Tesla Optimus is the humanoid robot of the carmaker Tesla. Since autumn 2026 it has been in early production at the Fremont plant. For business, it is a guidepost for the whole market: if the Autopilot approach works in a humanoid, the general-purpose robot will become a mass-market product, as the car once did. For now Optimus is not for sale — Tesla does not accept outside orders, and Elon Musk puts sales to outside customers at the end of 2027.
How it works
Optimus sees the world through cameras only — just like Tesla cars with Autopilot. The image goes into a neural network: it works out where the table, the part and the person’s hand are, and decides where to move its own hand and where to put its foot. There are no expensive sensors like lidar. The bet is that a strong model pulls everything it needs out of ordinary video, while cameras are cheap and familiar to mass production.
The body is dozens of electric motors with gearboxes in the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips and knees. Each motor gets a command many times a second, and sensors in the joints report where the arm is right now and how hard it is pressing on an object. Power comes from a battery in the body. For a factory, this means quiet work with no hoses or compressors, and charging from the ordinary power grid.
The robot is trained the same way as Autopilot: collect lots of video and motion recordings, run a huge number of attempts in simulation and bring it all together in one neural network that knows many tasks at once. A new skill is not a new program but new data. The first production-grade robots work in Tesla’s own factories: that is where they face the main test — a real shift.
Where it already works
- Tesla factories — the first production-grade robots work on the company’s own lines
- Fremont, California — early production of Optimus since autumn 2026
- AbsoTech waitlist — find out the moment outside sales start
What to consider
- Not for sale: Tesla does not accept outside orders and there is no price — nothing to compare it with yet
- The date for outside sales — the end of 2027 — is Elon Musk’s word, not a contract
- To Russia — only under a US export license, and such licenses are practically never issued: there is no legal route
- There are no sales in Vietnam either, as in any other country — only the waitlist