Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements

Tesla’s pivot from making electric cars to humanoid robots is facing challenges because of complex robot hands and disgruntled employees pushing back against training their robotic replacements. The struggle to scale up production comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet the company’s future on AI and robotics. As someone who frequently makes claims that fail to materialize, Musk has described the Optimus humanoid robot as potentially “the biggest product ever” during Tesla’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call.

But he also acknowledged that making an autonomous humanoid robot capable of handling many different tasks is “one of the hardest things to solve”—and now extensive reporting by The Information has revealed multiple complications that Tesla is trying to tackle while developing general-purpose robots and scaling up for mass production. Tesla’s Fremont factory in California has already stopped making the Model S sedan and Model X SUV as of May 2026, with the company switching both line workers and engineers over to working on Optimus, according to The Information. But the newest version of Optimus, called Optimus V3, has proven challenging from a development and manufacturing standpoint.

The Information’s reporting describes troubles with getting production line equipment to precisely line up components, along with limitations in running the production line too fast. Tesla has reportedly scaled up production to hundreds of robots per week—but the company is targeting production numbers surpassing 1,000 robots per week by the end of 2026. The automotive industry and other industries have already been using specialized industrial robots, such as robotic arms, for decades.

Tesla and many other automakers and robotics companies are betting that humanoid robots coupled with advances in AI models could eventually unlock general-purpose robots that can handle a diverse array of tasks while fitting more seamlessly into human workplaces. It’s no secret that making robotic hands capable of doing delicate manipulation tasks on par with human hands is a huge engineering challenge. The complexity of such robotic hands has translated into more production headaches for Tesla as human workers must manually assemble Optimus hands and forearms that together have more than 100 small components such as screws.