Tesla lifts Optimus output to several hundred robots a week, but hands and training remain bottlenecks

Tesla has raised production of its Optimus humanoid robot to several hundred units a week, according to reporting by The Information that was picked up by several outlets in late September 2026. That is roughly ten times the rate of the second quarter, when the company was building a few dozen robots a week in small-batch testing. Production takes place at the Fremont, California factory, where Tesla ended Model S and Model X production in May 2026 to make room for Optimus lines.

The next goals are ambitious. Managers reportedly aim to have a continuous automated line capable of more than 1,000 robots a week by the end of 2026, and an eventual capacity of about 20,000 a week. Tesla is expected to begin selling Optimus in late 2027, initially by leasing robots to commercial customers. According to Gizmodo, Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

The report describes several bottlenecks on the line. Each hand and forearm contains more than 100 screws and other small parts that are assembled by hand, and equipment at several stations struggles to align tight-tolerance parts for hands and joints, so more robots need rework after leaving the line. The hands are not yet durable enough for sustained use, and some touch sensors have been unreliable; Tesla plans a replaceable "sensing glove" for next year's model. Suppliers of motors and precision gears reportedly find it difficult to keep quality consistent at higher volumes. The robots now being built belong to the V3 generation, which is not the version intended for commercial sale.

Software is the other constraint. Most units work in tightly controlled, supervised areas inside Tesla's own facilities, and it reportedly takes several days to teach a robot even a basic task. Tesla has more than 500,000 hours of training data and plans to double that figure by the end of the year.

The figures show both the strengths and the limits of Tesla's approach. As the SectorAtlas profile of the company notes, Tesla can finance Optimus from an industrial business that generated revenue of USD 94.8 billion in 2025, and its manufacturing base allows a production ramp that few humanoid specialists could attempt. Volume alone, however, does not solve dexterity or task generalisation, and the programme's history calls for caution: in January 2025 Elon Musk said several thousand robots would be doing useful work by the end of that year, a target that was not met. For the humanoid sector, the key indicator in the coming quarters will be less the number of robots built than the number doing productive work outside Tesla's controlled areas.