Tesla's big bet on humanoid robots may be hitting a wall

I could see this being big news for corporations who operate warehouses because it would save a ton of labor, and also remove human inefficiencies from a complex system. Also save a lot of money on worker's comp claims. But I've never seen it at the household level - I don't get it. You're going to pay $30,000 for a home robot companion to do all the little tasks like fetching you a beer or opening a jar of olives?

What is limiting the production is that Elon's goals for the humanoid robot are very ambitious and it isn't ready.

''Hitting a wall'' because they were inspired by cybertruck.

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Do you really want a human-shaped robot for some of these tasks, though?

even for warehouses, specialized robots are much more efficient at every level. And they actually already exists. See what amazon does for instance.

I mean, it couldn’t even make it through two shifts serving popcorn on the mezzanine at their retro diner.

Even for warehouse applications I also never understood the hype. Why should a robot to move around boxes/pallets be humanoid? Seems like a needless complication.

And this is what i don't get: Why do we need a humanoid robot for this? Replace the Legs with Wheels, and your design becomes *so much more* simple. Its not like Robots would need to climb stairs or something. If They need to reach up higher into the shelf, just build a robot especially for that job - or add a long, extendable robot arm or smth. That was the key for automation after all: purpose built simple machines doing very specific jobs at very low cost.

Delay? Who'd expect that?

Are you sure about that? I don’t think robots will ever be cheaper to own and operate than unskilled human labor in jobs such as warehouses. I think this whole Optimus deal is just another attempt to feed Wall Street yet another dumb narrative to keep the stock price up…which seems to work. Question is: How much longer until the last investor realizes that Tesla is really just a regular car manufacturer.

The laundry, that would be THE selling point. We'd pay a lot for no-more-laundry...

If these humanoid robots ever come to fruition, you will see 300,000 boomers get their dicks ripped off the first week after they each ask the robot for the “Epstein Massage”. They call it “robogrip” for a reason and it’s nothing to eff with. But best of luck to them

One with an ancient product line.

Their robots are a decade behind the curve. They are aspiring to a prototype that will would have been mid in 2015. Ever see. YouTube video of a Tesla bot doing amazing things that wasn’t produced by Tesla? Reason is their “product” is unremarkable.

Relevant Tom Scott video  https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE

> You're going to pay $30,000 for a home robot companion to do all the little tasks like fetching you a beer or opening a jar of olives? [https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/aloha-housekeeping-humanoid-cook-clean](https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/aloha-housekeeping-humanoid-cook-clean) With the mission in mind, a team of researchers at Stanford University and Google DeepMind has created a Mobile Aloha humanoid system, a potential AI-powered housemaid of the future! The robot can be easily trained to do multiple activities like cooking shrimp or organizing things in your house.  > household level  Watch A New Humanoid Robot Clean A Hotel Room Like It Owns The Place [https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/06/12/meet-the-humanoid-robot-designed-to-clean-your-hotel-room/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/06/12/meet-the-humanoid-robot-designed-to-clean-your-hotel-room/) Humanoid Robots for BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. [https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robots.html](https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robots.html)

If laundry is that rough for you, get a service. They exist. In a future where it can automate, you would probably just have a hamper that ships it out and back at an industrial setup. No reason to have a 150lb surveillance and killing machine in your home.

Serving popcorn in slowmotion? That's more than ready isnt it?

I can see it being helpful to handy capped people that actually need help. And it could walk your dog and pickup the poops. Be your bodyguard, etc. Not sure what else it can do, maybe cook for you also? But it's too expensive to be useful for the everyday person, just another useless gadget.

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What robots? You mean the remote controlled ones from TeSSla? 🤭

I don't like shrimp

So just like FSD then?

That’d be a good solution for warehouses if you want it to look cool and be more expensive than other solutions with same effect, indeed. So I’m sure Tesla would use it, can’t think of another company though because their shares aren’t valued on vibes…

Not a question anyone asked. The question is if anyone would pay $30,000 for a home robot companion to do little tasks like opening a jar of olives. Nobody asked if you'd prefer a car vs a robot.

Humanoid robots is a flawed concept and is decades away from a profitable use scenario. Especially with the rise of AI. There is going to be so much cheap labor available.

Who wants 5000 robots that can barely teleoperate to scoop popcorn? The problem is their current robots are useless.

Not a decade behind, more like a quarter of a century. They're not up to what Honda's ASIMO was doing in 2000.

Doesn’t matter - share price is up 2% in 5 days!

So managers can more easily imagine they are human slaves?

The robot could give you piggyback rides when you need to go somewhere?

It really sounds like he forced them to produce robots that don’t work in the hope they would get them going just to hype the stock, and as usual it’s now coming back to bite them because it doesn’t work, and they change to a „new model“ next year - so this years production is for the bin? They don’t seem anywhere close to launching, and are already at „Optimus 3“??????

