Tesla Optimus Line Starts at Fremont in July 2026

What is Tesla doing with its Fremont factory?

Tesla is converting its Fremont, California factory's Model S and Model X production line into a facility for building Optimus humanoid robots. CEO Elon Musk confirmed the move during Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call. The last Model S and Model X vehicles will be produced in early May 2026, and robot production is targeted to begin by late July or August 2026.

Optimus is Tesla's humanoid robot, designed to eventually work inside factories and perform physical tasks.

When does Model S and Model X production end?

The Model S and Model X will end production in early May 2026. The Model S ran for 14 years at Fremont. The Model X ran for 11 years. Combined, Tesla produced over 610,000 of these vehicles. In recent years, Fox Business reports, Musk described the California factory as the future home of a "1 million unit per year line" for humanoid robots.

Sales of the two models had fallen to roughly 30,000 annually — a fraction of the line's 100,000-unit capacity, according to Electrek.

How fast is Tesla converting the production line?

Once the final vehicles are assembled, Tesla will dismantle the entire production line from the ground up. That starts with smaller parts production equipment and works forward to final assembly, which Musk said will be torn down in May. New production equipment for Optimus — including all wiring, communications, and testing infrastructure — will then be installed.

Musk called the four-month turnaround unprecedented:

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"If we were able to go from stopping production on one line, dismantling that entire line, reinstalling a whole new line, and turning that on in a matter of four months, that is an insanely fast speed. I don't think any other company on Earth has ever done that before."

How fast will Optimus production ramp?

Musk was direct: initial output will be "quite slow." He declined to give any production target for 2026. The core challenge is that Optimus has over 10,000 unique parts — none of which have been through mass production before.

"It will move as fast as the least lucky, slowest, dumbest part in the entire 10,000," Musk said. "It is impossible to predict these things."

He said initial robot skills will be "simple skills in the factory" before expanding from there.

Here's what we know so far about the timeline Tesla has publicly committed to:

What happened to Tesla's earlier Optimus targets?

This is a significant step back from prior commitments. In January 2025, Musk predicted Tesla would build roughly 10,000 Optimus robots that year. Tesla missed that target entirely. By January 2026, Musk admitted that zero Optimus robots were doing "useful work" in Tesla's factories.

More than 1,000 units of the Optimus Gen 3 robot have been deployed internally across Tesla's own facilities for testing, according to KuCoin News.

When will Tesla reveal the Optimus Gen 3?

The Gen 3 reveal was originally expected in Q1 2026. Musk pushed that timeline again — this time to "probably middle of this year." He cited competitive concerns, saying rivals "do a frame-by-frame analysis whenever we release something and copy everything they possibly can."

Competitors in the humanoid robot space are active. Boston Dynamics is shipping its electric Atlas humanoid to Hyundai factories this year, with plans for a production facility capable of 30,000 units annually. Figure AI, valued at $39 billion, has an active pilot at BMW. Agility Robotics' Digit is already deployed in customer warehouses, including at a Toyota plant in Ontario.

The broader race for humanoid robot manufacturing capacity is accelerating across the industry, much like the infrastructure buildout seen in AI compute over the past two years.

What is the second Optimus factory?

Beyond Fremont, Musk confirmed Tesla is building a second Optimus factory at Giga Texas. Production there is expected to begin around summer 2027. That facility is on the north campus expansion and is expected to eventually produce the higher-volume Gen 4 variant. KuCoin News reports Tesla has set a target capacity of 10 million units per year for the Texas line.

The scale of this industrial shift — from premium EVs to robot production lines — mirrors the kind of resource reallocation seen across the tech sector as companies bet on physical AI systems.

Tesla's next confirmed milestone is the start of Optimus low-volume production at Fremont, targeted for late July or August 2026.