Stuck in the "hands"! Reports say Tesla keeps lowering its production target for the "Optimus" robot, with the summer target already reduced to 2,000 units.

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At a time when its core electric vehicle business is experiencing sluggish growth, the humanoid robot “Optimus” project—highly anticipated by Elon Musk and touted as a venture that will eventually surpass the EV business—is facing significant setbacks due to key technical bottlenecks.

According to two sources cited in media reports, Tesla has abandoned its plan to produce several thousand robots this year because of difficult progress with the robot’s “hands,” the most technically challenging component.

Production targets repeatedly slashed, the “hands” become the biggest technical bottleneck

The production ambitions of the Optimus project suffered a rollercoaster-like decline in 2025.

At the start of the year, Tesla aimed to ramp up production from dozens of units in 2024 to several thousand. In March, Musk even raised the target to “at least 5,000 units” during an internal meeting.

However, this aggressive objective faced internal resistance from the beginning. According to sources, project staff repeatedly told Musk that his expansion timeline was too optimistic. Subsequent events confirmed these concerns: just a few months later, the production target was drastically reduced to 2,000 units.

By summer, employees reported to Musk that due to functional defects in the “hands,” even if 2,000 robots could be built, their utility would be reduced.

This ultimately led Tesla to abandon its mass production plans for the year and redirect resources to overcoming challenges related to the hands and making other improvements. In a podcast in September, Musk himself acknowledged that “the hands, including the forearms, are the main engineering challenge for the entire robot.”

The project delays have also been accompanied by changes in core leadership. Optimus engineering lead Milan Kovac left the company in June.

The project is now jointly led by three executives: Konstantinos Laskaris is responsible for hardware design, Ashok Elluswamy oversees software, and Lars Moravy leads manufacturing. All three report directly to Musk. The latter two also oversee Tesla’s automotive business.

From “factory workers” to “robot scientists”

Despite short-term production setbacks, Musk’s vision for Optimus remains grand. He hopes Optimus can board SpaceX’s Mars spacecraft by the end of next year and plans to deeply integrate it with his AI company xAI, ultimately creating a “robot scientist” capable of replacing white-collar workers and even scientists.

Regarding Optimus’s Mars plans, industry insiders cited by media have commented that the current version is designed for Earth’s indoor environment; unless it’s outfitted with specialized space suits and its thermal management system is completely redesigned, it would be nearly impossible for it to carry out any tasks on Mars, where average temperatures can plummet to minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about minus 62 Celsius).

The idea of making Optimus a “robot scientist” in the lab through xAI’s Grok model remains a distant, internally discussed concept.

Currently, Optimus’s applications in Tesla factories are limited to basic, repetitive tasks such as sorting batteries and security patrols.

The core logic behind Tesla’s humanoid design is to use billions of human activity videos on the internet to train the robot. However, converting this unstructured video data into effective training commands is itself a massive technical challenge. At this stage, Tesla still primarily uses videos of its own employees doing household chores, walking, and other activities for training.

As Tesla struggles with technical obstacles, outside competition is growing fiercer. Giants like Meta and Amazon have entered the field, while startups such as Figure AI and 1X have secured billions of dollars in funding.

At a summit in New York last week, when asked about his competitive advantage over giants like Tesla, 1X CEO Bernt Børnich had a succinct answer:

“The simple answer is, a product that works.”

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