Elon Musk spent July 1 walking Tesla’s first Optimus production line at the Fremont factory. The space is the same floor that ran Model S and Model X production until early May, converted in something like four months. VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has said the line is deliberately modular so Tesla can revise Optimus hardware without gutting the manufacturing setup each time. First units come off the line in late July or August. Fremont capacity, at eventual steady state, is a stated one million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas is planned for ten million per year in Summer 2027, which is the kind of number you should treat as a directional intent and not a delivery date.
The most useful sentence from Musk was the one that got the least attention. Optimus production will be extremely slow at first, he said. This is not like making a car. Each robot has around ten thousand unique parts across an entirely new supply chain. The Model S line ran on decades of Tier 1 automotive suppliers. Optimus V3 does not have that infrastructure yet. Every fastener, motor, actuator, and enclosure has to be sourced or tooled. Musk usually undersells the caveat and oversells the ramp. This time the caveat is the news.
The strategic frame is that Tesla is trying to be the first Western humanoid company at real automotive-adjacent manufacturing scale, and the wager is that the same kind of vertical integration that let Tesla build cars faster than Detroit will translate to robots. It is a defensible bet. It is also a bet that Figure AI has quietly been running the same race on. Figure hit one robot per hour at its BotQ facility earlier this year, which is a different unit of production but not a trivial one. Boston Dynamics is shipping electric Atlas units to Hyundai and DeepMind. Unitree shipped more than five thousand five hundred units last year at consumer-grade quality.
The question stops being whether humanoids get built and starts being who gets to a hundred thousand a year first, at what quality, and for which customer. Fremont’s answer starts arriving in a few weeks.