>~~very ambitious~~ delusional FTFY

Everything Tesla does hits a wall. Self driving hit a wall LITERALLY. Space X rockets hit walls, literally. His robo taxi is a lie His cybertruck is a joke All his products are overpriced. Where are his solor roofs and powerwalls? His robots are a joke. His mission to Mars thing is a joke, he can't even get past the phase where the rockets dont' explode after take off. His tunnels are a joke, He wants to do futuristic tech with current tech that is not available to do it.

Theres a shortage of skinny guys to dress up like robots that also know how to dance?

All Optimus robots built today come with Full Self Robotizing Capability. They can't do anything right now, but an OTA update that'll make them work will be pushed by the end of next year. It'll be the greatest asset value increase in the history of humanity. Buying any other humanoid robot is like buying an actual human. I mean, it's fine if that's what you want, but you should go into it with that expectation.

Because it's going to be a sexbot, not something with any commercial applications

:clutching my pearls:

the idea behind a home robot is for tasks like cooking and cleaning rather than opening jars.

Following on the heels of the robotaxi launch, Optimus plans are scaled back to putting one million guys in robot suits by the end of the year

Omg you’re right. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if all it can do is give handjobs but they sell you a paid upgrade that will enable it to go to the office for you and do your job sometime soon…

Dudes will get prostate infections because they didn’t clean their Bots often enough.

This is the exact answer to the question nobody is asking cuz their dumb. Why would i want a robot for simple tasks like opening cans? I want one to mow my lawn and paint my house and fix my roof, walk my dog or protect my kids. Otherwise whts the point? That is worth 30k and competes with a car.

>Musk has claimed the robot could one day perform tasks ranging from factory work to household chores and has said it could eventually drive Tesla’s valuation to $25 trillion. Hahahahahahahahahhahahh!!!

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer Nazi

No shit.

They don't even have "in the hundreds" of working Optimus robots. They have ZERO. They just have buckets of parts they can sort of stitch together for demos and hype videos. Nothing is a real product. Nothing is anything they could sell...and never will be. It's all a ZERO, just like TSLA should be priced at, ZERO. Fuck this fraud of company. (Okay, maybe I'll give TSLA a 10 buck target because they have a few cars that do exist and a charging network that isn't hypothetical, but that's still being generous.)

Chinese companies are already surpassing Tesla with sub $8000 offerings with robots that appear to be almost as and in some cases more capable than anything Elons are capable of. And these are from small robotics companies too, nothing like the budgets Tesla has for these projects.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=segway_more_complicated_than_it_needs_to_be

I love how when you mention the things you/id want a real robot for are the things they say,” but thats not the real reason for robots!” Like wtf? Yes it is.

Musk has mastered the ability to mass produce a defective product and fill parking lots with it. I remember we made fun of China for having lots full of defective EV cars even a few years ago. Now, BYD is achieving dominance, and there are parking lots full of Cybertruck. Here in the West we can't do oligarchy right...

That wall's name? Easily observable and predictable reality.

I'm shocked!

Only 15yrs behind Boston Dynamics and Honda. They'll catch up by next week. /s

Impossible they were just months away !

Because it \*IS\* a needless complication. Specialized robots have been doing tasks far more complex than warehouse work for like 60-70 years. They just don't look like some sci-fi dork like Ol Musky's wet dreams.

I would say that anyone who has ever seen or heard of Elon would know it’s mostly hype and will take 10x longer to deliver than he says.

No shit, another stock pump adventure that will not see fruition.

The article says that Elon wanted to produce 5000 robots this year, but even if they are able to achieve that, that won’t improve the financial results, since there is no demand or confirmed buyers. In fact there are no specs and we don’t know what this robot is capable of doing and what it might be useful for. Similarly, the Robotaxi operation won’t help financials in the foreseeable future, since they haven’t even achieved full autonomy yet.

I agree with everything you said but the solar stuff has a compelling price, which is why it sells. The price per KWh for batteries is relatively low and the solar panels installs are competitive. This isn’t saying it’s a good product because it’s not. They use cheap products and installs that have single point of failure. Inverters are cheaply built with lots of failures. Old powerwalls are pretty good but powerwall 3 has a high failure rate. Mostly junk products with even worse customer service.

It doesn't matter how many they build if they can't do anything, and they can't.

And it was under remote control.

There is no need to produce more than a handful if they don't actually work.

I was pretty sure Optimus was going to be driving the cyber cab by now, dropping customers off to pick up their roadster 2.0s that were delivered by a fleet of Tesla semis.

>One key obstacle: hands. Sources told The Information that Tesla has struggled to engineer human-like dexterity for Optimus, which is critical for the robot to perform varied tasks. And that's why most other humanoid robots in development leave out human-like hands. Granted a robot without some kind of hand functionality is pretty useless but replicating human-like agility, grip performance and tensile strength is very expensive and difficult. Even if they get something that appears to work it will probably require constant maintenance and repair. Like usual Elon got way ahead of himself promising something before it was really ready.

>You're going to pay $30,000 for a home robot companion to do all the little tasks like fetching you a beer or opening a jar of olives? It will never be able to do those things.

