Tesla's Robot Pivot Meets Complex Hands and Reluctant Trainers
Tesla's pivot from electric cars to humanoid robots is being slowed by two awkward problems: robot hands that are difficult to build, and employees pushing back against training the machines intended to replace them. Ars Technica reports the struggle to scale up production comes as Elon Musk has bet the company's future on AI and robotics. The pushback is the more interesting friction. A robot that can't yet reliably grip things is a technical problem; a workforce asked to teach its own replacement is a management one.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Asking people to train the robots that would take their jobs is at least an honest version of automation. Most companies pretend the two things are unrelated.
Musk has also called a general-purpose autonomous humanoid one of the hardest things to solve. The training exercise may be running well ahead of any actual replacement.
The lines are already moving, though. The Fremont factory stopped making the Model S and Model X as of May 2026, and line workers and engineers were switched over to Optimus.