Tesla Optimus: outside deliveries slip to late 2027, hands still the problem

Tesla's humanoid robot is still more than a year away from customers. On the company's Q3 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk said Tesla expects to start delivering Optimus to companies outside Tesla around the end of 2027, Electrek reports, and that three things still need work first: the hands, the robot's reliability and its AI.

What Musk said about production

Tesla has begun early production of Optimus on a high-volume line in Fremont, in the space where the Model S and Model X used to be built. Most of a line designed for a million robots a year is installed, Musk said, but reaching that rate, roughly 20,000 units a week, will take at least a year and possibly longer, because parts of the design are still changing. Tesla's Q3 shareholder letter calls the robots now coming off the line "the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured."

The first outside customers would be industrial: jobs that are dangerous, repetitive or need to run around the clock.

Why the hands are the hard part

Asked where the design is still changing, a Tesla Optimus engineer named the hand as one of the hardest hardware areas, along with custom gears that still raise reliability concerns. Musk agreed the hand is the main issue: fingers have to be soft enough to handle delicate objects yet survive constant wear, and unlike skin, a robot can't heal. He also said Tesla must make sure the robot doesn't wear out after a month of use.

The AI problem

Musk said Tesla is still working through problems with the AI architecture. Unlike its cars, Tesla has no fleet of robots collecting data, so it plans to build 10,000 to 20,000 units and let them practise tasks in what it calls an Optimus Academy. Tesla also plans to put its AI5 chip into Optimus around April 2027, and Musk promised a video "within a month or two" of the robot doing tasks that aren't pre-programmed.

A timeline that keeps moving

Electrek points out that the dates have slipped before. In 2024 Musk said Optimus would be used inside Tesla in 2025 and hopefully sold in high volume to other companies in 2026; in January 2025 he talked about building about 10,000 robots that year. Rivals are on similar schedules: XPeng plans IRON deliveries in the first half of 2027, and Boston Dynamics says its 2026 Atlas deployments, including with Hyundai and Google DeepMind, are already committed.

For the rest of Tesla's quarter, including Cybercab and FSD plans, see our Tesla Q3 2026 results story. Curious about running AI at home instead? Our laptop for local AI guide explains what hardware you need.