Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, is now on the path to becoming its first trillionaire. Tesla’s shareholders recently approved a massive pay package for the CEO, including some $1 trillion in stock options. But the payout will happen only if certain targets are met—including Musk’s successful deployment of 1 million Optimus robots.
Named after a Transformers character, because of course it is, Optimus is a humanoid machine that’s supposed to be able to complete boring and dangerous work in place of humans. The robot was unveiled in 2021, when Tesla held an “AI Day” event detailing its future plans. Musk declared then that Tesla needs to be “much more than an electric-car company,” and to that end, it would combine its advancements in chips, autonomous driving, and batteries into this robot.
Optimus would be able to do factory work, sure, but that’s just the starting point. Over time, Musk has said, Optimus could unleash unprecedented economic and societal change as a source of tireless, unpaid labor that can be trained to do anything. “Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store,” Musk posted on X last month. Maybe Optimus will provide better medical care than a human surgeon can, he’s suggested, or eliminate the need for prisons by following criminal offenders around to prevent them “from doing crime” again. He has even said that the robots could power an eventual Mars colony.
This is the kind of hyperbole the world has come to expect from the guy who’s said for a decade that millions of fully driverless Tesla EVs are coming “next year.” Optimus was actually just a person in a bodysuit when it was first unveiled. And although Tesla has developed it into an actual robot since then, it has still relied on human assistance to fulfill basic tasks, such as serving drinks. We’re a long way off from the dream.
Yet there is something real buried underneath Musk’s bluster. It’s not just Tesla: Many automakers are trying to pivot to robotics. Rivian, the electric-vehicle start-up, just announced a spin-off company called Mind Robotics. Hyundai is so bullish that it bought the robotics giant Boston Dynamics a few years ago, and it already has robot dogs spot-checking cars at a U.S. plant. Xpeng, a fast-growing EV company in China, recently debuted humanoid robots.
There is, in fact, a lot of overlap between modern cars and robots. Robots need batteries similar to the ones inside EVs—you wouldn’t want Optimus stinking up a room with a gas engine. The auto industry has already invested billions of dollars in advanced sensors, chips, and AI for driverless technology. Just add arms and legs, and you basically have a robot. “The auto industry is adjacent to so many of the areas of expertise that are required for robotics,” Sterling Anderson, General Motors’ chief product officer, told me. “Robotics and autonomous vehicles, they both operate in the same worlds.” Automakers also have access to factory data that can be used to train robots, much as all of the writing on the internet has fed large language models. “Nobody else has access to that,” Jiten Behl, a former Rivian executive turned venture capitalist who helped bring about the carmaker’s robotics spin-off, told me.
Today’s car factories are already full of industrial robots; the auto industry buys more of them than any other sector. Articulated robotic arms assemble, weld, and paint various parts, and automated platforms transport them to different workstations. Some carmakers have even dabbled before; Honda began developing bipedal robots in the 1980s and unveiled a childlike walking-and-hopping prototype, Asimo, in 2000. That program was retired a few years ago, but amid the wider AI boom, humanoid robots may now unlock even more automation. “All those tasks today that those robots cannot automate, you have thousands of factory workers doing,” Behl said.
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Profit margins are thin on every car sold, and cutting down on labor costs—or eliminating them outright—would be a big help to carmakers’ bottom lines, especially when it comes to competition from China: U.S. and European manufacturers already pay thousands more in labor costs per vehicle than their Chinese competitors do. Companies such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz say they are developing robots with humanlike reasoning that are entirely focused on making cars more efficiently—that innovate the act of manufacturing while also working around the clock, with no paycheck.
Of course, much of the auto industry has consistently struggled to make battery-powered cars. Replacing humans with battery-powered robot workers may be even further outside its area of expertise. One big issue is something Musk calls “the hands problem”: It’s shockingly hard to get a machine to replicate the dexterity of human digits. (There’s a reason the robot that Chipotle unveiled in 2023 could make only a burrito bowl or a salad, not a burrito.)
[Read: The American car industry can’t go on like this]
Still, for Anderson, Behl, Tesla, and the others, the convergence between robotics and cars is already well under way. A car is “not often described as a robot, but that’s what it is,” Anderson said at a recent event in New York City where GM previewed an electric Cadillac that lets you stream Love Island while it drives you down the highway. Take that to its logical conclusion as cars become more and more automated, and you simply have a robot that rides on tires instead of walking on legs. The ultimate goal for that isn’t far off from what Optimus is supposedly trying to do: guard your life, and save you time. Maybe then you can finally give that vegetable garden the attention it deserves.
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