Tesla Motors Repeatedly Cuts Optimus Robot Production Targets to 2,000 Units by Summer Due to Hand Technology Bottlenecks

Deep News
10/08

As Tesla Motors' core electric vehicle business faces sluggish growth, the humanoid robot "Optimus" project - which Elon Musk has pinned high hopes on and claims will eventually surpass the EV business - is encountering major setbacks due to critical technological bottlenecks.

Sources familiar with the matter reveal that Tesla Motors has abandoned its plan to produce thousands of robots this year due to slow progress on the robot's "hands," which represent the most challenging technical component.

**Production Targets Repeatedly Scaled Back, Hand Technology Becomes Major Bottleneck**

The Optimus project's production ambitions experienced a rollercoaster decline throughout 2025.

At the beginning of the year, Tesla Motors planned to increase production from dozens of units in 2024 to thousands. In March, Musk pushed the target even higher to "at least 5,000 units" during an internal meeting.

However, this aggressive target faced realistic internal resistance from the start. Sources indicate that project employees repeatedly told Musk that his expansion timeline was overly optimistic. Subsequent events confirmed these concerns: just months later, the production target was drastically cut to 2,000 units.

By summer, employees reported to Musk that even if 2,000 robots could be manufactured, their practical utility would be compromised due to functional defects in their "hands."

This ultimately led Tesla Motors to abandon this year's mass production plans, redirecting resources toward overcoming hand design challenges and making other improvements. Musk himself acknowledged in a September podcast that "the hands, including the forearms, represent the main engineering difficulty of the entire robot."

Accompanying the project delays are changes in core leadership. Optimus engineering head Milan Kovac left in June.

Currently, the project is led by three executives: Konstantinos Laskaris oversees hardware design, Ashok Elluswamy handles software, and Lars Moravy manages manufacturing, all reporting directly to Musk. The latter two executives also oversee Tesla Motors' automotive business.

**From "Factory Worker" to "Robot Scientist"**

Despite short-term production obstacles, Musk's vision for Optimus remains ambitious. He hopes not only for Optimus to board SpaceX's Mars mission by the end of next year but also plans deep integration with AI company xAI to ultimately create "robot scientists" capable of replacing white-collar workers and even scientists.

Regarding Optimus's Mars mission plans, industry experts note that the current version of Optimus is designed for Earth's indoor environments. To operate on Mars, where average temperatures drop to minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 62 degrees Celsius), it would need special spacesuits and complete redesign of its thermal management system to perform any meaningful tasks.

The vision of making Optimus a "robot scientist" conducting research in laboratories through xAI's Grok model remains in distant conceptual discussions internally.

Currently, Optimus applications in Tesla Motors factories are limited to basic repetitive tasks such as battery sorting and security patrols.

Tesla Motors' core logic for maintaining humanoid design is to leverage billions of human activity videos on the internet to train the robots. However, converting this unstructured video data into effective training instructions presents enormous technical challenges. Currently, Tesla Motors primarily uses videos of its own employees performing household tasks and walking for training.

While Tesla Motors struggles with technical hurdles, external competition intensifies. Tech giants like Meta and Amazon have entered the field, while startups like Figure AI and 1X have secured billions in funding.

At a summit held in New York last week, when asked about competitive advantages against giants like Tesla Motors, 1X CEO Bernt Børnich's answer was succinct:

"The simple answer is: a working product."

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