Elon Musk announced that Tesla may start selling its Optimus humanoid robot next year. The automaker plans to use the robot in its own factory by the end of the year.
A few months ago, Tesla unveiled “Optimus Gen 2”, a new generation of its humanoid robot that should be able to take over repetitive tasks from humans.
The new prototype showed a lot of improvements compared to previously underwhelming versions of the robot, and it gave some credibility to the project, which was laughed off by many when first announced with a dancer disguised as a robot for visual aid a few years ago.
Tesla believed it to be possible by leveraging its AI work on its self-driving vehicle program and expertise in batteries and electric motors. It argued that its vehicles are already robots on wheels. Now, it just needs to make them in humanoid forms to be able to replace humans in some tasks – primarily repetitive and dangerous tasks.
In a previous update on Optimus, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the “Optimus stuff is extremely underrated.” The CEO said that the demand could be as high as 10 to 20 billion units.
He went as far as “confidently predicting” that Optimus will account for “a majority of Tesla’s long-term value.”
The CEO sees everyone having a Tesla Optimus robot at home on top of them taking over a lot of manufacturing and service jobs.
With the release of Tesla’s Q1 2024 financial results, Musk gave an update on the timing for the rollout of Optimus. The CEO says that Optimus is already performing factory tasks inside its lab. He believes that Optimus will be used to perform real tasks inside actual Tesla factories by the end of the year.
Furthermore, Musk said that he believes Tesla could start selling its Optimus humanoid robot to customers outside of the company by the end of 2025.
The CEO again reiterated that he expects Optimus to represent most of Tesla’s revenue and overall value eventually.
Musk previously said that he expects Optimus to cost “less than half of a car” – so closer to $25,000.
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