Elon Musk has once again pushed back the debut of the highly anticipated Gen 3 Tesla Optimus as he hypes the AI-powered humanoid as the key to “universal high income.”
During Tesla’s Q3 2025 earnings call, Musk said the third-generation Tesla Bot will be unveiled sometime in early 2026. It’s the latest in a series of timeline extensions for the project that Musk insists will be Tesla’s biggest product ever by far.
Musk framed the delay as a matter of refinement, saying the Optimus team is “getting very close” to a production-ready design as it works through complex engineering challenges. As he’s previously said, the delay is largely due to the humanoid’s highly dexterous hand, which has a reported 22 degrees of freedom (DoF) and can nearly match human capabilities.
The EV maker has been developing its flagship humanoid since 2021. The third-gen iteration was expected in late 2025 but Musk now says Tesla will show it off “probably in February or March 2026,” with limited production beginning that year. Once Optimus V3 is revealed, Musk said it’ll seem like a human in a robot suit. The
“You’ll have to poke it to believe it’s a robot,” he said.
According to Musk, Tesla engineers continue to test second-generation Optimus units at its Palo Alto engineering headquarters, where they reportedly walk the halls autonomously. Musk says the robot shares much of its AI stack with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, describing it as part of the manufacturer’s “real-world AI” platform.
Musk has a reputation for being overly optimistic about the project. He previously projected Tesla Bots would be in limited production by 2024. Heading into 2025, he said up to 10,000 Optimus robots would be manufactured by year’s end. He later reduced that by half before pushing production into 2026.
As of now, Optimus V3 production is targeted after the first quarter of 2026. Musk said Tesla engineers are holding weekly “Friday night Optimus” sessions to refine the robot’s design and solve manufacturing challenges.
Musk expects the Optimus program to scale dramatically once they land on a final design. He outlined a roadmap beginning with 1 million units per year, followed by future generations reaching 10 to 100 annually. He said the humanoid could ultimately operate continuously, tethered for constant power, to deliver up to 5x the productivity of a human worker.
As he’s previously said, Musk believes Tesla’s combination of AI software, advanced electromechanical engineering, and mass-production chops give it a unique advantage over competitors.
“There is no existing supply chain for humanoid robots,” he said, explaining why the manufacturing process is so complicated.
Tesla is heading into 2026 with intensifying competition from well-funded US startups like Figure AI and 1X Technologies, which are both aggressively moving their humanoids toward mass production. Figure founder Brett Adcock has downplayed the difficulty of manufacturing humanoids, comparing them to electronics rather than vehicles.
There’s also a slew of relatively low-cost Chinese humanoids emerging from perceived leaders like Unitree Robotics, UBTECH Robotics, LimX Dynamics, AgiBot, and EngineAI. In the past few months, there’s been a surge of highly dexterous end effectors, like Sharpa’s SharpaWave and Wuji Tech’s Wuji Hand, which boast similar dexterity as the Gen 3 Optimus hand.