Elon Musk mentioned two difficulties when producing Optimus

During Tesla’s financial report meeting on July 22, Elon Musk said that creating Optimus is “a very complex problem to solve” and “no one has ever done this”. He believes the Optimus is the company’s “biggest product ever,” but points out the challenges of designing the machine to be ingenious, reliable, durable and safe.

“Human hands are miracles brought by nature,” Musk said. “The more we study the hands, the more we realize how amazing this part is. It’s not just the symmetry of the thumb. The details of how it works is amazingly subtle. The closer you look, the more amazed you are. Optimus will have human dexterity and then superhuman abilities.”

Theo They were levelMusk is implicitly admitting that Tesla has not been able to complete the hand for Optimus. Previously, the billionaire also mentioned this difficulty. “To have a useful humanoid robot, you will need it to have hands, great mechanical hands,” the billionaire wrote on X late last year.

Also at this week’s meeting, Musk said that “not having a supply chain” for Optimus is a big difficulty when building robots, because everything has to be built almost from scratch. In addition to adding lines to produce parts, Tesla also has to share AI chips, solving memory, logic and packaging problems that previously served mainly for electric vehicle production.

“Optimus is the most difficult product to mass produce that we have ever faced at Tesla,” Musk said. “Because everything on the robot is new.”

Theo Business Insider, mid-last year, he described Tesla as having to design everything from the motor, transmission, coupling system to control software and sensors, not to mention training. However, the billionaire affirmed that he would be “shocked” if Tesla did not produce 100,000 robots per month in the next 5 years.

Musk is currently highly focused on humanoid robots. Earlier this year, he said Tesla had stopped production of two key car models Model S and Model X at the Fremont (California) factory to make room for Optimus. The company also pledged to spend $25 billion on capital investments this year to soon mass produce this robot, about three times more than last year.

Tesla announced Optimus in 2021, launched the first prototype in 2022, now in its third generation (V3). The robot is 1.73 meters tall, weighs 57 kg, runs on Tesla’s self-developed AI5 chip with about 5 times more memory bandwidth than its predecessor, and integrates AI Grok for voice control. Musk repeatedly emphasized that Optimus will be “the greatest product” and that this robot and self-driving cars will open “a world without poverty.” Tesla plans to start production of Optimus in the second half of this year and commercialize it in 2027.