Elon Musk says the Optimus robot will be more important to Tesla than cars or autonomous driving

Last year, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s strangest new product: a humanoid robot that could be used in factories to perform repetitive, tedious, or dangerous tasks for humans. “Optimus,” or Tesla Bot, seemed a distant concept at the time, or even a very elaborate joke of the CEO, but he claims that he expects the robot business of this kind to surpass the business that the company has. in the automotive field.

Robots could soon be Tesla’s main business

But it seems that the Optimus robot could actually be the future of Tesla, despite the fact that it was built on the development of electric cars and, more recently, on the realization of autonomous cars through Full Self-Driving software. Not long ago, at the inauguration of the Tesla Gigafactory in Texas, Musk suggested that the Tesla robot could hit the market very soon, in 2023. However, the CEO is known for incorrectly estimating delivery times, repeatedly postponing both Tesla projects. , as well as SpaceX several years ahead of its original projections.

“I was surprised that people don’t realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program.” said Elon Musk in a conference call with investors. “The importance of Optimus will be evident in the coming years. Those who look ahead, or look and listen carefully, will understand that the Optimus business will ultimately be more valuable than the car business and will be more valuable than FSD. ”

Probably the skepticism of the public comes either from the fact that Elon Musk exaggerated in previous statements, regarding the products to be launched, or the delivery time. Then, the fact that Musk did not have a working model when revealing the project, but only a man dressed in a suit and a few slides describing the technical capabilities of the robot, contributed to the lack of confidence in the “Tesla Bot”. But there is also the precedent of Boston Dynamics, a company bought by Google and then sold to Hyundai, which worked for 25 years on the development of robots before having a commercial product on the market in the form of Spot.

source: TechCrunch