Tesla Optimus Hits Hundreds Weekly, Zero Useful Work — SkimNews
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- Tesla is building several hundred Optimus humanoid robots per week at Fremont — roughly 10x its Q2 output — on a line converted from Model S/X production, with a year-end target of 1,000+ weekly.
- Optimus's AI still can't reliably generalize — the robot needs several days to learn basic tasks and behaves unpredictably outside trained scenarios, three people familiar with the system said.
- Optimus's hand and forearm contain over 100 screws assembled manually, with fixtures failing to align tight-tolerance parts; touch sensors have reliability issues that Tesla plans to address with a replaceable "sensing glove" next year.
- The Optimus training pipeline spans 500,000 hours of data with a year-end doubling target, after Tesla moved self-driving data annotators onto the robot program and opened training hubs in Colorado, Arizona, and Florida.
- Musk's January 2025 forecast — ~10,000 Optimus built in 2025 with "several thousand" doing useful work by year-end — has not materialized; Tesla has admitted zero are doing useful work, and a V3 reveal promised by mid-2026 still hasn't happened.
- XPeng started an automated IRON humanoid production line in Guangzhou this month, targeting commercial sales in 2027.
Why it matters: Tesla has bet its Model S/X line on a robot whose AI can't generalize and whose hands still need 100+ manual screws — the same hardware-first playbook that took nearly a decade to deliver supervised FSD. XPeng is now running an automated competitor line.
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