The production of Optimus robots will begin in Fremont, USA, in late July or August — just four months after the last Model S and X roll off the assembly line in early May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed during the first-quarter 2026 earnings call, while again postponing the Gen 3 presentation, UNN reports with reference to Electrek.
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However, Musk warned that initial production volume would be "quite slow," calling it "literally impossible to predict" this year's production rate, given that Optimus consists of 10,000 unique parts on a new production line.
Musk's proposed timeline appears ambitious. The last Model S and X cars will be produced in early May, completing a 14-year production run for the Model S and an 11-year run for the Model X. In total, Tesla has produced over 610,000 such vehicles, but sales have shrunk to approximately 30,000 per year, representing only a small fraction of the line's 100,000-unit capacity.
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After the last cars are assembled, Tesla will dismantle the entire production line from scratch — starting with equipment for small parts manufacturing and ending with final assembly, which Musk said will be dismantled next month.
Then, entirely new production machinery for Optimus will be installed, including all infrastructure for wiring, communications, and testing. Musk called the four-month transition unprecedented.
"If we could go from stopping production on one line, dismantling that entire line, installing a brand new line, and getting it running in just four months, that's an incredibly high speed. I don't think any other company on Earth has ever done that before," Musk said.
Musk was candid about the upcoming challenges, responding to questions from investors who, he said, "don't fully understand what's happening on the production line."
The main problem: Optimus is a completely new product with a completely new production line and more than 10,000 unique components, none of which have been used in mass production before.
"It will move as fast as the unluckiest, slowest, dumbest part of all 10,000," Musk said. "It's impossible to predict such things."
He declined to name any production targets for 2026, saying only that the initial skills for the robots would be "simple factory skills" before gradually building them up. This is a significant departure from Musk's January 2025 forecast of producing "approximately 10,000 Optimus robots" this year — a goal Tesla completely failed to achieve, with Musk admitting in January 2026 that no Optimus robot was performing "useful work" in Tesla's factories.
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In addition to Fremont, Musk confirmed that Tesla is building a second Optimus factory in Giga Texas, with production expected to begin around summer 2027. This facility is expected to eventually be involved in Gen 4 production.
Regarding the Gen 3 presentation, originally expected in the first quarter of 2026, Musk again pushed back the timeline — this time to "probably mid-this year." The reason? Tesla claims that competitors "are doing frame-by-frame analysis of every release we make and copying everything they possibly can."
The publication notes that Tesla's competitors are indeed not standing still. Boston Dynamics is supplying its electric humanoid robot Atlas to Hyundai factories this year, planning to create a production base capable of producing 30,000 units per year. Figure AI, valued at $39 billion, is actively being implemented in a pilot program at a BMW factory. And Agility Robotics' Digit robot is already being used commercially in customer warehouses, including at Toyota's plant in Ontario.
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