Tesla Optimus Deliveries Slip to Late 2027 as Hands Lag

Tesla now expects to begin delivering Optimus humanoid robots to outside customers around the end of 2027. On the company's Q3 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk said the robot's hands, its durability and its AI all still need work before then.

Musk said early production of Optimus has started on the high-volume line in Fremont where the Model S and Model X were once built. Most of a line designed for a million robots a year is installed, but reaching a rate of about 20,000 units a week will take at least a year, possibly longer, because parts of the design are still changing. The first customers would be industrial users with jobs that are dangerous, repetitive or need to run around the clock.

Hands and AI are the bottlenecks

An Optimus engineer called the hand one of the hardest hardware areas, along with custom gears that still carry reliability concerns. Musk agreed the hand is the main issue: fingers must be soft enough for delicate objects yet survive constant wear, and a robot cannot heal the way skin does.

On software, Musk said Tesla is still working through problems with the AI architecture. Unlike its cars, which feed data for FSD, Tesla has no robot fleet collecting training data. It plans to build 10,000 to 20,000 robots to practice tasks in what it calls an Optimus Academy, and to put its AI5 chip in Optimus around April 2027. Musk also promised a video within a month or two showing the robot performing tasks that are not pre-programmed.

A moving timeline and tough rivals

The schedule has slipped repeatedly. In 2024 Musk targeted internal use in 2025 and high-volume sales to other companies in 2026. In January 2025 he spoke of about 10,000 robots that year, with several thousand doing useful work, which he later admitted did not happen. Tesla's Q3 shareholder letter now calls the Fremont units "the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured."

Musk claimed that no one is even close to Tesla in general-purpose humanoids. Rivals look comparable. XPeng started an automated IRON production line in Guangzhou in September, targets mass production by the end of 2026 and deliveries in the first half of 2027. Boston Dynamics began producing its electric Atlas in January and says its 2026 deployments are all committed, including to Google DeepMind. It is also training Atlas at Hyundai's Metaplant in Georgia, and Hyundai plans 25,000 robots across its plants.

The video Musk promised will be the next test of whether Optimus can do real, unscripted work.