Tesla’s Optimus won’t reach outside buyers until late 2027, and the hands are why

The Optimus humanoid robot is finally being built for real, but no outside company can have one yet. Its fingers, its durability and its software all still need work before it ships to customers, and the hand is the hardest part.

The hand is where humanoid robots tend to fail at real work. On Tesla’s earnings call, Elon Musk explained that the fingers must be soft enough to pick up delicate objects while surviving constant wear, and that a robot’s hand cannot heal the way human skin does. A machine that, in his words, can “wear out after a month” is not something a factory will pay for.

Tesla has begun what Musk calls early production on its high-volume line in Fremont, California, in the space where the Model S and Model X used to be built. The company’s letter to shareholders calls the robots coming off it “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured,” which also means every Optimus shown before this quarter was not. Most of a line designed for about a million robots a year, roughly 20,000 a week, is already installed, but Musk said reaching that pace will take at least a year, possibly longer, because parts of the design are still changing.

When an analyst asked where the design was still moving, a Tesla Optimus engineer pointed to the hand and to custom gears that still raise reliability concerns. Musk agreed that the hand is the main issue. Electrek had reported a month earlier, citing The Information, that the hand and forearm contained more than 100 small parts assembled by hand and that the touch sensors were unreliable.

The software is the other gap. Tesla trains its driver-assistance system on data from the cars it has already sold, but there is no comparable fleet of robots in the world collecting experience. Its answer is to build 10,000 to 20,000 Optimus units and have them practise tasks in what it calls an Optimus Academy. Musk also promised a video within a month or two showing the robot doing work that was not pre-programmed, and argued that many rival humanoid demos only run scripted routines.

Tesla’s own record is the reason for caution. In 2024 Musk said Optimus would work inside Tesla in 2025 and be sold to other companies in 2026. In January 2025 he said Tesla would build about 10,000 robots that year, with several thousand doing useful work by December, and he later admitted none were. On the same call, Tesla also pushed back the unsupervised version of its Full Self-Driving software again, to around the second quarter of next year for the first customer cars.

Musk also told investors that “there is no one that is even close to Tesla” on a general-purpose humanoid. Rivals suggest otherwise. China’s XPeng switched on an automated production line for its IRON humanoid in Guangzhou in September, with more than 80% of core processes automated, and plans first deliveries in the first half of 2027, starting with stores and shopping malls, then Europe later that year. XPeng has not yet shipped IRON to a paying customer either. Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has been building its electric Atlas since January, says all of its 2026 deployments are committed, and is teaching Atlas to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. It also chose sturdy industrial grippers over human-like fingers, which Electrek describes as a way around the very problem Tesla says is holding it back.

Optimus is not on sale to consumers anywhere. Tesla says the first outside units will go to industrial jobs that are dangerous, repetitive or run around the clock, and it has not named the customers or the countries that will get them first. The robot programme is also expensive: Tesla’s third-quarter net income fell 43% from a year earlier to $787 million as spending on AI and Optimus rose, TechCrunch reported.

The next checkpoints are close together. Musk promised the unscripted Optimus video within one or two months, Tesla plans to put its AI5 chip into the robot around April 2027, and outside deliveries are now targeted for around the end of 2027. Every earlier date for Optimus has slipped, so the video will be the first real test of whether this one holds.

Tags: Baker Mayfield, Elon Musk, tesla, robotics, humanoid robots, Boston Dynamics