Tesla’s Manufacturing Hangover Is Steering Musk Into Robotics

The electric carmaker’s 6.7% global sales drop last year shows it used just 70% of its plant capacity—a level comparable to traditional auto rivals. Things could get worse in 2026. Read more: [https://go.forbes.com/SVZCsr](https://go.forbes.com/SVZCsr)

No, what's 'steering Musk into robotics' is the need for a new grift to keep the share price artificially inflated.

That's insane. What if Enron had just shifted into being a copper miner or some other random thing.

Optimus is worse than figure. I've evaluated both myself in person. Optimus seems like a toy, and not a very good one.

He should transition to contract manufacturing with the unused capacity.

Why change when it's not broken? \-Elon Musks' grifting decision tree

“Steered”

Who's willing to bet that all this ends with a government bailout? Trump was willing to use USG funds for his hedge fund buddies in Argentina, why not divert some of the firehose to his propaganda chief? After all, what's a few billion dollars between friends?

Nationalize SpaceX

Build licensed BYDs for Americans lol

Yeah, after promising that the 2020 roadster is going to be able to fly, they’ve kind of tapped out the insane promises to make on the automotive side before even the biggest believers start expecting to actually see a prototype. Robots offer a blank slate of lies to tell.

I mean obviously this. Robotaxi was the big one but they are getting their asses handed to them by like 5 other companies in that space so next is robotics

Elon ‘I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth’ Musk

Seeing crap like this only further lowers my opinions of the media. It's all so superficial and only shows how little research they really do.

The only thing I've seen him steer into is oncoming traffic, but dancers in neoprene suits hardly qualify as robots.

Why not, he's already copying the Bre-X business plan.

FSD is steering him into oncoming traffic.

Given that NASA has not gotten their money's worth, they have every moral right to seize Space X assets as compensation.

isnt robots passe by now? elons working on flying cars

Articles like this that get halfway there annoy me. There is a bunch of information about how Tesla is a failing company, how auto sales are declining, how it is unclear if or when they will turn around, how there is no evidence that Optimus is anywhere close to being a product that can do anything useful, much less something that anyone would buy. And then the author says all this bad news is the reason why Tesla is transitioning to robots, and "Musk says" they will make 10,000,000 of them. Which is obviously nonsense. The story, as pointed out below, is that Tesla as an auto company is in serious decline, and there are other products that Musk (and the market, to be fair) predict will be insanely profitable but they don't currently exist and (here is the important part) may never exist.

Robots powered by lewd and disgusting grok. Yeah I want that around my children🙄.

Think their Trademark name for Cybercab, has been suspended. Didn’t file the paperwork in time and someone else, trademarked it. Another brilliant business move from Elon. Hopefully the other company charges him hundreds of millions if Tesla wants it. lol.

Where they also get their asses handed to them.

Well it works well in conjunction with a VR headset, so we’re just gonna have to by meta oculus to use our robots to clean for us. To think I hated serving popcorn before, now I can do it slower while sweating in a headset. Only haters don’t desire this breathtaking future

With their reputation for quality, would you trust them to build something?

The idea that they're gonna compete with Boston Dynamics is insane

Where do you think the can gets kicked after autobots and AI fail to justify the share price? Neurolink in 50% of skulls by next year?

Yup. The robotics angle is pure grift

Or the whole of China

If that's true, it's truly scary. Have you seen the build quality of Teslas ?

Come on, they would be pardoned or got a cabinet position today

Oh ya what happened with that? Didn't he promise some James bond car on rogan that was going to be unveiled before 2025 year wbd?

Waymo is winning in deployments. Nvidia just came out with their own version which doesn’t need lidar and uses a thinking model. They’ll be able to scale it like crazy with synthetic data.

Probably even more robotics companies poised to outdo them too.

It’s cute that people think they will sell these to the middle class to be butlers. When they will be a much better and loyal robot army for when civil unrest hits the fan because of their destructive attack against society. The robots will make sure the dirty crowd doesn’t get through the gates. “Universal high income”, ROFL

I hate musk as well as anyone else, but that's improved a good bit since the Model 3 first came out.

If at first you don't succeed, lie lie again.

They can't even make the car making robots work in their favor, and that one isn't even some new ground breaking tech.

It's just too much money. Tesla's valuation is $1.5T, more than the rest of the global car industry put together. The US defense budget is less than a trillion; global defense spending is less than 3T. Volkswagen's market cap is \~50G with revenue of \~300G.

Did anyone see the presentation of Atlas yesterday? The Hyundai/Boston Dynamics-Robot? It absolutely annihilates Optimus. So the grift is already dead in the water.

Unless you count all the double sided tape failures resulting in parts flying off the Cybertruck...

How does this differ from Tesla's approach? I am no expert, but have come to understand that the reason behind the large gap between Tesla and Waymo is due to the fact that Waymo uses lidar. How would a camera based approach be on par with lidar?

I don't understand why everyone is looking at Optimus like the end all and be all. Like, haven't we seen times and again robots doing stuff and things from robot dynamics doing crazy stuff? I gathered that the main problem was not the robot or motion per se but "how do we make it work in a real life enviroment" and World models seems to be the answer... but tesla should do what, make Optmius great at driving Tesla? The robot battle seems to me it's not as "easy" as the Ev battle.

How had I not thought of that! If I was King of Robotics the first thing I would do is fix the factory robots. I remember when the Tesla factory was supposed to be the most advanced facility in the world with little human involvement. If they can't get a robot arm bolted to the floor to work, how are they going to get a humanoid robot to work?

