10 ms·

The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybert

The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybertruck will be canceled. None of the Tesla plants will be making robots at any scale for many years.

phendrenad2 9mo ago
Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- bdangubic 9mo ago
  they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company
- phs318u 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - epicwynn 9mo ago
    We can kill robots without remorse, and they're likely going to be worse than a human agent at most things for a few years. Not a bad timeline for them to waste their time on.
    - moogly 9mo ago
      What if they're private property though? Historically, the state has always valued private property over human lives, so the response could be even more brutal.
    - jayd16 9mo ago
      Except we're the ones that pay for robots, and the cleanup and the settlements.
    - poink 9mo ago
      As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
- testing22321 9mo ago
  IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them. It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50? Place your bets!
  - adastra22 9mo ago
    Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?
    - testing22321 9mo ago
      Not mostly, no. But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line. Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.
      - adastra22 9mo ago
        Tour Toyota. It’s be lights-out except for all the people there on tours to see the mechanical marvels.
        impure-aqua 9mo ago
        That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together. Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.) But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting. Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated. Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch. It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
- laughing_man 9mo ago
  I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
  - Animats 9mo ago
    A reasonable guess. As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos. This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle). Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader. Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody? I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.
    - TOMDM 9mo ago
      > Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI. My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far. Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
      - Animats 9mo ago
        > Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news. BD did most of their locomotion using classical dynamics and control theory until a few years ago. So did Honda, with Asimo. I did some of that in 1994.[1] Early thinking revolved around landing on the "zero moment point". There's a landing point which, if hit, maintains speed and balance. To speed up, you aim for slightly beyond that point; to slow down, aim for a nearer point. That was Asimo. You could push that concept to the level of BD's "Big Dog", and later, their smaller dogs. Even pre-calculated flips were possible. But that approach gets you rather clunky motion. The next step was to use some machine learning to tweak the control system parameters. That works, but you don't get overall coordination of all the joints. That only started to appear as machine learning systems became powerful enough to take on the whole problem at once. Hard problem. Took over three decades to get decent humanoid control. Now everybody is doing it. You can be too early. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU
- _ea1k 9mo ago
  S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k. It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.
tempestn 9mo ago
Agreed, let alone 1M units a year!
- tombert 9mo ago
  My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist. The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
  - arw0n 9mo ago
    It is like me at the climbing gym: "This problem is too hard for me, let's work on a harder one instead, then I at least look cool while failing." "Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".
    - autarch 9mo ago
      Nice. I think my new climbing routine will be to just look at the 5.13 and mime moves from the ground for an hour, then go home.
      - disillusioned 9mo ago
        I _could_ flash this V12 but what would be the point?
  - mraniki 9mo ago
    Interview in Davos. The “right” has the same touch than the “just” here: > MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month. Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0
sampton 9mo ago
I can't remember when was the last S/X refresh. It's nuts they just let it go stale and shut the factory down.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.
  - totetsu 9mo ago
    Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.
    - WalterBright 9mo ago
      And what would he do with them?
      - lazide 9mo ago
        The same systems had labor board whistleblower info. Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
        Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078 The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-social-security-privacy https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026 Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321.197.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577... > The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group. “Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum
riffraff 9mo ago
Do you expect the demand for Tesla's robotaxis to be high? I don't see it.
- lacker 9mo ago
  If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.
  - riffraff 9mo ago
    that's why I said "Tesla's robotaxis". They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.
  - Deklomalo 9mo ago
    The question is what 'high' means in context of revenue. Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left? Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber. And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like. For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.
    - mustyoshi 9mo ago
      >Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber. This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.
groundzeros2015 9mo ago
Why would cybertruck be cancelled?
- trgn 9mo ago
  it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day. and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.
  - AlexandrB 9mo ago
    In what world is the Cybertruck not "oversized" and "bloated". It has roughly the same footprint as an F150.
    - trgn 9mo ago
      it's its own design, doesn't look like a fat truck, more something new and big
    - burnte 9mo ago
      Modern F150s are also bloated and oversized.
  - jefftk 9mo ago
    > people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.
    - 9mo ago

