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Tesla Begins Optimus Production at Fremont as Musk Targets Late-2027 Deliveries

October 24, 2026 · Category: Business & Tech

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has started building its Optimus humanoid robot on high-volume lines at its Fremont, California factory, the company said in its third-quarter shareholder update. "The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla wrote, adding that the manufacturing process is "suitable for a commercial product" even as hardware keeps changing. ABC7 reported the same milestone Friday, citing Elon Musk and the Fremont location.

That is a manufacturing milestone, not a finished product. On the earnings call, Musk called the work "early production" and warned the ramp will be slow and "somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product," TechCrunch reported. He said reaching 20,000 robots a week will take "at least a year, maybe a little longer," with external deliveries likely toward the end of 2027. Tesla's update lists California Optimus as "Early Ramp" (no capacity number) and Texas as "Construction." Most equipment for a Fremont line designed for about a million robots a year is already on site, Musk said, per The Verge, while a Texas line is planned for much larger long-term capacity. Space once used for Model S and Model X is being converted for Optimus, Business Insider reported.

What still needs work matters as much as what is rolling off the line. Musk said the design must still be tweaked for a robot that is "safe and reliable and has long duration," so it cannot "wear out after a month," and that "there's still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI" before Optimus is useful for open-ended tasks. Hands remain the bottleneck: Tesla is "building robots that do not have perfected hands," he said, because robot hands cannot heal and must stay durable while soft enough for delicate objects. UC Berkeley robotics professor Ken Goldberg told The Verge that shipping hardware ahead of software is "a big problem," and that dexterity is far harder than walking.

Musk's near-term plan is to bootstrap usefulness inside Tesla first. He said the company needs roughly 10,000 to 20,000 robots for "Optimus Academy," where they practice tasks and generate training data, and he hopes to put Tesla's AI5 chip into Optimus around April 2027. First customers would be industrial buyers wanting dangerous or repetitive work around the clock; household uses would come later. He has also promised a video within a month or two of tasks that are not preprogrammed. ABC7 illustrated its report with footage of an Optimus unit at a popcorn machine — a look at the form factor in production, not proof of unscripted reliability.

On price, Tesla has not announced an MSRP, order path or unit count. Musk's closest public figure remains his long-term consumer target: at the October 2024 "We, Robot" event he said Optimus would cost $20,000 to $30,000 "long term," The Verge reported, after a 2022 AI Day guess of under $20,000 cited by Reuters. Those are scale aspirations, not today's quote. The race is already crowded — Business Insider noted Agility Robotics' Digit and Figure AI logistics deployments.

The announcement landed in a soft quarter: TechCrunch reported Q3 net income fell 43% to $787 million as AI, Optimus and autonomy spending rose, with revenue roughly flat at about $28 billion. The Optimus bet is now visible on the factory floor; proving the bots can earn their keep is the next test.

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Tickers: NASDAQ:TSLA

Why it matters

Moving Optimus onto a high-volume Fremont line is the first hard evidence that Tesla's robot program has a manufacturing process it is willing to call commercial-grade. The same call made clear that hands, durability, safety and AI still decide whether those bots become useful industrial tools by late 2027 — or expensive training hardware. This is reporting only, not investment advice.

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