Why Elon Musk Says The Tesla Bot Is More Important Than Tesla Vehicles!

What if the key to humanity’s future lies firmly in the hands of a robot? Elon Musk seems to think that it does. The Tesla CEO has been talking a lot lately about his new project Optimus, also known as the Tesla Bot. A product concept for a fully autonomous, humanoid robot that would integrate seamlessly with the people of the world and begin to take over many of the boring, repetitive and dangerous jobs that are fundamental to our economy.

One of the striking things that Elon Musk has said is that there will be a point in the not so distant future that the Tesla Bot overtakes the Tesla vehicle as the company’s primary source of revenue. And even beyond that, this robot could become the primary source of global labor in a new economy where droids become the working class and humans are elevated.

If that all sounds familiar, it’s because this scenario has been used as the premise for decades worth of science fiction stories, from I Robot, to the Matrix, to Alien, to Blade Runner, the Terminator… And in most of those stories, the whole robot thing doesn’t work out so well for the humans involved.

Can Elon Musk defy all of these dire predictions and follow through on his promise to save the world with a legion of robotic humanoids? Or is Tesla doomed to become the real life embodiment of the Tyrell Corporation? Let’s talk about it.

Can Robots Save the World?

So, the Tesla Bot, or Optimus if you prefer, is embodied by this ultra sleek design that looks like Timothee Chalamet wrapped in a skin tight SpaceX flight suit, wearing a Daft Punk helmet.

The whole point of Optimus is that it will be a fairly unremarkable robot in terms of physical capabilities. And this is part of Elon Musk’s safety plan. At 5’8” in height and 125lbs in weight with a top speed of only 5 mph, Elon says that the average person should be able to overpower or at least outrun a Tesla Bot. This is in stark contrast to a product like the Boston Dynamics Atlas that can effortlessly do parkour and gymnastics and would probably rip a human being in two if ever given the opportunity. The Tesla Bot isn’t designed to be impressive, it’s designed to be practical - Elon has referred to it as a ‘worker droid’.

At the recent Cyber Rodeo that kicked off vehicle production at Tesla’s Austin GigaFactory, an event centered around Tesla vehicles and vehicle production, Elon still chose to talk specifically about the robot, saying, “It will upend our idea of what the economy is… it will be able to do basically anything humans don’t want to do. It will do it. It’s going to bring an age of abundance. It may be hard to imagine it, but as you see Optimus develop, and we will make sure it’s safe, no Terminator stuff, it will transform the world to a degree even greater than the cars.”

Of course, the true secret to a safe and effective robot isn’t so much in the design as it is in the programming. And this is the area where Tesla really excels - the company’s experience with real world artificial intelligence is what makes Tesla the front runner to implement a real, artificial human. The same technology that they are currently using to make robot cars that can navigate city streets alongside human drivers will go into producing robot workers that can seamlessly integrate with the human economy.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, Elon was able to speak very candidly about his approach to the Optimus project, saying, “With respect to AI and robotics, of course, I see things with some trepidation. Because I certainly don't want to have anything that could potentially be harmful to humanity. But humanoid robots are happening. Look at Boston Dynamics. They do better demonstrations every year. The rate of advancement of AI is very rapid.”

So, Elon is saying that artificial intelligence and robotics are going to happen with or without him, but he wants to take the lead himself because he doesn’t trust anyone else to do it safely. In theory, the rules for operating a safe robot should be simple to implement, but equally simple to abuse.

If we fall back to some of our favourite science fiction, we have Isaac Asimov’s work in ‘I, Robot’ - the book, not the Will Smith movie, it’s a fine movie, but the original book is able to take a much more thoughtful look at sentient robots by examining the idea through a series of short stories. It’s really old, but it holds up. Anyway, Asimov identified the three rules of robot safety. Rule number one: You do not talk about.... No. Rule number one is: Don’t harm a human or allow harm to come to a human through inaction. Rule number two is: Always obey the orders of a human unless they conflict with rule number one. Rule Number 3 is: Self preservation, as long as it does not conflict with rule number one or two.

We can basically apply a similar set of guidelines to what Tesla is doing with the Full Self Driving car. We know that rule number one for Tesla Autopilot is don’t hit anything or let anything hit you. I don’t know that Elon has ever specified rule number two, but we can deduce that it must be: obey all traffic laws, unless that involves hitting something. And rule number three is probably: Don’t do anything that would make the passengers uncomfortable, while obeying the law and not hitting stuff.

We have yet to see a case of Tesla’s FSD Beta going rogue and killing a bunch of people - knock on wood - so, in theory, this should all come together the way that Elon has envisioned it, no danger to humanity.

The Rise of The Tesla Bot

So there are really two paths that can be taken with automation - we can either try to replace every human task with a robot, or we can replace the human with a robot that can do every task.

When speaking with Business Insider, Elon explained his solution pretty well, saying “Humanity has designed the world to interact with a bipedal humanoid with two arms and ten fingers. So if you want to have a robot fit in and be able to do things that humans can do, it must be approximately the same size and shape and capability.”