It's not going to be anything. It's fake.

People still don't grasp that they're fake.

As pointed out in a previous comment the popcorn robot was controlled by a human remotely.

Translation: The stupid stock pump sucks

It won't be delivered at all. It exists only to appear on short videos.

I hate elon too but spacex is actually very successful, launching 87% of total mass to low earth orbit compared to the rest of the world's 13%. The starship, which is the bigger version, seems to have hit a wall though.

Stonks skyrocket!

Forget scaling manufacturing to 5,000 units but do they have one that actually works? Since it has the same fundamental reliance of “proven FSD technology” and doesn’t have Lidar. Unlike their cars where the owner can drive it / assist FSD that isn’t possible for a robot. And we can assume the promised retail price will be significantly higher than promised and one would assume the robot prices does not include the ongoing neural network subscription that will be needed for it to function.

Concerning

None of this is surprising or news. The only thing left his for mutual and hedge funds to wake up and start selling off this stock. The retail cult members never will until it’s down like 50% or more

Yes, I expect their robots to hit walls. And other fixed objects.

No it was controlled by AI

The state of California says Optimus has to do 10 million hand jobs before it can be certified for autonomous use that they charge for. Elon tried the friends and family pitch with a certified masseuse in the room with her finger on a kill switch, but California said no.

I worked in an IBM warehouse during college in the early 1990’s. We had robots that would move through shelves and bring out specific parts for shipment - 35 years ago.

Not sure about Optimus but with Waymo launching in NYC, ATL, DC, Miami and now Dallas, I think its pretty clear that Tesla has lost the robotaxi race. Tesla still has not launched in Austin and Texas will pretty much let you do anything to their citizens.

My bad, it would be impressive if the robot did it on its own

SpaceX is massively successful and practically has a monopoly right now.

> They're not up to what Honda's ASIMO was doing in 2000. I checked the old pictures of ASIMO - it was being teleoperated by TWO guys across the room. Tesla got it down to 1 teleoperator!

But their humanoids are doing a great job making popcorn in diners /s

Having trouble finding teleoperators?

Significant part of SpaceX success has been Elon mostly staying away from it.

I assume you meant this sarcastic?

Handjob from Optimus may result in something being yanked off by accident.

I meant it as you totally Maddoxed the solution

Very true.

Not true. It will disengage two seconds before it rips off, the user is responsible to immediately yank it back otherwise it legally counts as them ripping it off themselves.

It can't get the hands or battery life right.. and they tried to have it move boxes in the factory but it was way worse than humans.. meanwhile I just saw a chinabot that can change its own battery.  Even if there is a market for humanoid robots, seems like Tesla will capture almost no viable market share

Sadly, I don't know the meaning of the Words "to Maddox smth". What does that mean? Pop culture reference?

They hit a wall and many other objects too...

While Boston Dynamics and such are definitely making progress, there's a reason most useful robotics are things like arms on an assembly line. Like, observe everything a human fast food worker has to do. They're manipulating all manner of complex objects (often involving liquids), speaking, running after things, making people smile (well, the good ones), noticing things like a dropped wallet ... Many people can do the job, sure, but designing a machine that can do even a fraction of this stuff well is insanely difficult.

And using government money to fund it. Nasa is so bloated that if they gave Elon half of what they would spend at NASA he's already ahead huge profits.

Fuck office work I'm in it for the handjobs

He also tweeted that it will be serving you in the diner by next year but promptly deleted it lol

This article is from when the overly complicated highly hyped Segway was invented. Basically pointing out it was easy over complicated and useless.

But Musk Said a Potential of 30 Trillion in Sales soon with robots

This is missing the point - the prototypes from 10 years ago were already good enough in a physical sense, but no one was able to mass produce them at a reasonable price. But the software wasn't ready. It needed language capabilities so the owners don't need to program them with a computer, and it needed vision capabilities, and they were of course way too expensive even if they had language and vision. Today, a decade old robot with software advances is now 'actually capable' enough to do a wide range of domestic, factory and maybe even construction labor. I have no doubt in my mind that these will sell in whatever volume they can be purchased IF the software works and they're <100k USD.

It isn't in any way massively successful if judged against the things it was supposed to have done by now. In the time it has taken SpaceX to develop Starship and **attempt** its first orbital flights, the Apollo program had * developed the Saturn V rocket * built it * landed 12 humans on the Moon across 6 successful missions * decommissioned the program All of this was accomplished by NASA in just 11 years (1961 to 1972), while SpaceX began Starship development in 2012 and is still testing in 2025. Massively successful my arse.

They openly admitted it was remote controlled. Jeez.

What do you mean? Serving me one tub of popcorn and then breaking down permanently is massively useful!

Just add ~15 years of empty promises, and we'll be just a year away.....

Wasn't the solar roof product line discontinued?

