Tesla will be in low production development of humanoid robots for the company’s internal use by the end of next year, CEO Elon Musk announced on Monday (22 July). 

Musk wrote on his social media platform X that Tesla’s humanoid robots should “hopefully” be in high production in 2026.

Tesla’s Optimus, which was called Bumblebee at the time, was first unveiled in September 2022.

At the beginning of 2024, Tesla released a video of its second-generation robot folding a T-shirt. 

Musk previously said that he believes robot sales could make up a larger percentage of Tesla’s sales than other products, including its cars. 

“I think Tesla is best positioned of any humanoid robot maker to be able to reach volume production with efficient inference on the robot itself,” Musk said.

According to research and analysis company GlobalData, the overall robotics market will be worth $218bn by 2030.

Isabel Al-Dhahir, senior analyst at GlobalData, previously said: “Advances in AI have enabled the development of robots, allowing them to become highly complex products rather than the stand-alone, fixed-function machines they used to be.

“This, in turn, has increased the number of roles that robots can perform. Cloud computing is central to this development to enable sensing, computation and memory to be managed more rapidly, securely and at scale.”