Tesla teleoperated robot failed while serving popcorn on first day of new diner

Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which CEO Elon Musk claims is ahead of the industry and will sell in the trillions of dollars, failed while serving popcorn on the first day of Tesla’s new diner launch.

Musk has been touting Optimus as a revolutionary product that will generate “trillions of dollars” per year for Tesla.

It’s the latest pivot that the CEO has led Tesla into, as electric vehicle sales are declining, and it is becoming increasingly clear that its self-driving effort is unlikely to be profitable anytime soon.

The company needs new revenue streams to justify a $1 trillion valuation, given its declining revenue and earnings.

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However, we have been reporting on how the program appears to be in shambles lately.

Last month, Tesla’s head of the program, Milan Kovac, left the company just a few months after being promoted to vice-president.

Earlier this month, we learned that Tesla paused production to perform some much-needed upgrades to the current version of the robot, as it is reportedly currently only able to move some batteries within Tesla’s workshop at a rate lower than that of human workers.

That’s despite Tesla claiming for months that the robot is already performing useful work within its factories and plans to ramp up production to 100,000 units per month next year, with the goal of starting to sell the robot.

Aside from gullible Tesla shareholders, not many people believe this narrative. The main issue is that Tesla is not seen as having a lead in humanoid robots, which is still a nascent industry, and its previous demonstrations have been misleading.

For example, Tesla was less than forthcoming about its robots being teleoperated by humans during its ‘We, Robot’ event last year.

The launch of its new diner in Los Angeles was the latest occasion to showcase Optimus. Tesla had an Optimus robot serve popcorn to customers.

Again, Tesla employees at the event confirmed to attendees that the robot was teleoperated, which makes the demonstration unimpressive to start with, but the disappointment doesn’t stop there.

The robot was seen frozen and stopped operating during the first day of the Tesla diner launch.

Attendees were told that the robot lost connection.

Electrek’s Take

To be clear, Tesla can only get the Optimus robot to serve popcorn for a short period before it fails, even with the use of human teleoperation.

Yet, Musk claims that Tesla will make 100,000 of these next year and sell them to customers.

It makes no sense. It’s similar to Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin, which requires teleoperation and a human safety monitor with a finger on a kill switch at all times.

That said, I honestly believe that Tesla will be able to scale Optimus faster than its robotaxi service. However, they will both scale much slower than Tesla shareholders currently believe and the competition is already ahead of both.