A recent quarterly earnings report from Tesla resulted in a lot -of media coverage surrounding the company's financials and, frankly, its role in the future of the electric vehicle industry.
But Tesla has a lot of irons in the fire and CEO Elon Musk has been stressing the importance of the company’s ambitions when it comes to autonomous vehicles and other technologies – including AI.
One much publicized form factor of AI for Tesla has been the design and development of humanoid robots. Dubbed Optimus, the Tesla bot has been in the works for years, and earlier projections from Musk had the robots, designed to take on tedious tasks in factories, rolling out soon – specifically in Tesla factories by the end of 2024 and being delivered to other companies by 2025.
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Though it’s largely been drowned out by the noise of Tesla’s recent financials – a 44% dip in quarterly profits despite a 2% increase in revenue – it appears Tesla has quietly pushed back the timeline on Optimus.
As reported by Electrek, instead of rolling out the bots in Tesla factories this year – a timeline Musk attested to just a few months back – the Optimus humanoids will go into “low production” for internal use at Tesla next year. Subsequently, the “high production” of the bots, for selling to other companies, is now targeted for 2026.
This represents a delay of about a year. And while it’s not exactly unusual for Tesla – or any company these days – to get behind schedule on emerging technologies, it’s also true that Tesla has bet a lot on diversifying its business model in a shift away from solely selling vehicles. In fact, in an April call with analysts, Musk said that instead of a car maker, “Tesla should be thought of as an AI robotics company.”
With that in mind, it seems that Optimus will have a lot to prove – when we finally see it hit the market.
In a recent post on X, the Musk-owned social media platform, he said the bots would be “genuinely useful” when they roll out, though observers are right to be skeptical as to when that will actually be. As The Guardian points out, Musk suggested back in 2021 that the bots would be ready for Tesla plants the following year.
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