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

Tesla's Fremont, California factory is shifting from producing its Model S and X electric vehicles to developing its Optimus humanoid robot, a move led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk to pivot away from car sales towards AI and the company's robotic assistant. However, progress has been slower than expected, with the company moving from producing a few dozen Optimus robots in Q2 to several hundred a week last month, as reported by The Information.

Yet, the production is facing significant hurdles that could jeopardize Tesla's plan to manufacture over 1,000 Optimus robots per week before the year's end. The issues primarily pertain to the durability and reliable assembly of the robots' hands, a major engineering challenge that Tesla has been grappling with for over a year.

Instead of integrating touch sensors directly into the hands, Tesla is developing a "sensing glove" that can be easily replaced. Despite hundreds of thousands of hours of training data, Tesla's robots are still taking days to learn even the most basic tasks. This latest setback contradicts Elon Musk's earlier predictions, where he had promised in 2024 to have "a thousand to a couple thousand robots working in its factories" by 2025, and in January 2025, he claimed that Tesla would produce around 10,000 Optimus robots by the end of 2024.

Now, Tesla aims to produce 20,000 units per week, a goal that appears increasingly ambitious in light of the reported production issues.