Sarcasm tags ruin all sarcasm

And 90 percent of its launches are used for Starlink. Without that, there is not much Business in SpaceX. And looking at the High Cost of Starlink, its questionable that this will be a longer lasting cash cow for the Company. It’s also built more on hope than actual business.

No one as far as I am aware has humanoid robots that are good enough in a physical sense. We don't have the data on what breaks and what works when something like this is used in a dirty job site 80 hours a week for 6 months. How does it do with very hot work rooms or very cold environments. That stuff requires trial and error. You need prior using the robots to learn the lessons to completely redesign them. We just reached good enough with batteries and balance. Sensing still isn't there. Artificial muscles are real bad but probably good enough if it moves very slowly.

Gotcha, 10% rally imminent.

That was always a ketamine fueled project. I think there are some people with solar roofs but they increased the price by something like 3/4x and cancelled a bunch of people with orders. I have their solar and I’ll most likely pull it off the house when it fails. I couldn’t imagine being at their mercy when you need your roof replaced. It is already a nightmare to get them to fix anything.

Lol the Robot was dropping popcorn all over the floor in their "serving popcorn" video. They can't even get it right when everything is staged.

That’s just a safety eunuch inside

Do you think a Tesla robot could build a brick or concrete block wall? Edit: Or roof a house? Or harvest asparagus?

hearing the VP left made me put-curious last month. not that I ever valued Optimus as a product, but it seemed to be no longer a going "story" for Elon to pump this year. He tried anyway, LOL.

What’s the next fraud fake product after Optimus? Is this the end of the scheme?

No the solar roof thing was entirely a scam. They never had a product. Unless I'm thinking of something different.

You still holding your Nikola bags??

Truly useful robots are highly specialized, and therefore never look like humans. The one exception will be when someone finally develops a high-quality humanoid robot sex slave. Those will sell like hotcakes!

There are definitely people with solar roof. They were the product where the solar panels look shingles. There are videos out there of people reviewing them. They were something like 60-100k installs though.

Good point. I'm hungry, so that sounds like a good idea.

Why I said AI (Always Indians)

> I remember we made fun of China for having lots full of defective EV cars even a few years ago. > Now, BYD is achieving dominance, I see. You are explaining how filling parking lots is an important step towards dominance and Tesla is on the path to a $25 trillion valuation. I was puzzled by Musk's projection until I read your insightful analysis. Thanks. /s

So human they've got actual people inside them lol

Projected 25 trillion valuation will be achieved in 3.13 years with 2% growth every week.

I saw that some Chinese company is selling a basic humanoid robot for $6000. Probably not the highest quality, was previously a model for labs and classrooms. Still interesting though. Wonder how much capability it carries at that price?

Oh for Christ sakes. Does anyone actually think a humanoid robot is really realistic yet? It is not that hard to make a robot dance. Is actually pretty easy as all the moves are pre-programmed and that is attached to some relatively simple software that keeps it balanced and more or less in a certain area. Try and get it to wash a single glass though in a dedicated kitchen of their choice. Can not do a simple thing like that. And even if you did do some really complex programming to search out glasses and put them in a sink and wash etc, it would work in a single kitchen design. Get it to work on that one task in millions of kitchens across America, good luck. And this is just one task out of a thousand. And do not get me on the short battery life for any real work.

That's what I've been saying! I've been waiting for RealDoll™ to partner up with a robotics program somewhere. I think they've already added speakers and support for their version of a LLM inside the head!  But amusing as that is, no sex robot is going to be successful until some sort of tactile feedback is invented. Imagine trying to, ah 'adjust' grip strength on the fly, as it were. A leetle to hard and you'll have a "squeeze a toothpaste tube with the cork on to hard" situation.

This comment killed me. 😂

That's all true, but we should keep some perspective: The Apollo program employed ~400,000 people and NASA was 5% of the federal discretionary budget at the time.

I most def would not allow anything Tesla with a camera in my house.

Elon is basically a welfare queen all his companies are supported with taxpayer handouts. and that stupid carbon offset thing is a cash cow for him, like a welfare farmer being paid to destroy his crops or to not plant.

Hell fucking no lol

Add to the question of "where are" to the semi truck and roadster.

What do you think was the original plan for all the people put in alligator alcatraz? LOL

yeah unironically the most valuable part of tesla is probably their supercharging network. its definitely worth quite a pretty penny as it is actually very reliable compared to most other chargers. but damn near almost everything else tesla has is just a big fraud. solar roof/panels suck, are overpriced, semi hasn't even really been selling, cybertruck was an obvious failure, model 3 and y did have good sales until elon outted himself as a n\*zi but they kind of relied on credits, which are going away, and robotaxis/FSD are a big flop

There is no plan.

Then really what good are they.

Imagine the marks it would make on your floors as it moves it massive weight about. The neighbours six houses down will hear it clunking too. Unless of course it only has a tiny 4 minute battery.... As for the hands, Ive worked in robotoic gripping for years. Forget it. A multi-function human like hand with sensing feedback isn't happening. Not a good one anyway. It would wear out in days if it were as sensitive as a human hand. It needs amazing pressure control in two ways, it needs pressure feedback. It need heat sensors locally and from a distance, and the number of actuators you need to design and miniaturise is daft.

