Tesla Optimus at South Korea

Tesla Optimus (Tesla Bot) is a general-purpose humanoid robot developed by Tesla, announced as a concept at AI Day in August 2021 and shown as working prototypes at AI Day in September 2022. The second generation, Optimus Gen 2 (December 2023), demonstrated Tesla-designed actuators and sensors, roughly 30 percent faster walking, a weight reduction of about 10 kg, 11-degree-of-freedom hands with fingertip tactile sensing, and a 2-degree-of-freedom actuated neck.

Optimus shares its perception and compute approach with Tesla's Full Self-Driving stack. Tesla positions Optimus for factory and general-purpose labor and projects a long-run price near $20,000 to $30,000 at scale, but those figures and timelines are company projections rather than realized outcomes. At the We Robot event in October 2024, Optimus units that appeared to converse and serve drinks were reported by Bloomberg and TechCrunch to be human-teleoperated rather than autonomous.

Tesla has claimed internal factory testing of Optimus, but on the Q4 2025 earnings call (January 2026) Elon Musk acknowledged the robots are not in material use in Tesla factories and remain in the research-and-development phase. As of mid-2026 there is no verified external commercial sale, and the production-design V3 reveal has slipped repeatedly. Optimus is therefore recorded at research maturity: its factory presence is maker-facility R&D, not a verified commercial deployment.