- Tesla boss Elon Musk says the company will start producing and using humanoid robots from 2025
- Planned that the robots can undertake dangerous or boring, repetitive tasks
- Other companies are also developing humanoid robots
Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla is set to start making and using humanoid robots next year, with a plan to sell them from 2026, according to the company’s owner, Elon Musk.
Musk said on social media that the robots will first be used by Tesla. This news came as Musk pushed for cost cutting at Tesla as demand for its cars has weakened recently, although the company is still making huge profits – about $1.5 billion in the three months to the end of June, although this was down from $2.7 billion in the previous three months.
Hope for deployment
The humanoid robots, called Optimus, have been in development for some time –Musk had previously said he hoped the robots would be ready for use this year, but that timescale has now slipped.
“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” Musk posted on X (which everyone still calls Twitter), the social media platform he also owns.
The aim is for the autonomous robots to be used to perform unsafe or repetitive tasks in a manufacturing setting.
But Tesla isn’t the only company developing humanoid robots – Honda and Boston Dynamics are just two companies that are also working on such technology.
Ambitious technology
Musk is known for being ambitious with technology – he also recently claimed that the next generation of his SpaceX company’s Starship rockets will be taller than the Pyramids of Giza.
In response to a post on X, which Musk also owns, he wrote that the Starship rockets “will probably approach 140m over time”.