Well FSD is good at hitting walls, so why not Optimus too?🤣

Absolutely, but the point still stands that it shouldn't be added to the list with the rest.

We literally already have robots that can run warehouses, just look at any Amazon warehouse. They sure as shit aren't humanoid either because that's fucking dumb.

Optimus hitting a wall would be an achievement compared to where it is, which is still failing via teleportation while bolted to the ground.

The latest rockets explode BEFORE takeoff.

Where is the model 2?

Law of Robotics number 7: Under no circumstances should the cylinder be damaged. O

Powerwalls cost three times as much as my EG4s with lower capacity AND being locked into Tesla ecosphere... Total rip off!

Stonk +5%

Hitting a wall, locking you inside, then absolutely incinerating you!

At this rate of net profit they'll meet their current valuation in about 1000 years!

By jove, I think you cracked the code... Everything they have ever done had been to pump stock prices!

Tesla exemplifies the Dunning-Kruger effect in action—a company that began by repurposing a Lotus chassis and off-the-shelf batteries into an electric vehicle, believing it could tackle the rest as it went. While that approach worked for the first iteration, each subsequent leap has introduced increasingly complex challenges. Meanwhile, the company struggles to address its existing obligations and maintain the strategic focus it now critically needs.

I love the absurdity of his claim that you'll be able to send your Optimus robot to work a job and get paid, as if the company wouldn't just buy their own robots and cut out the middleman.

Looks like a DIY off grid type thing. I haven’t heard of any installers using this battery. I installed mine 5 years ago for about 8k for the first and 6k for the second. Of course that’s with 30% off. Looks like the battery market is evolving nicely and becoming way cheaper. Bad news for Tesla.

I had a friend that ordered a hot tub from wish, it was just $20! While it inflated, it wasn't capable of holding both a person and very much water, and it did nothing but hold the two.

Which decade old robot would you recommend?

And SpaceX has computers billions of times faster, as well as access to the knowledge of what's worked and not worked over the last 50+ years.

Even if they manage to produce _something_ that works, is a product and is innovative (and I’m deeply skeptical of all those points), this seems - at best - doomed to be another Segway. Which did not, as its creators envisioned - revolutionize transport and even urban planning. It was a technologically innovative gadget that didn’t really have many serious use cases where it made sense. It was a fad for a while, and the Chinese promptly made a bunch of cheaper competing gadgets, and one of the Chinese manufacturers ultimately took over the business. Moral of that story being: Even innovative tech that works isn’t a bigger product than its market, which is not big unless you do some job better than the competition. This is another product based more on what Elon thinks is cool rather than market and tech considerations. There are no doubt a lot of manual jobs that could be automated but aren’t for various reasons like cost-effectiveness. But Elon apparently thinks the main obstacle is the lack of a _humanoid_ robot - despite that being an obviously inefficient design. (I mean consider just the number of moving parts and thus power and maintainance required just to keep the thing standing up) If Optimus was an actual good robot design the industrial robotics giants would be doing it already. If the Tesla Semi was a good truck design, the truck giants would’ve copied it (or more likely, been first) This crap is the stuff you come up with when you want to pretend to be a visionary but have no vision. Recycling sci-fi ideas that never went beyond fiction because of their inherent impracticality.

There’s absolutely no market for humanoid robots. If they are to be successful, they will look nothing like humans.

And repairs will be the black hole that swallows any profits. They can’t keep up with car repairs, and now a humanoid robot? Hahaha!!

But… he’s a genius…

The solar roofs and powerwalls were the only thing I was ever interested in. I’ve only seen one Tesla roof, EVER! Now I want nothing from that moron.

Efficiency is subjective when it comes to goals of a humanoid robot program. First, they are seen as less alien because it's an acceptable shape making any interaction with humans more natural and efficient. Second, if the goal was to have a jack of all trades robot then it is an efficient design. Third, you could build thousands of models of specialized robots with 10s of thousands of parts that have no commonality or you can streamline your entire production chain and build one model maybe with some differing attachments. I would say that the semi design is not bad per se likely too futuristic but they can get away with this design and others can't or haven't. Trucks have engines that are huge and need to be placed somewhere with all the additional parts. the tesla semi doesn't really have that concern so they can manipulate the layout and design much more than Freightliner can. I dont like tesla or musk myself due to the deceitful promotional material and communications they have with shareholders.

The shingles at his demo on the set of Desparate Housewives were fake. I guess they made some real ones? Looks like only 3,000 were installed by 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/tesla-has-installed-3000-solar-roof-systems-in-the-us-study-finds.html

EG4 is gaining a pretty big following, mostly DIY and off-grid, but they are solid, with as good a warranty as Tesla but with better customer service and way less fascism. Lots of installers will build for them these days, mine included.

Tesla is a joke thanks to Muskrat...

