In the past few months, Tesla has increased the production of its Optimus humanoid robots by about tenfold. It sounds like a mass-production inflection point has arrived, but people familiar with the project say the company is still far from large-scale, reliable production. Last month, Tesla built only a few hundred robots per week. Between that and Musk’s blueprint of producing one million units per year lies an entire supply chain.

The bottlenecks are very specific. First, the robotic hand is too complex—dexterous hands are among the hardest pieces of hardware to crack for humanoid robots, with many joints and high precision requirements. Second, the automated production line hasn’t been running smoothly; many steps still rely on manual debugging. Third, suppliers can’t keep up—yields and delivery schedules for key components limit the overall production cycle time.

Tenfold growth: the engineering validation is accelerating, but producing a few hundred units per week is still small-batch pilot production. As humanoid robots move from the lab to the factory, the real threshold isn’t making a single unit—it’s bringing large-scale (10,000-unit) consistency, yield, and cost down to levels that are commercially viable. This is also why the experience of whole-vehicle manufacturing can’t be directly transferred to a robot production line. Tesla is taking this step faster than people imagined, and it’s still far from the finish line.