Optimus (Tesla)

Optimus is the humanoid robot Tesla is building to do general-purpose physical work — in their factories first, and eventually in homes.

It's officially called Tesla Bot, but everyone calls it Optimus, after Tesla's announcement at AI Day in 2021.

Why Tesla, of all companies

Elon Musk's argument is simple: Tesla already makes the world's most advanced moving robots — the cars themselves. Self-driving software, electric motors, batteries, computer vision, mass manufacturing. A humanoid robot is, in his framing, "a car that walks." The same factory that turns out 5,000 cars a day could, in principle, turn out humanoid robots at similar scale and similar cost.

Whether that's true is the trillion-dollar question of the next decade.

What it actually is

The current Optimus (Gen 2, with Gen 3 being shown in late 2025) is about 1.73 m tall, weighs around 57 kg, and walks on two legs at about 8 km/h. It has 28 actuated joints — that's the number of motors moving the robot around. Each motor is a custom Tesla design, not an off-the-shelf part. The hands have 22 degrees of freedom each, which is roughly human-equivalent.

The "brain" is a smaller version of Tesla's full self-driving computer. The same neural networks that learn to drive a car are being adapted to control a body — what's called a vision-language-action model or VLA.

The training trick

Tesla's most interesting bet isn't the hardware. It's the training. They have a fleet of millions of cars sending back video and driving data. They have a humanoid that needs to learn how to manipulate objects. The same kind of large-scale, self-supervised neural network training that taught Tesla cars to drive is now being pointed at the humanoid.

Where other humanoid companies hand-program behaviours, Tesla wants to teach the robot by showing it humans doing things. If that works, Optimus could pick up new tasks the way a person does — by watching and trying.

What it can do today

As of public demos in 2025, Optimus could walk on flat ground, pick up small objects, sort batteries into trays, and do simple manipulation tasks. It still falls. It still moves slowly. It still needs a human in the loop for anything new.

The Gen 3 demos in late 2025 added natural-feeling walking (heel-strike, toe-off) and the ability to recover from light pushes — both significant steps toward something that could work alongside humans.

What Musk says it costs

Tesla's stated target is to sell Optimus for $20,000-30,000 once it's in mass production — cheaper than most cars. Whether that's achievable depends on whether they can keep the parts list mostly off-the-shelf and the manufacturing fully automated.

For comparison, Boston Dynamics' Atlas has never been sold to anyone (yet) — it's been a research platform. Figure 02 prices are confidential but estimated at $50-100k. Unitree's H1 humanoid sells for around ₹15-25 lakh ($18-30k) — clearly a target Tesla is trying to undercut.

Why it matters

If Optimus works at the price Tesla promises, the world has a general-purpose humanoid worker for less than a year's salary in most rich countries. The implications — for factory work, elderly care, dangerous jobs, and the labour market more broadly — are why every major car company and several AI labs now have a humanoid project.

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Curious about the robot that started the modern humanoid race? Read Atlas (Boston Dynamics).