Tesla Reportedly Can’t Get the Hands to Work on Its Optimus Robot

Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images Earlier this year, news emerged that Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was being converted from a facility manufacturing its Model S and X EVs to focus on building its Optimus humanoid robot instead. It was the latest sign yet that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was making good on his threat of abandoning car sales in favor of both AI and the company’s bipedal, black-masked assistant. But progress has been slower than he’d like. While the company managed to ramp up production of its Optimus robot from a few dozen in Q2 to several hundred a week last month, as The Information reports, it’s running into some serious roadblocks that could endanger its ambitious plans of manufacturing more than 1,000 of them a week before the end of this year. For one, most units aren’t actually being shipped to customers and instead are being used for internal testing and data collection. They’re also not being treated as general purpose machines, still being confined to complete simple, repetitive tasks. That’s in part because the company is seriously struggling with durability and reliable assembly of the robot’s hands, according to The Information, a major engineering challenge Tesla has reportedly been struggling with for over a year now. Instead of relying on touch sensors built directly into the hands, the carmaker is developing a “sensing glove” that can be hot-swapped. Beyond the robot’s hands, and despite hundreds of thousands of hours of training data, Tesla’s robots are still struggling to learn basic tasks, a process that can take them days. The latest reality check flies in the face of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s characteristically boisterous predictions. He promised in 2024 to have a “thousand to a couple thousand robots working in its factories” by 2025. Then, in January 2025, he said that Tesla would build roughly 10,000 Optimus robots by the end of last year, many of which would be “doing useful things.” Now, Tesla is targeting 20,000 units a week. But considering The Information‘s latest reporting, Musk’s EV maker has a massive amount of catching up to do — let alone convincing customers to spend huge amounts of money on humanoid robots. More on Optimus: Elon Musk Says His Optimus Robot Is So Dope That People Will Forget Tesla Ever Made Cars