Tesla Starts Optimus Robot Production in California as Profit Falls 43%
TechCrunch ● Covered by 2 sources
Tesla started making Optimus robots in Fremont. It’s a real production line now, but profits still fell 43% as spending surged.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch — read the original for the full story.
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Tesla has started building its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, on a manufacturing line that used to make electric vehicles. The company says the bots coming off that line are its first production-quality units, and it now believes the current process can support a commercial product. Not full speed yet, though. Elon Musk called it “early production” and said the ramp will be slow and bumpy because the machine is so new.
The long-term target is classic Musk scale: 20,000 robots a week by the end of 2027. But he also said there’s still design work to do, including making the robot safe, reliable, and durable enough not to wear out quickly. And the software side isn’t done either. Musk said there is still a lot of work left before Optimus can handle truly useful open-ended tasks.
That ambition sat awkwardly beside Tesla’s third-quarter numbers. Revenue was flat, expenses jumped as the company pushed harder on AI, autonomy, and Optimus, and profit fell 43% to $787 million from $1.37 billion a year earlier. Tesla’s total revenue came in at $28.04 billion, a bit below both the prior quarter’s $28.23 billion and the $28.09 billion it generated in the third quarter of 2025.
EV sales were the main source of revenue, but they did not provide much lift. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the quarter, about 6,000 more than the previous quarter, but fewer than a year earlier, while EV revenue held flat at $20 billion. Solar and energy storage fell 16% to $2.8 billion, which Tesla blamed on tariff-related customer refunds. The services business, helped by subscriptions to Full Self-Driving software, was the bright spot: up 33% to $4.6 billion, with a record $734 million in gross profit.
Tesla’s executives kept talking up FSD and the coming unsupervised version, even as that timeline slipped again. Customers can still buy the supervised version today, which requires attention and intervention. Ashok Elluswamy said the first customer vehicles could join the robotaxi fleet around Q2 next year. That’s a long way from Musk’s earlier promise that unsupervised driving would probably arrive in the fourth quarter of this year.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Tesla doing Tesla things: build the sci-fi demo, then ask Wall Street to finance the rest of the movie. The robot line is real, but so is the bill, and the company keeps treating “soon” like a business model. Open-ended tasks, unsupervised driving, robot fleets — the same old fog machine, just with fresh hardware.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