Teslas robots aren't anything special though

The world's most amazing product demo that never happened. The best product is no product

Um critical thinking isn't required for hype

Optimus is 100% Grade A bullshit, nothing more.

As soon as one Optimus comes off the line, it immediately goes to work building more of itself. Hyper-exponential!

Why clean when you can leave your house dirty and escape into VR?

So did the event even happen where is was suppsoed to be shown? I figured they would show either an existing quad copter or just have some plastic model based on some unrealistic drawing and have made up stats behind it (like the battery swap where no battery was swapped and it was all just a car sitting there with a timer graphic behind it).

News articles don't need to be editorials. They presented you the information and trust you to reach a conclusion. I feel like social media has degraded the public's media literacy. Articles don't have to spoon feed you what to think.

Puppetry, it's steering Musk into Puppetry. And Jim Henson's Creature Shop has been doing better work for decades now.

To be fair, Germany between World War I and two had universal high income as well.

Fair point. But my issue is that I think the main claim of the article is wrong. I don’t think that reduced auto sales are causing Tesla to move to robots. Rather, reduced auto sales necessarily will result in lower profits and cash which will slow their move to robots, as they have less money to invest in the needed R&D.

Simulation is often no as accurate as the real world, so someone like Tesla would use a fleet of vehicles to provide some real world grounding. Nvidia had the same issue with robots. Sim wouldn’t be able to account for everything, so you pair it with real world robot data, which is why you see humanoid robot trainers wearing VR glasses to collect data. Nvidia however wants to scale based on its chips rather than real world fleets, so they’ve been investing heavily in fixing this. Nvidia cosmos is basically a simulated real world anchor to compare your sim programs like Issac sim against. So they may be able to take a smaller sample of real world data and then scale based more on cosmos and computer chips. If it turns out to be a better approach Nvidia will beat Tesla because they are lightyears ahead on simulation. At least that’s my basic understanding of it.

It is almost like traditional auto manufacturers, who have been doing that for over a century, actually base their plans on the real world demand for their products.

Ah yes Tesla's famous high quality manufacturing is in high demand /s

Watch, like the Semi, He’ll sell 10 robots to Frito lays under strict NDA to keep the grift flowing.

~~Roadster prototype demo by end of 2025, guaranteed.~~ Roadster prototype demo on April 1, 2026, guaranteed!

Interesting article. wasn't aware that toyota got a $50m stake in tesla in return for letting them use their factory. unfortunate for toyota that they didnt hold that stake until today but nobody could've seen this massive bubble coming. for anyone curious that didnt want to read the article, it was a 3% stake which would be worth about $41 billion dollars today if they held it all.

Robotics was before Cybertaxi. It’s gone nowhere hard. Optimus is the CyberTruck of the robotics world.

data centers in space was the latest one

I can't believe after promising that the roadster would fly, the press and all the people who preordered went "wow this is amazing" instead of "ok, now it's a confirmed scam"

When the cold gas thruster claim was made, I remember reading an engineer’s breakdown of how big and heavy the system would need to be to shave 1s off the 0-60 time. If I remember correctly, the thruster system would need to be at least as large and heavy as the car itself.

Data can't reason its way through something it can't see or know about. Anyone trying to use software or AI to drive is going to kill a lot of people.

Damn, I think you’re onto something. It sounds like a SNL parody commercial, but clean house Augmented Reality VR glasses sound nice to me. It may keep me from killing my kids. Probably would need some trick for trip hazards though.

Real estate in Mars

What makes this even more embarrassing to fElon is that some Chinese company made an EV with something similar but better. This MFing car can create so much down force, it can exist upside down without moving.

Now Musk buddy is NASA head, is it not ?

So he’s steering into a double ketamine fuelled manufacturing hangover… makes perfect sense/s

In Australia small mining companies sometimes switch to 'tech'. They licence some worthless university research project and spend 10 years milking shareholders before going broke.

Literally nothing since. He was clearly just making up shit as they discussed it.

Nor are cold gas thrusters legal on street cars so a non starter anyway

BYD's Xpeng spin off has jumping cars. I've seen Chinese EVs with deployable drones. Chinese are starting to erode future promises he can make.

If their robodog is anything to go by then whatever they make the Chinese will get to mass producing it quickly. Loads of those robodogs around now with various uses but it isn't Boston Dynamics selling them for the most part.

Dang I thought he would at least have someone in a transformers costume pop out and dance or something

Not that anyone wants a Eldof robot lurking around probably running on vitamin K … the creep factor

yeah April 1 was pulled out of his ass at the November bag-holders meeting

yup, Soylent Green future basically

Toyota sold them the factory super-cheap since it was a stranded asset after NAFTA. I guess they figured Tesla would be an interesting place to do off-the-balance-sheet R&D, like how Xerox invested in Apple prior to the Mac.

Yeah but nobody has a commercially viable product there so they can at least keep lying and saying Optimus is the best because no one is actually evaluating it. Plus, the whole industry is premised on the notion AI will get so good it can autonomously control the robots to do any task we want them to, and the reality is that in the industry Tesla is the only one with enough infrastructure to be able to even pretend to be working towards that goal. The rest are focused on building better mechanisms, which they are indeed kicking Tesla’s ass with. Don’t get me wrong, I think the whole industry with Optimus in particular is kinda doomed, I’m just explaining why Elon can get away with pretending to be ahead in that sector.

Musk in 2017: In a few years, robots will move so fast you'll need a 'strobe light' to see them

Every time one of Elon’s crazy promises fails, he makes a new one to excite investors. I remember him promising to design AI chips better than Microsoft and Nvidia.