Remember during Covid when Elon said Tesla would build their own respirators for patients? And then they found out it was really hard, so they slapped Tesla brand stickers on some Chinese CPAPs and called it good? Yeah, about where we are with Tesla robotics.

I work with robotics in an industrial setting. The idea of a humanoid robot is fucking stupid, and a PR stunt because most the general public doesn’t understand anything about robotics or automation. If you hate the battery life on your cordless vacuum cleaner, just wait until you see how much power it takes to operate a humanoid robot and all of its individual motors, joints, and the processing that coordinates them, let alone the array of sensors required for it to simply navigate its environment.

What Elion doesn’t realize is that just because you see in the movie doesn’t mean you can do it

Nice I’ll be looking for them on my next build.

The issue is that Tesla did a hybrid with linear and rotary actuators, but now they are likely running into supply bottlenecks because linear actuators need planetary gears. The planetary gears are difficult/slow to make and there aren’t many manufacturers. They also likely made the calculations needed to move the body much more complicated which slowed them down. Figure went full rotary so they aren’t having those issues and are starting to have some success. It’s not really an issue with humanoids but rather Tesla making mistakes.

I know that prices have been in flux on batteries since the tariffs hit, but I've had them for a year now and have had zero issues with them. My Solark inverters on the other hand... Yeesh.

Sex robots will come first. They’ll be programmed that way.

It’s not an even comparison to contrast the Cold War nasa effort with the private industry right now. SpaceX has brought in much lower costs per launch, reusable rockets etc. no other company has been as successful as SpaceX. I do think that the government should nationalize all space programs and not leave it to private companies.

If only the funding could’ve continued instead of dumping trillions on useless wars.

You can buy solar roofs with tiles like shingles now from China. Tesla doesn't produce them.

Oh Asimo was teleoperated too? These robot guys all seem to be scammers.

Tesla didnt make any, they have no such manufacturing facilities.

That's just money funneling (Starlink launches).

It's another failed business so yes it should. There is no money in private sector space launches but there are a lot of grifters looking to get rich off IPO's.

What are you even talking about?

It's nothing to do with the mechanical aspects.

>Today, a decade old robot with software advances is now 'actually capable' enough to do a wide range of domestic, factory and maybe even construction labor. No it isn't, you're delusional.

Of course it can't, whether teleoperated or not.

>I could see this being big news for corporations who operate warehouses because it would save a ton of labor They don't really work, they're just toys.

I'm pretty certain people are more accepting of robots that look nothing like humans. Factory floors have been filled with robot arms for decades.

>I can see it being helpful to handy capped people that actually need help. And it could walk your dog and pickup the poops. It's a fake product. It will never be able to do any of those things.

I bought a toy robot that could dance 20 years ago on Amazon

Mechanical and electronics is the easy part. Having a humanoid robot do something useful is currently impossible. In a few decades, things might change, but the fact is that humanoids have very narrow application and are very expensive due to how many motors and how many motors just sustain other motors instead of just doing work. Factories are filled to the brim with robot arms, and robot arms may ALWAYS be the solution of choice of factories, like, forever. It's what experts have told Musk since he first announced Optimus.

Clients will gladly pay for cells that costs literal millions, if it makes that back in a few years or less. Optimus? Even at impossible price like 10 000 $ it's just a luxury toy that's too big and dangerous to be around.

Something that isn't explored is Musk and billionares are obsessed with Humanoids? Same with rockets, they dream of escaping a catastrophe they cause. Same with bunkers and mega yatch for the same reason. Billionares don't feel like mingling with the rest of us. Billionares can't wait to automate the humans they need to rely on to make their wealth.

So it's a gimmick? lol

It exists to appear on videos to pump Tesla stock. That's literally its purpose.

You forgot Hyperloop/Boring company. That's when I woke up to the fact that Elon is a fucking fraud/moron. Reddit was still very drunk on Elon back then. But I'm a chem eng who designs above and below ground pipelines and that whole idea was biggest crock of shit I've ever heard. The kind of thing we came up with after hitting a bong in college. He's the reason we can't have nice things, like reliable high speed trains built on well-established, decades-old technology. Even Maglev is becoming increasingly attractive.

The thing is, Asimo was in fact a very capable technology test bed for its time. And aside from trotting it out to show that they were at the forefront of technology, Honda never really acted with any major conceits that Asimo was more than that. It's also why 'look, we have a humanoid robot, and it can dynamically balance!' isn't the amazing thing that all these companies tout it to be. It's been, what, almost a decade since Boston Dynamics showed off it's robot doing sick backflips? Any decent research university with basic fabrication capacity could crank a respectable humanoid robot these days. Hell these days, you can build a, admittedly VERY limited, small humanoid robot in your own garage using plans available online and open source software libraries. Sure, your efforts wouldn't hold a candle to Boston Dynamics or even Tesla, but you could do it, all on your own, for about as much money as a project car.

