Elon Musk says Tesla's Optimus production ramp will be extremely slow due to entirely new manufacturing processes

Robotics is hard.

Every unit must behave reliably after it leaves the clean geometry of the production line.

Cars repeat a narrow task inside a heavily engineered road system, while humanoid robots are being asked to generalize across spaces that were designed for human bodies, human judgment, and human tolerance for failure.

A robot must survive contact with kitchens, stairs, tools, dust, people, hesitation, bad lighting, dropped objects, and all the small chaos that factories spend decades trying to remove.