Tesla now expects to start delivering its Optimus humanoid robots to outside customers around the end of 2027. Speaking on the company's Q3 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk said the hands, the robot's durability and its AI all still need work before then.
Early production has started on the high-volume line in Fremont, California, where Model S and Model X used to be built. Most of a line designed for a million robots a year is installed, but Musk said it will take at least a year, possibly longer, to reach about 20,000 units a week, because parts of the design are still changing. Tesla calls the bots coming off the line "the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured."
Image: robohub.app — https://robohub.app/robots/tesla-optimus-gen2
The hand is the hardest problem
A Tesla engineer pointed to the hand as one of the hardest hardware areas, along with custom gears that still carry reliability concerns. Musk agreed the hand is the main issue: fingers must be soft enough to handle delicate objects while surviving constant wear, and robots can't heal like human skin.
On AI, Tesla is still working through architecture problems. With no fleet of robots collecting data the way its cars do for FSD, it plans to build 10,000 to 20,000 robots to practise tasks in what it calls an Optimus Academy. The AI5 chip is expected in Optimus around April 2027. Musk also promised a video within a month or two showing tasks that aren't pre-programmed.
A timeline that keeps moving
Targets have already slipped several times. In 2024 Musk pointed to internal use in 2025 and high-volume sales to other companies in 2026. In January 2025 he said about 10,000 robots would be built that year, with "several thousand" doing useful work by year-end, a goal he later admitted was missed.
Who is ahead?
Musk said that, to his knowledge, "there is no one that is even close to Tesla" on general-purpose humanoids. Competitors' demonstrations suggest otherwise. XPeng's IRON has more than 80% of core processes automated and plans mass production by the end of 2026 and deliveries in the first half of 2027. Boston Dynamics started producing its electric Atlas in January, says all its 2026 deployments are committed, and is training robots at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. It chose sturdy grippers for industrial parts rather than human-like dexterity, a way around the problem holding Tesla back.
The picture across the sector is the same: hands that handle real work, robots reliable enough to pay for themselves, and AI that can manage tasks it wasn't trained for. Nobody has solved generalisation yet, Tesla included. The promised video in the coming months will be the first concrete test of Tesla's claims.
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