>The thing is, Asimo was in fact a very capable technology test bed for its time. Yeah you're right there. I just hadn't twigged that it was remote controlled as well.

I mean, not gonna lie, I'm kinda surprised nobody in the humanoid robot industry isn't trying to make their bots look like Bamax or those little bunny ear guys from Zenless Zone Zero. It wouldn't make them better robots. But they'd at least not look like some pathetic middle aged billionaires idea of cool shaped into the general dimensions of a man. And really, some silly little padded fella that can take your toddler abusing the hell out of it and maybe play some very simple games with kiddies would at least be something resembling a use case. Like an interactive stuffed animal.

To be honest, SpaceX very much seems to in a Kingdom of the Blind situation. The space launch industry had been in dire and decaying straights for years before they came onto the scene, and part of what allowed their success was picking up a lot of knowledge transfers from legacy talent before retirement and death lost us the tacit knowledge for space launch entirely. That does not mean that SpaceX is extraordinary in absolute terms, only be comparison to the competition. And the competition is Boeing . . .

Honestly, I'd rather build one of those kinda doofy open source 3D printed robots in my garage. It would be no more useful than Optimus, but at least it would be an interesting project that would probably teach me a variety of skills, and it would be a heck of a conversation piece.

Please don't insult the Greendale Human Being. They're trying their best!

>yeah unironically the most valuable part of tesla is probably their supercharging network. its definitely worth quite a pretty penny as it is actually very reliable compared to most other chargers. It's actually worthless as it's a money loser. They have to pay huge costs for the capacity that they don't make back in charging fees. People don't understand how it works when you hook up to the grid as a large user.

In the movies they have magic power sources that work forever. Real life, as you say, is different.

Solar roofs with normal solar panels are real, not the fake solar shingles though.

I dunno, the limitations of AI seem to be rearing their head already. Far from replacing humans in white collar tasks, there's some evidence that they actually reduce productivity while obfuscating responsibility, and thus the ability for a business to improve efficiency. Robots are likely to be the next place VC pumps money in order to keep up tech hype.

Right. If I was going to buy something like that I'm sure I can just order it from China.

That's because 'fake' is a tricky word here. On the one hand, Optimus is not fake. The robots emphatically *exist*. They are capable of walking around. Picking up objects. The physical chassis is, at least superficially and under teleoperation, capable of doing what appears to be useful things. But on the other hand, Optimus is fake, because in a real world scenario, without a human operator, or a carefully curated environment to operate in, performing a careful choreographed task, with copious editing, they're little more than glorified animatronics. The motors cannot sustain continual strenuous activity (apparently they're not even all that physically strong). The battery life would be abysmal without tethering. And the hands are apparently hideously failure prone. And of course, there is no autonomous AI capable of guiding them through even the most rudimentary tasks with an acceptable degree of reliability. Most people are still not used to the latter circumstance because most people have not interacted with an Optimus is person only through curated videos of events mostly attended by Tesla fans.

Yep. It’ll be named XOrangefuka project. First owner: DJT. First casualty: DJT.😂

Yep that's very well put. Elon has been grifting like this for decades.

I upvoted both because lots of people knee jerk down voted.

An even 'robots', in the sense of what people imagine as industrial robot, i.e. big articulated arms, are often times inferior to other pieces of machinery at specific repetitive tasks. Sometimes you just need a machine that can cut and fold 10,000 little cardboard boxes an hour.

"Bet". To anyone with a brain this was going to fail spectacularly. It's all just hype to keep the stock up.

I am sure you have seen the 3d printed concrete houses. I am not sure how that is any less labor intensive than just putting up forms and pouring the walls. I saw that in the new neighborhood near me. There would be the slab. They would wait like a month for it to cure. Then you would walk by and all the wire would be up in the shape of the house all floppy and you think that wire is floppy it is amazing something that floppy strengthens concrete. Then the next day the forms are up. Then the third day the forms are gone and all the exterior walls are there. With those 3d printed interior walls you have to do a lot of extra work to get the wires and pipes in the wall. Makes no sense to me.

They don't use any rebar in the 3d printed homes. They'll crumble away in a few years.

Why can't we Just sit back and enjoy (another) train wreck of overhyped then underperforming

Haven’t you heard of the new compact pick up?

I have, let's add that one to the list of future broken promises right now.

Yep! Humans make specific tools/machines for specific tasks because the human form is REALLY versatile, however that versatility leads to inefficiency for specialized tasks. There is an excellent reason that your clothes washer doesn’t look and function like a person using a wash board in a river, or your dishwasher doesn’t look like a person scrubbing dishes in the sink.

You should read the book Concrete Planet. Rebar is why modern concrete structures don’t last. Roman concrete has no rebar and it lasts a thousand years. Modern structures maybe last 100 because the rebar starts to corrode.

”may” be hitting?

This is exactly why the stock will go up tomorrow.

Build your own robot!!!

