Tesla is shifting production at its Fremont factory from electric vehicles to Optimus humanoid robots, but faces manufacturing challenges with complex robot hands and employee resistance to training their potential replacements. CEO Elon Musk has positioned Optimus as potentially Tesla's biggest product, though the company struggles to scale production toward its 1,000-per-week target by end of 2026.
Tesla is scaling Optimus humanoid robot production to several hundred units per week at Fremont, but the robots remain limited to controlled tasks and can't handle generalized work. Key challenges include fragile hands with assembly issues, supplier quality problems at scale, and AI that takes days to learn basic tasks. Most units are currently used internally for testing rather than commercial deployment.