Earlier this year, news emerged that Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was being converted from a facility manufacturing its Model S and X EVs to focus on building its Optimus humanoid robot instead.
It was the latest sign yet that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was making good on his threat of abandoning car sales in favor of both AI and the company’s bipedal, black-masked assistant.
But progress has been slower than he’d like. While the company managed to ramp up production of its Optimus robot from a few dozen in Q2 to several hundred a week last month, as The Information reports, it’s running into some serious roadblocks that could endanger its ambitious plans of manufacturing more than 1,000 of them a week before the end of this year.
For one, most units aren’t actually being shipped to customers and instead are being used for internal testing and data collection. They’re also not being treated as general purpose machines, still being confined to complete simple, repetitive tasks.
