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Elon Musk says Tesla Optimus robot should cost ‘less than half of a car’

Elon Musk says that Optimus, Tesla’s general-purpose humanoid robot, should cost “less than half the price of a car”.

A few months ago, Tesla unveiled “Optimus Gen 2”, a new generation of its humanoid robot that should be able to take over repetitive tasks from humans.

The new prototype showed a lot of improvements compared to previously underwhelming versions of the robot, and it gave some credibility to the project, which was laughed off by many when first announced with a dancer disguised as a robot for visual aid a few years ago.

Tesla believed it to be possible by leveraging its AI work on its self-driving vehicle program and expertise in batteries and electric motors. It argued that its vehicles are already robots on wheels. Now, it just needs to make them in humanoid forms to be able to replace humans in some tasks – primarily repetitive and dangerous tasks.

In a previous update on Optimus, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the “Optimus stuff is extremely underrated.” The CEO said that the demand could be as high as 10 to 20 billion units.

He went as far as “confidently predicting” that Optimus will account for “a majority of Tesla’s long-term value.”

The CEO sees everyone having a Tesla Optimus robot at home on top of them taking over a lot of manufacturing and service jobs.

For that to work, they will have to be somewhat reasonably priced. Musk had previously said that he thinks it’s possible to bring the price below that of its vehicles, which start at around $40,000.

Now, Musk says that he believes Tesla can bring the price of its Optimus humanoid robot down to “less than half of a car”:

Top comment by MarkusB

Liked by 28 people

Sorry if I don‘t seem to keep up with Elon’s predictions about what will determine Tesla’s long term value.

First, I understood it was scaling M3 and MY production, where weak end-of-quarter deliveries would makeTesla’s value “collapse like a soufflé”. Then it was the energy business which was going to be “bigger than the auto part”. Then it was FSD: a failure to achieve it would “send Tesla’s value to zero”. Then it was AI in general. So now it’s Optimus. Cool! Can’t wait to learn what the crucial piece of the valuation-puzzle may be next week.

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Tesla’s average car sale price globally last year was just over $45,000, and the average new car sale price in the US is about $47,000.

This means that Musk sees the cost of a humanoid robot as being between $20,000 and $25,000.

There’s no clear timeline for Tesla to bring the robot to production, but Musk said in 2022 that it could go into production as soon as 2023 – though that didn’t happen.

Tesla has been listing more jobs for its robot program lately, including jobs related to supply chains and manufacturing.

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.

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