And this is also going to be the key to driving mass production that will eventually lead Tesla to a point where they sell more Bots than vehicles. If we remember what Elon was saying at the Giga Texas opening last week, he said that he wants to ramp the Model Y production line in that factory up to capacity of 500,000 vehicles per year - the highest volume single production line in the world. And then once that is achieved, that’s when he’s going to start building Cybertrucks and Roadsters and all of the other things. You maximize production efficiency when you specialize in building one product. 

So by making Optimus a general focused humanoid, Tesla can pour all of their efforts and resources into one unified design on one production line that could go far beyond half a million units per year - just think about how simple it would be to assemble a Tesla Bot compared to a Model Y? 10x easier? Maybe even 100x easier to build? If we apply the same level of productivity from a Tesla vehicle line to a Tesla Bot production line, we easily get run rates in the millions per year.

And that’s the way that the Tesla Bot is going to succeed, it needs to become a mass market product - and that means it needs to be affordable.

Obviously the market for autonomous humanoid robots is still non-existent, but we can at least get a feel for it with the robot dog from Boston Dynamics called Spot. This unnerving, little 4 legged contraption can be yours for the low price of just $74,500 - at least that was the price it was at launch in 2020, it’s probably like double that now. Anyway, that’s a ton of money for a very small robot with very limited use cases.

How much would a Tesla Bot cost? Most of the major components in the Optimus design are already being used in Tesla’s mass market vehicles, the Model 3 and Y - Optimus would have the same brain as the car, what Tesla calls a Full Self Driving Computer. The Bot would use the same digital cameras to see. The same robotic actuators that steer the car during Autopilot would power the robot’s arms and legs. The same batteries and charging system would work in both cases. The Tesla Bot would just require a whole lot less of the same stuff that’s already going into a 50 or 60 thousand dollar car.

So it wouldn’t be very expensive to make, but how much would the robot buying consumer be willing to pay? Well, if Boston Dynamics can charge 75 grand or more for a robot version of Lassie, then Tesla can easily go triple that price for a fully functioning humanoid, that’s more than fair.

But it’s probably unlikely that Tesla would even try to sell Optimus anytime soon. They could do the most good by showing the world what the Tesla Bot is capable of by integrating them into the Tesla GigaFactory or the SpaceX Starbase. As Elon has said himself, “if we can’t find a use for it, then we shouldn’t expect that others would.” Most of us have already assumed that these Bots will be the first to set foot on the planet Mars, long before any human being.

Once people see Optimus walking around on the surface of Mars and going about its job of building the first Martian colony ahead of human visitors, then Elon is going to be able to sell these things for whatever price he wants. If Logan Paul will pay $5,000,000 for a Pokémon card, then people will pay more than that for a personal robot butler.

But I don’t think Elon will charge $5,000,000, or $1,000,000 or even $100,000 for a Tesla Bot. Because it doesn’t appear that Elon is doing this just to get even more rich than he already is, which is pretty damn rich, but he’s putting so much into the Tesla Bot project to try and make the world a better place. And I also think that’s why he’s bringing such a sense of urgency to the project. 

On an earnings call in January, Elon said, “In terms of priority of products, I think actually the most important product development we’re doing this year is the Optimus humanoid robot.”

Elon has expressed several times in recent months that he hopes to have a prototype version of the Bot operating this year. And at the recent Cyber Rodeo event, Elon said that he thinks there is a shot at being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year. 

Obviously this is the kind of thing that Elon says all of the time, and is almost never right about. He said that Cybertruck would be available in 2022 - it isn’t. He also said that the Roadster, the Semi and Robo Taxi would all be real products by 2020 - they weren’t. 

But we also don’t often hear Elon talk about a product with the same kind of significance that he has been giving to the Tesla Bot so far this year. In the January call, Elon said, “I think Optimus has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time. If you think about the economy, the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. So, what happens if you don’t actually have a labor shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point. That’s what Optimus is about. So, very important.”

So, it’s obviously more to him than just a cool, robot product that will make a bunch of money - this is about solving a very big, global problem that Elon takes very seriously.

Lastly we can see the company itself is taking this project seriously by hiring new talent to come work on the project with Tesla. Over the past few weeks we have seen more and more jobs pop up on the Tesla career page that are related to the humanoid robot project. These include some really interesting titles, like Deep Learning Engineer slash Scientist for Tesla Bot. Or this one, Motion Planning and Navigation for Tesla Bot that has a pretty wild job description, reading, “Tesla is on a path to build humanoid bi-pedal robots at scale to automate repetitive and boring tasks for manufacturing slash logistics. Core to the Tesla Bot, the motion planning stack presents a unique opportunity to work on state-of-the-art algorithms for motion planning and navigation culminating in their deployment to real world production applications.”

Tesla says that the role is going to participate in the development of an “overall humanoid software architecture.”