Tesla’s head of Optimus humanoid robot, Milan Kovac, announced that he is leaving the automaker after 9 years.

It leaves just as CEO Elon Musk claimed that the humanoid robot is going to make Tesla a”$25 trillion company.”

Electrek first reported on Tesla hiring Kovac back in 2016 to work on the early Autopilot program. At the time, we noted that the young engineer had an interesting background in machine learning.

He quickly rose through the ranks and ended up leading Autopilot software engineering from 2019 to 2022.

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In 2022, he started working on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program.

Late last year, he was promoted to Vice President in charge of the complete Optimus program, as CEO Elon Musk began to tout the program as critical to Tesla’s future.

Musk claimed that Optimus could generate $10 trillion in revenue per year and make Tesla a $25 trillion company. These claims are largely unsubstantiated as the humanoid robot market is still in its infancy.

Most market research firms currently estimate the size of the humanoid robot market to be in the low single-digit billions of dollars, with growth projections through 2032 ranging from $15 billion to $80 billion.

That would represent impressive growth, but nowhere near what Musk is touting to investors.

Today, Kovac announced that he is leaving Tesla for personal reasons:

This week, I’ve had to make the most difficult decision of my life and will be moving out of my position. I’ve been far away from home for too long, and will need to spend more time with family abroad. I want to make it clear that this is the only reason, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. My support for Elon Musk and the team is ironclad – Tesla team forever.

Kovac has been regarded as one of the top new technical executives at Tesla, which has seen a significant talent exodus of top engineers.

The company has made progress with the Optimus program over the last year. Still, many have been skeptical, as Tesla has been less than forthcoming about using teleoperation in previous demonstrations.

Kovac is not the only Optimus engineer to leave Tesla recently.

Figure, another company developing humanoid robots, has recently poached Zackary Bernholtz, a 7-year veteran at Tesla and most recently a Staff Technical Program Manager.

Electrek’s Take

This is a significant loss for Tesla. Kovac was one of Musk’s top technical guys and literally the head of the program he claimed would bring Tesla to the next level – although I think most people have been understandably skeptical about these claims.

I’ve been bullish on humanoid robots, and I could see Tesla being a player in the field, but it’s nowhere near the opportunity that Musk is claiming, and there’s also plenty of competition with no clear evidence that Tesla has any significant lead, if any.

In China, Unitree has been making impressive progress, and it is already selling a humanoid robot.

In the US, Figure has also been making a lot of progress lately:

I think it’s a smart space to invest in for manufacturing companies like Tesla, but there’s going to be a lot of competition.

It’s too early to say who will come out on top.

As for Kovac leaving, I’m sure his personal reason is correct. However, we often see people claim that and then they quickly turn up at another company.

If he believed that his product would soon become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, I doubt he would be leaving, but you never know. 9 years at Tesla is some hard work and it’s impressive for anyone. Congrats.

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Tesla being in the crosshairs of the Musk/Trump divorce, EV sales in Europe, a new Hyundai electric minivan, and more.

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America voted for inflation, and it got it today, as republicans running the Department of Transportation bowed to their oil donors and finalized a rule to make your cars less efficient, thus costing America an extra $23 billion in fuel costs.

Sean Duffy, who was appointed as Secretary of Transportation on the back of the transportation “expertise” he showed as a contestant on Road Rules: All Stars, a reality TV travel game show, announced the rule on his first day in office.

His original memo promised a review of all existing fuel economy standards, which require manufacturers to make more efficient vehicles which save you money on fuel.

Specifically, the rule finalized today targets the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard (CAFE), which was just improved last year by President Biden’s DOT, saving American drivers $23 billion in fuel costs by meaning they need to buy less fuel overall. The savings from the Biden rule could have been higher, but were softened from the original proposal due to automaker lobbying.

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Sierra Club’s Transportation for All director, Katherine Garcia, responded to the new Duffy rule’s finalization with a statement:

“The Trump administration’s deregulatory, pro-polluter transportation agenda will only increase costs for Americans. Making our vehicles less fuel efficient hurts families by forcing them to pay more at the pump. This action puts the well-being of our communities at risk in every way imaginable. It will lead to fewer clean vehicle options for consumers, squeeze our wallets, endanger our health, and increase climate pollution. The Sierra Club will continue to push back against this administration’s dangerous clean transportation rollbacks.”

