
Tesla Optimus In Volume and Selling to External Customer Starting Late 2026
- by NextBigFuture
- Sep 10, 2025
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Brian Wang
The Tesla Optimus V3 will ignite the Humanoid bot revolution and has solved the hands problem. There are three major problems really good hands, really good AI mind that understands the real world and will be able to made at scale in the millions. There are also unmentioned issues of durability and being able to last for years of usage.
Musk says the Tesla Optimus Version 3 is sublime and has a breakthrough with human-level manual dexterity (27-28 degrees of freedom per hand), AI for real-world navigation, and high-volume production. Challenges include no existing supply chain—Tesla must vertically integrate actuators (26 per arm). They have custom motors, gearboxes/electronics that were designed from first principles. Tesla vehicle scaling but was a harder than just making a few working units. Teslabot is harder than Model X and cybertruck but easier than SpaceX Starship.
The design is finalizing now (2025). They are targeting high-volume production of million bots per year or more by ~2030. They will cost ~$20K-$25K with the AI5 and later AI6 chips and memory for about ~$5K-6K. They will sell for about $40000. First-wave pricing demand-driven which means for $80000 to 150000. They will have ranch-ready bots selling to regular people starting in 2026-2027.
The AI5 is making huge progress and will be 40 times better than AI4 in some metrics. AI5 has 40x improvement over AI4 for softmax. It has 8x raw compute, 9x memory, 5x bandwidth and has native softmax/mixed precision. It is co-designed with software.
AI5 will be used for robotaxi and teslabot. Both will provide distributed AI inference as a major cloud computing like major revenue line that could be more profitable than their actual main mobility or labor functions. AI5 will further improve robotaxi as well as being critical for Optimus as has been described. Tesla FSD for robotaxi safety will have 2-10x human level safety by end-2025 and this 10x parameters and still just use AI4. AI5 will enable Tesla FSD to get even better to perhaps 100X human level of safety.
The bot hands will be versatile and able to thread needles, playing violin or assembling cars. Most human hand muscles are in the forearm. The tendons are puppet system for the hand. Just making a robot hand like the human hands is a materials/engineering nightmare. Tesla solved this with physics-based redesign and enabling generalized tasks in human-designed environments.
Tesla is solving the last mile of robotics—generalization over specialization. It will be seamless to put it into the existing human infrastructure with infinite scability. The bots adapt to us instead of us making massive changes to our world for bots. Hardware edges out software as current bottleneck, but LLMs provide free interaction. The voice commands are like Grok’s Annie and other persona that are already being used.
Brian Wang
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
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