In a nutshell: Musk’s bold plan for the Optimus drone is beginning to come collectively. The humanoid robots will start their business journey inside Tesla factories, assembling electrical autos. With a price ticket within the tens of 1000’s, will probably be some time earlier than they transfer from industrial labor to extra home chores in buyer properties.

Tesla will start utilizing a small quantity of Optimus robots for its inside operations subsequent 12 months, whereas “excessive manufacturing” for third-party corporations will hopefully begin in 2026. Elon Musk shared the brand new timeline through X, and he’s already behind the beforehand introduced schedule for utilizing Optimus at Tesla.

Optimus shall be useful on the corporate’s manufacturing ground. Musk didn’t specify the robots’ duties. The brand new timeline is a slight setback, as he had beforehand stated that the bots can be prepared for Tesla factories by the top of this 12 months.

Tesla can have genuinely helpful humanoid robots in low manufacturing for Tesla inside use subsequent 12 months and, hopefully, excessive manufacturing for different corporations in 2026

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024

Regardless of pushing for AI, robotics, and every part in between, like most of as we speak’s tech moguls, Musk’s ambition is now burdened by extra urgent points. Tesla electrical car gross sales are down, and earnings have dropped by nearly half, from $2.7 billion to $1.5 billion within the quarter that resulted in June.

Tesla’s focus is now on company-wide value discount efforts, and Optimus bots may excel in that regard. A robotic does not must eat, sleep, or relaxation. Optimus was constructed to excel in performing the unsafe, repetitive, or tedious duties that people nonetheless do on the manufacturing line.

Musk beforehand projected that Tesla would quickly begin mass-producing robots costing lower than $20,000 every for finish prospects. He additionally predicted that the corporate may in the future swell to an unprecedented $25 trillion valuation due to its robotic tech. The continuing imaginative and prescient is to enhance Optimus bots to the purpose the place they’d match properly into home conditions as companions, housekeepers, or babysitters.

Tesla is not the one firm at the moment working to embed robotics and drones into its manufacturing course of. Honda and Boston Dynamics have come a good distance with their early prototypes. They’re now actively working to construct a business enterprise primarily based on all these robotic experiments through the years.

Conventional carmakers world wide are engaged on robotic tech as nicely. Not too long ago, BMW partnered with robotics agency Determine to automate factories, utilizing neural community algorithms to assist with object recognition and manipulation. A number of massive tech AI gamers, together with Nvidia and OpenAI, helped fund Determine. Jeff Bezos is within the machine learning-driven bots as nicely.