purpose humanoid robot.”
The company’s third-quarter shareholder letter, released before the call, gave no timeline, volume or customer for the robot.
What the Deck Says
“Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines. The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured,” the company wrote on the deck.
“While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product.”
What Changed Since Q2
In the second-quarter deck in July, Tesla said it expected to “start production soon,” that first-generation lines were being installed in Fremont where the Model S and Model X lines had been decommissioned, and that the first robots would go to an internal “Optimus Academy” for training data collection and functionality development rather than to factories or customers.
The Texas site was at the building-construction stage.
Three months later, the deck says production has started and the Fremont status has moved to early ramp.
On the first-quarter call in April, Musk said the start of production was targeted for the “late July, August time frame,” gave the one-million-per-year Fremont and ten-million-per-year Texas capacity figures and said it was “impossible to predict” this year’s output.
On July 2, replying to a post on X, he wrote: “No, Optimus production will be extremely slow at first, as everything is new. This is not like making a car.” Wednesday’s call put a date on the Fremont figure for the first time: at least a year from now.
The external-sales timing is not new.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22, Musk said: “By the end of next year, I think we’ll be selling humanoid robots to the public.” Wednesday’s remarks keep that date and attach three conditions to it, the AI, the electromechanical design and the usage life of the robot, that he said must be solved first.
The Hands
The statement follows a report on September 25 that the robot’s hands posed “major manufacturing and durability challenges,” citing intricate hand assembly, supplier limits and breakdowns of automated assembly equipment in Fremont.
The report, which sent Tesla shares lower on the day of the Semi launch, said Tesla wanted a line capable of more than 1,000 robots a week by year end, toward an eventual 20,000 a week, and that output had risen from a few dozen a week in the second quarter to several hundred, without being dependable at scale.
Optimus R&D
Tesla does not disclose how much it spends on Optimus.
The deck attributes the 39% rise in operating expenses to “SI [AI] and other R&D projects,” stock-based compensation including the 2025 chief executive performance award, and general costs, with research and development up 69% from a year earlier to $2.76 billion.
The company groups Optimus with Super Intelligence and energy as the areas where it “continues to invest in the future through R&D and Capex,” and the highlights page lists robotics among the projects “critical to building a future of Amazing Abundance.”
Tesla’s planned 400 MW of training compute by year end is described as “supporting the development of both vehicle and humanoid robot autonomy software.”
