At Tesla's facilities, another project—which we watched progress slowly over years of presentations and demonstrations—appears to be entering a completely new phase; according to recent reports, the company is now producing hundreds of Optimus units per week. By August, Tesla's Fremont line had produced several hundred; just a few months earlier, during the second quarter, the rate was still in the tens. In other words, production has increased roughly tenfold in a short time, and the plans are even more ambitious.

According to people familiar with the program, Tesla aims to achieve an automated production line capable of manufacturing over 1,000 Optimus units per week by the end of 2026. However, there is a crucial detail: these robots are not yet leaving the factory to work in people's homes. Most remain within Tesla itself, used for testing, training, and data collection. There is a reason for this: producing hundreds of physical bodies is one thing, but creating countless robots capable of reliable operation is something else entirely.

One of the biggest hurdles lies in the hands; the hands and forearms of the Optimus unit utilize over a hundred small components, and some of these parts still require manual assembly. Scaling up production while maintaining the necessary precision is a major challenge for Tesla—yet there is an even greater issue: the robot's intelligence.

Optimus can learn specific tasks, but there remains a vast gap between repeating an action it was trained for and independently handling a variety of objects, positions, and situations; this is why so many of the robots produced remain within Tesla itself—the more they work and undergo training, the more data the company gathers to refine its models.

According to reports, the initial strategy involves deploying the first Optimus units in controlled environments—such as factories and warehouses—before considering less predictable applications. This presents a fascinating challenge for Tesla: Elon Musk has stated that he believes Optimus could eventually become more important to the company than its cars. However, to reach that point, Tesla must prove two things: that it can manufacture humanoids by the thousands, and that those thousands of humanoids can perform truly useful tasks.

An interesting parallel is unfolding within Tesla: while one team works to transform a robot—long merely a promise—into a mass-produced product, another of Musk’s projects has just crossed that same threshold after nearly a decade of waiting. Unveiled in 2017 and originally slated for production in 2019, that project faced years of delays, but electric trucks are finally reaching customers—though that is another part of the story we will cover in a future post.