Tesla to Begin Full Production of Optimus Robots in Late 2027 at the Earliest, Elon Musk Says

05:49 AM EDT, 10/22/2026 (MT Newswires) -- Tesla (TSLA) Chief Executive Elon Musk expects the company to begin full production of its Optimus robots in "at least a year," he said in an analyst call on Wednesday, according to a transcript. "We've started, like, what I'd call early production on a high-volume line in Fremont," he said. Musk said that the growth of Optimus will be an "S-curve" which initially "has a shallow slope and is somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product." But he said that "the vast majority" of its one-million unit production line is already in place. "I would expect that it takes us probably at least a year, maybe a little longer to get to that annualized rate, to get to 20,000 units a week," he said. "This is just fundamentally because there's still parts of the design that are changing." Shares of Tesla were down 5.5% in Thursday's premarket trading.