The rule had been filed on Mar 16, and review was completed yesterday. Oddly enough, the rule was filed as “not economically significant,” a categorization for government rules that won’t affect the US economy by more than $100 million – which is less than the $23 billion that the DOT’s own analysis says the new rule will cost Americans.

Both we at Electrek and the Sierra Club had a meeting with the government to point out this inconsistency, but both of our meetings were scheduled for today and were cancelled late last night. There seems to have been no public comment period regarding this change in regulations.

DOT isn’t done raising your fuel costs, it wants to do more

Duffy’s original DOT memo says he wants to target all similar standards, rather than just the improvements made last year – so in fact, our headline likely underestimates how much higher Duffy wants to make your fuel costs.

A recent analysis by Consumer Reports shows that fuel economy standards are enormously popular with Americans, and that maintaining the current standards could result in lifetime savings of $6,000 per vehicle, compared to current costs, by 2029. And that fuel economy standards implemented since 2001 have already saved $9,000 per vehicle. Now, imagine the net effect of removing all of those standards, which Duffy has directed the DOT to examine doing.

As we’ve already seen to be the case often with Trump’s allies, the DOT memo lied about its intentions. Just like EPA head Lee Zeldin, who said he wants to make the air cleaner by making it dirtier, Duffy, says he wants to make fuel costs lower by making them higher. The memo attempts to argue that your car will be cheaper if it has lower fuel economy, even though it wont, because buying more fuel will mean you spend more on fuel, not less.

Unequivocally, over here in the real world, dirtier air is actually dirtier, and higher fuel costs are actually higher.

The result of this increased fuel usage also inevitably means more reliance on foreign sources of energy. The more oil America uses, the more it will have to import from elsewhere. Other countries looking to exercise power over the US could certainly choose to raise prices as they recognize that the US has just become more reliant on them.

And, as we know from the most basic understanding of economics, adding more demand means prices will go up, not down. Reducing demand for a product in fact forces prices down, and EVs are already displacing oil demand which depresses oil prices.

Meanwhile, Biden’s higher fuel economy standards would mean that automakers need to provide a higher mix of EVs, which inherently get all of their energy to run not just domestically, but regionally as well. Most electricity generation happens regionally or locally based on what resources are available in your area, so when you charge a car, you’re typically supporting jobs at your local power plant, rather than in some overseas oil country.

But these are just attempts to follow-through on the dirty air, inflation causing promises that the republicans made during the campaign. Mr. Trump signaled he intended to raise your fuel costs (and costs of everything else) during the 2024 US Presidential campaign, when he asked oil executives for $1 billion in bribes in return for killing off more efficient vehicles.

Since he made his way back into the White House (despite that there exists a clear legal remedy stopping insurrectionists from holding office in the US), republicans have tried to follow through on this promise and more – not only trying to make your cars more expensive, but also threatening US energy dominance, sending US jobs to China and illegally attacking clean air laws.

However, whiplash changes in regulatory regimes like this are typically seen as bad for business. Above all, businesses desire regulatory certainty so they can plan products into the future, and there are few businesses with longer planning timelines than automakers.

This is why automakers want the EPA to retain Biden’s emissions rules, because they’re already planning new models for the EV transition. They went through this once before, in the chaos of 2017-2021, where they originally asked for rollbacks but then realized their mistake, and now still complain about the broken regulatory regime caused by the last time a former reality TV host squatted in the White House.

Further, if American manufacturing turns away from the EV transition, or continues to make tepid movement towards it, this will only hand more of a manufacturing lead to China, meaning more decline of American manufacturing (compared to the huge manufacturing boom seen under President Biden).

Finally, the most important problem with DOT’s final rule is that it will increase emissions, which harms your health and increases climate change. Much like the other trends we’ve seen here, this administration doesn’t know much about the basics of climate science, which is already costing America $150 billion a year in increased infrastructure costs related to damage from natural disasters.

And that’s not even counting health costs, which will be even higher. The aggregate of these damages could cost each American born today $500,000 over their lifetime.

But all of these harms will happen to real people. This isn’t reality television, where the intent is to make up drama for views. This is actual harm that’s actually going to be done to Americans, who are having a rough time as the global economy continues to grapple with the long-term disruptions resulting from a pandemic that was exacerbated by the same reality TV host, and of course the ever-present worsening climate change.

And so, Mr. Trump is now trying to follow through on his campaign promises – which, in so many ways, will only make your life costlier, more unhealthy, less stable, and less secure from foreign influence. This is what 49% of America voted for.

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