Tesla has started producing its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont factory, in manufacturing space once used for electric vehicles, the company said in its third-quarter update on Wednesday, Oct. 21.
Why it matters: Fremont, already Tesla's biggest Bay Area car plant, is now where the company is betting on robots. The spending behind that bet helped cut quarterly profit by 43%.
What Tesla said
"The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla wrote in its shareholder letter, TechCrunch reported. The company said its current process is "suitable for a commercial product."
CEO Elon Musk called it "early production" on the earnings call and said the ramp will be slow and "somewhat bumpy." He claimed Tesla could make 20,000 robots a week by the end of 2027.
What it did not say
- No number of robots built, no weekly rate, no customer and no price, MEKAWIRE noted from the SEC filing.
- The filing lists the Fremont Optimus line as "Early Ramp" and a Texas line as "Construction."
The money
- Net income: $787 million, down 43% from $1.37 billion a year earlier.
- Revenue: about $28.0 billion.
- Research and development: $2.76 billion, up 69%.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving software is also under scrutiny locally: see our report on the Vallejo I-80 crash.