Has Tesla started producing Optimus robots?

Tesla has started production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its factory in Fremont, California, in a manufacturing space once dedicated to making electric vehicles. The company announced the milestone Wednesday, but the news arrived alongside a quarterly report that showed a sharp drop in profit.

“The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured,” Tesla wrote in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. “While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product.”

Musk called the effort “early production” during a conference call with analysts. He said the ramp will be slow and “somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product.” Even so, he claimed Tesla will be able to make 20,000 Optimus robots per week by the end of 2027.

Musk acknowledged that the machine is not ready for everyday work. “There’s still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has long duration, so it can’t, like, wear out after a month,” he said. “And there’s still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks.”

The robot news did little to brighten the financial picture. Tesla’s revenue was flat while its expenses rose sharply as it poured money into Optimus, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. Net income fell to $787 million, a 43% drop from the $1.37 billion it earned in the same period of 2025. Lower sales of regulatory credits also weighed on profitability.

Total third-quarter revenue came in at $28.04 billion, roughly flat compared with $28.09 billion a year earlier. It was also about $200 million lower than the previous quarter’s $28.23 billion.

Vehicle sales, which drive most of the company’s income, were flat year over year at $20 billion. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the quarter, about 6,000 more than in the previous quarter but fewer than in the same period last year.

Not every division struggled. Revenue from Tesla’s solar and energy storage business fell 16% from a year earlier to $2.8 billion, which the company blamed on tariff-related customer refunds. The services business, which includes customer subscriptions to Full Self-Driving software, grew 33% to $4.6 billion. That segment also produced a record $734 million in gross profit for the quarter.

When will Tesla's unsupervised Full Self-Driving launch?

Full Self-Driving was a major focus on the call. Musk, Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja and Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, all struck confident tones about the product. Still, the timeline for the “unsupervised” version has slipped again. Tesla owners can subscribe today to a supervised version that requires the driver to pay attention and be ready to take over at any time. The unsupervised version would be the equivalent of Level 4 autonomous driving, similar to the technology used in robotaxis.

Elluswamy said the company suspects it could begin turning on the first customer vehicles for its robotaxi fleet around the second quarter of next year. He was referring to privately owned Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD (Supervised) receiving a software update that would enable unsupervised driving.

That timeline is later than what Musk offered in April. On that earnings call, he said the unsupervised version would “probably” be released in the fourth quarter of this year.

Tesla’s bet on robots and AI is now the central story of the company’s finances. The factory in Fremont is producing machines, but the revenue from those machines has not yet appeared in the company’s results.

Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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