Tesla has started producing its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, converting space once used for EV manufacturing, the company said Wednesday. The milestone came with third-quarter results showing profit down 43% to $787 million as spending on robots, AI and autonomous driving outpaced flat revenue of $28.04 billion. CEO Elon Musk called it "early production" and claimed Tesla will make 20,000 Optimus units per week by the end of 2027, while executives pushed back the unsupervised FSD timeline to around Q2 next year.
According to TechCrunch, Tesla has begun building its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, converting a space once used for electric vehicle manufacturing. The announcement came Wednesday alongside third-quarter results that showed a 43% drop in profit, as spending on robotics, AI and autonomous driving outpaced flat revenue.
Production line comes online in Fremont
Tesla said in its third-quarter shareholder letter that the units leaving the new line are the first production-quality Optimus robots it has built. The company acknowledged that hardware and manufacturing processes will keep changing but argued the current process is already suitable for a commercial product.
“The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured. While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product.” — Tesla, third-quarter letter to shareholders
On the earnings conference call, CEO Elon Musk described the effort as “early production” and warned that the ramp will be slow and uneven because Optimus is such a radically new product. He said the design still needs tweaks to deliver a robot that is safe, reliable and durable enough not to wear out after a month, and that substantial work remains on the AI side before the machine is truly useful for open-ended tasks.
Even so, Musk claimed Tesla will be able to produce 20,000 Optimus robots per week by the end of 2027.
Flat revenue, rising costs squeeze quarterly profit
The forward-looking robot plans did not offset a middling quarter. Tesla’s total revenue came in at $28.04 billion, just below the $28.09 billion booked in the same period a year earlier and roughly $200 million under the prior quarter’s $28.23 billion.
Vehicle sales, still the core of the business, were flat year-over-year at $20 billion. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the quarter, about 6,000 more than the previous quarter but fewer than in the same period last year.
The solar and energy storage business posted a 16% year-over-year revenue decline to $2.8 billion, which Tesla attributed to tariff-related customer refunds. Services was the bright spot, growing 33% year-over-year to $4.6 billion and delivering a record $734 million in gross profit for the quarter.
Those gains were not enough to cover spending on artificial intelligence projects and Optimus. Net income fell to $787 million, down 43% from the $1.37 billion earned in the same period of 2025. Lower regulatory credit sales added further pressure on profitability.
Executives stay bullish on FSD as timeline slips again
Musk, CFO Vaibhav Taneja and Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, all struck bullish positions on the company’s Full Self-Driving product on the earnings call, even as the timeline for an unsupervised version slipped once more.
Owners can currently subscribe to a supervised version of the software, which requires the driver to stay attentive and ready to take over at any moment. The unsupervised version would amount to Level 4 autonomous driving, comparable to capabilities used in robotaxis.
“We suspect somewhere around Q2 next year is when we can turn on some of the first customer vehicles to be part of the robotaxi fleet.” — Ashok Elluswamy, Vice President of AI Software, Tesla
Elluswamy was referring to when privately owned Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD (Supervised) would receive a software update enabling unsupervised driving. Musk had said during the company’s April earnings call that the unsupervised version would “probably” be released in the fourth quarter of this year.
Source: TechCrunch
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
