Tesla announced it has begun producing its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, in a space previously used for electric-vehicle manufacturing. The company described the first units as production-quality, but CEO Elon Musk called it early production and warned the ramp would be slow and somewhat bumpy. He repeated a target of 20,000 bots per week by the end of 2027, while acknowledging that design tweaks and AI work remain before the robot is truly useful for open-ended tasks.
Those ambitions came alongside third-quarter results that showed the cost of Tesla's big bets. Revenue was roughly flat at $28.04 billion, slightly below the $28.09 billion from a year earlier, and net income fell 43% to $787 million. EV deliveries totaled 486,532 vehicles, fewer than in the same quarter last year. Solar and energy storage revenue dropped 16% to $2.8 billion, which Tesla blamed partly on tariff-related customer refunds, while services revenue grew 33% to $4.6 billion.
Tesla also delayed the timeline for unsupervised Full Self-Driving, with executives now saying some customer vehicles could receive it around the second quarter of next year, later than Musk's earlier fourth-quarter estimate. Lower regulatory credit sales added to the profit pressure.