Tesla says it has started producing its Optimus humanoid robot on a high-volume line at its Fremont factory in California, in space that used to build the Model S and Model X. It is the clearest sign yet that the robot is moving from prototype to product. It also arrived alongside a company update that showed profits falling and a founder who was careful not to over-promise.
The announcement came in Tesla's third-quarter shareholder letter on Wednesday 21 October. "Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines," it said. "The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured." Tesla added that it had "proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product", while promising to keep iterating on both the hardware and the process.
What Musk actually said
On the earnings call, Elon Musk called it "early production" and warned the ramp would be "somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product". He said Tesla has "the vast majority of a million-unit-per-line production line landed in Fremont", but that reaching 20,000 robots a week, roughly a million a year, would take "at least a year, maybe a little longer".
His reasons were candid. Parts of the design are still changing, and Tesla must make the robot safe, reliable and long-lived, so that, in his words, it "can't, like, wear out after a month". He also conceded there is "quite a lot of work to do" on the AI before the robot is "truly useful for open-ended tasks". He described the early part of the growth curve as having "a shallow slope", and said there are "like 10,000 things that have to go right".
That is a noticeably more cautious tone than the headline numbers Tesla has floated in the past. In April Musk talked of a Fremont capacity of one million robots a year and ten million at a planned Texas site. This week's remarks put a date on the Fremont figure for the first time, and it is more than a year away.
When can anyone else buy one?
Musk repeated that Optimus should be delivered to companies outside Tesla "around the end of next year", meaning late 2027, once the AI, the mechanical design and the robot's working life have been sorted out. That matches what he told the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, when he said he expected Tesla to be selling humanoids to the public by the end of 2027. A larger robot factory is under construction in Texas.
For now the robots are staying in-house. The second-quarter update in July said the first machines would go to an internal "Optimus Academy" for training and data collection, not to factories or customers. The latest letter gave no volume, price or customer. So there is still no way for a business, let alone a consumer in the UK, to order one.
The hands problem
The announcement follows a report in late September that Optimus's hands posed major manufacturing and durability challenges, with intricate assembly, supplier limits and breakdowns in automated assembly equipment at Fremont. That report said output had risen from a few dozen robots a week in the second quarter to several hundred, but not reliably, and that Tesla wanted a line capable of more than 1,000 a week by the end of the year. Tesla did not give a current weekly figure this week, so those numbers remain unconfirmed.
Hands matter because they decide whether a humanoid can do anything beyond walking and waving. Human-style dexterity needs dozens of tiny actuators, tendons and sensors in a very small space, and every one of them has to survive thousands of hours of use. It is one reason Tesla's rivals, from Boston Dynamics to Figure, talk as much about durability as about demos.
The money behind the robot
The wider results show how much Tesla is spending on its bet. Revenue was flat at $28.04bn, against $28.09bn a year earlier, while net income fell 43% to $787m from $1.37bn. Research and development spending rose 69% to $2.76bn, and operating expenses climbed 39%, which Tesla put down to AI and other R&D projects, stock-based pay and general costs. Tesla does not say how much of that goes on Optimus, and it groups the robot with its AI and energy work as areas where it "continues to invest in the future".
The car business is still paying the bills. Vehicle revenue was flat at about $20bn on 486,532 deliveries, and Tesla's services arm, which includes Full Self-Driving subscriptions, grew 33% to $4.6bn. Tesla also said it plans around 400 megawatts of training computing power by the end of the year, supporting both vehicle and humanoid software.
Cybercabs and the self-driving timetable
Optimus was not the only promise on the call. Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, said the company is trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026, even though US safety regulators are examining whether a vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals meets federal standards, according to Reuters. Separately, Tesla's AI software chief Ashok Elluswamy said the first privately owned cars could join the robotaxi fleet around the second quarter of next year, later than Musk's earlier hint of a fourth-quarter 2026 release for unsupervised driving.
What it means
Starting a production line is a real milestone, and Tesla is one of very few companies with the factory experience to try building humanoids at car-industry scale. But "production-quality" is not the same as "useful", and Tesla's own executives were frank about it. Musk's targets rest on the AI and the hands working as hoped, and Tesla has missed Optimus deadlines before.
Compare the field. Agility Robotics' Digit has a record of more than 65,000 working hours at customer sites, though doing one narrow job. Chinese makers such as Unitree and AgiBot are already shipping thousands of robots a year. Tesla's edge is its manufacturing muscle and its AI training compute, not a lead in deployed robots.
For UK readers, the practical message is simple: Optimus will not be on sale here for at least a year, and probably longer. If you want a humanoid today, our guide to prices and availability covers the models you can actually buy, and we have updated it with Tesla's latest position. We will keep following the Fremont ramp as real numbers emerge.
Read our guide: Humanoid robots in 2026: prices, availability and what they can really do. Related: Tesla and SpaceX set up merger committees.