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Tesla tore down the Model S/X line in 46 days to build Optimus — and Musk says the ramp will be "long and flat"

Tesla has begun installing its first Optimus production line at the Fremont factory, in the hall where the Model S and Model X were assembled until early May. The teardown took 46 days. The stated capacity of this first-generation line is one million robots a year. That number is the headline. The more informative part is what Elon Musk said around it. He has described the initial output as "quite slow" and the ramp as long and flat, and called the production rate for this year "literally impossible to predict" — because Optimus has roughly 10,000 unique parts, almost none of which Tesla has built at volume before, on a line that has never run. The destination of the first units matters too. They are not going to paying customers. Tesla intends to put early robots into its own factories and workflows first, which is both the cautious choice and the one that keeps the feedback loop inside the company. A second line is planned at Giga Texas, targeted at summer 2027. There is a gap here worth naming plainly. A line rated for a million units a year is a statement about tooling, not about output — annual capacity assumes a mature process running at speed, and Musk is simultaneously saying the process is neither mature nor fast. Both things can be true, and reading the first figure without the second is how humanoid timelines have been mis-reported for three years running. It is also worth noting what has not happened: Optimus V3, the generation this line is meant to build, has had its public reveal pushed back more than once. Until Tesla publishes a specification for the robot coming off that line, the catalogue treats its figures as reported rather than confirmed.