phendrenad2 9mo ago

Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bdangubic 9mo ago
they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company
phs318u 9mo ago
[flagged]
- epicwynn 9mo ago
  We can kill robots without remorse, and they're likely going to be worse than a human agent at most things for a few years. Not a bad timeline for them to waste their time on.
  - moogly 9mo ago
    What if they're private property though? Historically, the state has always valued private property over human lives, so the response could be even more brutal.
  - jayd16 9mo ago
    Except we're the ones that pay for robots, and the cleanup and the settlements.
  - poink 9mo ago
    As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
testing22321 9mo ago
IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them. It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50? Place your bets!
- adastra22 9mo ago
  Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?
  - testing22321 9mo ago
    Not mostly, no. But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line. Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.
    - adastra22 9mo ago
      Tour Toyota. It’s be lights-out except for all the people there on tours to see the mechanical marvels.
      - impure-aqua 9mo ago
        That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together. Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.) But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting. Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated. Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch. It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
laughing_man 9mo ago
I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
- Animats 9mo ago
  A reasonable guess. As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos. This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle). Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader. Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody? I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.
  - TOMDM 9mo ago
    > Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI. My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far. Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
    - Animats 9mo ago
      > Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news. BD did most of their locomotion using classical dynamics and control theory until a few years ago. So did Honda, with Asimo. I did some of that in 1994.[1] Early thinking revolved around landing on the "zero moment point". There's a landing point which, if hit, maintains speed and balance. To speed up, you aim for slightly beyond that point; to slow down, aim for a nearer point. That was Asimo. You could push that concept to the level of BD's "Big Dog", and later, their smaller dogs. Even pre-calculated flips were possible. But that approach gets you rather clunky motion. The next step was to use some machine learning to tweak the control system parameters. That works, but you don't get overall coordination of all the joints. That only started to appear as machine learning systems became powerful enough to take on the whole problem at once. Hard problem. Took over three decades to get decent humanoid control. Now everybody is doing it. You can be too early. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU
_ea1k 9mo ago
S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k. It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.

tempestn 9mo ago

Agreed, let alone 1M units a year!

tombert 9mo ago
My dad found it extremely amusing that Elon said "we just have to solve the 'AI problem' and we'll have robots doing shopping for us", or something like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but that was the gist. The word "just" is doing a lot of work there. Going by that logic: We "just" need to figure out cold fusion to have effectively infinite energy. We "just" need to develop warp drives to travel across the galaxy. We "just" need to figure out the chemo problem to cure cancer.
- arw0n 9mo ago
  It is like me at the climbing gym: "This problem is too hard for me, let's work on a harder one instead, then I at least look cool while failing." "Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".
  - autarch 9mo ago
    Nice. I think my new climbing routine will be to just look at the 5.13 and mime moves from the ground for an hour, then go home.
    - disillusioned 9mo ago
      I _could_ flash this V12 but what would be the point?
- mraniki 9mo ago
  Interview in Davos. The “right” has the same touch than the “just” here: > MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month. Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0

sampton 9mo ago

I can't remember when was the last S/X refresh. It's nuts they just let it go stale and shut the factory down.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.
- totetsu 9mo ago
  Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    And what would he do with them?
    - lazide 9mo ago
      The same systems had labor board whistleblower info. Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
      Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078 The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-social-security-privacy https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026 Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321.197.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577... > The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group. “Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum

riffraff 9mo ago

Do you expect the demand for Tesla's robotaxis to be high? I don't see it.

lacker 9mo ago
If they actually worked right now, the demand would be high. Demand is certainly high for Waymos. Even if they worked worse than a Waymo I think the demand would still be very high. But it's hard to tell if (or when) it will work well enough to actually be a real product.
- riffraff 9mo ago
  that's why I said "Tesla's robotaxis". They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.
- Deklomalo 9mo ago
  The question is what 'high' means in context of revenue. Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left? Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber. And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like. For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.
  - mustyoshi 9mo ago
    >Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber. This just isn't true. If you're a woman, choosing a slightly more expensive robotaxi over a ride share where you might meet your end is a valid choice.

groundzeros2015 9mo ago

Why would cybertruck be cancelled?

trgn 9mo ago
it's one of their models i would like for them to succeed the most. americans love trucks (especially where i live), and the impact of electric truck replacing ice ones on the gestalt of the neighborhood is significant, no noise, no fumes. people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too. my neighbor bought one, and it's night and day. and oddly enough, while i kneejerk hated it at first, the design has grown on me, something genuinely different, playful. much rather see a parked cybertruck than yet another oversized bloated "regular" truck.
- AlexandrB 9mo ago
  In what world is the Cybertruck not "oversized" and "bloated". It has roughly the same footprint as an F150.
  - trgn 9mo ago
    it's its own design, doesn't look like a fat truck, more something new and big
  - burnte 9mo ago
    Modern F150s are also bloated and oversized.
- jefftk 9mo ago
  > people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.
  - 9mo ago