Agreed. The mechanical and electronics bits Tesla is pretty good at. There wasn't much supply chain for EVs, Tesla designed and build a ton of their components in house. A lot of things are expensive because they are produced in low numbers. It's a chicken-egg problem until someone does it themselves for their own product. You see a lot more vertical integration in first-time-mass-production products. Running neural nets at a fidelity high enough to navigate a 3d environment and do tasks dynamically (versus being pre-programmed) is beyond the technology anyone has been able to demonstrate. It's probably not impossible, but it's without question extremely difficult. I'm not confident in it based on how self driving is going: roads have more rules than "make me dinner".

You can't build structures like we build without rebar. I know all about the Romans, I've visited their most famous concrete building the Parthenon. For a building like a house/villa they would have used bricks or stone.

Seriously. Zilch. Nobody wants to fucking live on Mars either.

With Blackjack and Hookers!

VC’s don’t look for places to burn money. They look for opportunities to make money. Humanoid robots is not the thing.

A grift for quick investors' money.

All the people that lose their jobs because of AI are totally going to buy these robots.

When I looked into this a few years ago, I figured it would cost me 3 batteries at 30K to run most of my house when we lose power (which happens relatively often), and that was after incentives. We have a larger house with an in law apartment, so 4 heat pumps, 2 fridges, well pump, etc. What they were going though was to have the electric company put power into your battery so that they could then withdrawal it during times of high power usage. After 10 years, that was supposed to mean the cost of your battery was near zero. Not sure how that worked out in reality.

Oh man who could have guessed this.

May be? May be? Anyone with a brain two years ago would have seen it was behind a wall. A wall of lies and deception that everything the company does,including customer service is.

Maybe they should teach the bots to pick fruit and veg. If they have a freak out, they'll be safely in the middle of a deserted field. That must have some kind of market potential. Tesla, please send me money for my idea.

It had extremely basic autonomous functions. Walk in a line, turn around and walk back afaik

It probably overheated. Most smaller battery powered robots have massive issues with heat

The US DoD will be booking a massive amount of SpaceX capacity for its upcoming radar and image sensing Constellations

Hehe now that CAFE fines are zero'd out.... He's Fucked on selling carbon credits. Even before that, Ford and GM EVs were massively dropping the number of credits he was selling

I truly doubt that after the Fallout between Musk and Trump.

Doesn't matter, it's a massive part of the DoDs sensing capabilities upgrade. That said it'll be finished in 2-3 years so... Then SpaceX is SoL

Forget the robot, that's all i need

I disagree. There is a huge variety of tools and environments designed for the human form factor. I foresee something more like Star Wars where there are many kinds of robots, some of them roughly humanoid.

More like hitting a steep slope. The last 10% of significant projects takes at least 90% of the total effort. This is why Elon Musk is betting the farm on AI. It is the only way the required advances for FSD and Optimus can be accomplished. I would not bet against him, but the apparent lack of ethical guardrails on his strategies is concerning.

If it performs as well as the cars your house will probably burn down in weeks

Those Tesla robots look spooky as hell. I want one of those in my house about as much as I want a ventriloquist dummy sitting in a chair next to my bed.

Yeah, you see it just like Ron Howard did 50 years ago…

Agree. The only saving grace is the supercharger network. No clue why nobody else even comes close to the reliability and price. Literally everyone else just sucks (including Rivian which I drive)

Literally or figuratively?

Behind what curve? There's no humanoid robot on the market that will clean your house. If there is, then share a link where we can buy it. And no one cares if something is in constant r&d or used for other reasons. People want things that the consumer can buy. That's how companies make money, and investors make money. Not based of theoretical stuff that is built in a lab, and stays in a lab.

You're not living in the real world if you don't believe robots will be doing most of the chores humans do one day. It is inevitable.

Remember when everyone said that Tesla would be a flop too? How did that work out? Musk has some of the greatest engineers in the world working for him, and unlimited funds. I'm pretty sure that he's going to do everything he said he would. The robotaxis are going to take over Uber. No one is going to pay $30 for a 15 min uber ride when they can pay $6 for a robotaxi. Musk will have these things running in every city, and there will be very little labor cost, and the cost to the consumer will be much less. Common sense always wins in the end.

Anyone who is middle to upper class would buy a humanoid robot to do tedius things like dishes, take out the trash, do the laundry, make the beds, and things of the sort. We still may be a while away, but there's no denying that robots that do these types of things are inevitable. Even a 40k investment for tech like this is nothing if it will last 7 years. That's basically like having a 24/7 maid.

Remember what the macintosh looked like 30 years ago before you were typing on your laptop today? Remember dial up internet that took 3 minutes to load aol.com? We live in a society of immediacy, but how quickly people forget things. Do you think we'll still be driving electric cars with only a 300 mile range 10 years from now? People today have no long term vision anymore. That's what living in a "tech age" will do to you.

I would say you are not living in the real world if you \*do\* believe robots will be doing more of the chores humans do one day. "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I think, some day soon, there will be a very strong backlash towards all of this, even if it is "inevitable". How rewarding is life if you don't do anything yourself?