Optimus moved into production this quarter at Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory, where the humanoid robot learns from what it sees instead of code written to instruct it.
“You’ve probably seen lots of impressive demonstrations of robots on the internet,” CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday (July 22) on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “Those demonstrations are pre-programmed or remote controlled. There is no humanoid robot that is actually able to do generalized tasks. Optimus will be the first one that is capable of doing that.”
That scalability is the point. Programming a robot for every possible task isn’t feasible, but learning by observation is virtually limitless: factory floor footage runs continuously, and video of humans performing everyday tasks already exists at internet scale. Like a new employee, Optimus practices, fails, learns and improves, the company says.
“Just like Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s driver-assistance software, we have access to a broad fleet of humans giving us data from all of the workers at our factory,” said Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI. “Optimus can learn quite a bit from observing them perform their tasks.”
Optimus Has No Existing Supply Chain, So Tesla Is Building One
Getting Optimus built at scale is a separate challenge. Cars draw on decades of existing suppliers for parts like glass and body panels; Optimus has no such precedent. Every part is new and every supplier had to be found from scratch or brought in-house.
“The difficulty of scaling the production ramp is proportionate to the newness of the parts in the robot,” Musk said. “With Optimus, there is no supply chain.”
Karen Cattan, Tesla’s VP of supply chain, said the company builds components itself when outside partners fall short. “In certain cases where we don’t find a great partner, we’ve never hesitated from insourcing it,” she said. Tesla is also lining up outside suppliers for chips and batteries. Samsung is building a manufacturing facility in Texas. Micron, one of the world’s largest memory chip makers, has given Tesla an allocation at a time when supply is tight. Panasonic has invested in battery cell production to support the ramp.
Tesla has also placed equipment orders for a chip development facility in Austin that puts design, testing and production under one roof, compressing a process that typically takes months into weeks. No such facility exists anywhere else on earth, Musk said. “It’s going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla,” he said.
Robotaxi Fleet Has Driven 380,000 Miles Without a Notable Incident
While Optimus is a longer-term bet, Tesla’s robotaxi program, fully driverless vehicles that pick up and drop off passengers with no one behind the wheel, is proving the same technology in the real world.
Tesla has logged more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised robotaxi driving across seven U.S. markets with zero notable incidents, Elluswamy said. The fleet is growing at double-digit rates week over week and Tesla expects that pace to hold through year end.
The program started roughly a year ago in Austin with safety monitors in the car. By late last year it was running with no one on board, and it has since expanded across Florida, Texas and the Bay Area. “Robotaxi growth so far has been literally exponential while keeping an impeccable safety record,” Elluswamy said.
Both robotaxis and Optimus run on the same principle: a machine that learns from what it sees, improves through repetition and eventually outperforms a system following a fixed script. Robotaxis are proving the model works. Optimus is the next test of it.
What Else Stood Out
- Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s software that handles steering, acceleration and braking without human input, now has nearly 1.5 million paying customers globally. In North America, 55% of Q2 North American deliveries had FSD enabled at purchase.
- Tesla is adding Starlink satellite connectivity to the Cybercabs.
- Tesla ended Q2 with its biggest order backlog since 2023. Model Y set sales records in the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said.
- The Tesla Semi, the company’s electric freight truck, will get autonomous driving capability by end of this year or early next.
- Optimus will eventually have superhuman dexterity, finer motor control than a human hand, Musk said. The human hand is more remarkable the closer you study it, he added, and Optimus is designed to match and then exceed it.
Second-Quarter Results and Future Outlook
Tesla reported record second-quarter deliveries with sequential growth of 60% in the Americas, 27% in Asia Pacific and 12% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Automotive gross margins, excluding regulatory credits, fell from 19.2% to 16.3%, driven by the non-recurrence of a $230 million warranty benefit and tariff relief from Q1. Adjusted for those items, margins were approximately flat.
Service margins, which include used cars, Supercharging, service centers and insurance, hit an all-time high of 14.1%, up from 9.2%. Free cash flow turned negative as capital expenditure more than doubled from the previous quarter, and Tesla now expects full-year capital expenditure above $25 billion.
