Tesla’s Optimus output grows nearly 10-fold, with manual assembly becoming a bottleneck

A report published Sept. 28, 2026, said output of Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, had increased nearly 10-fold, while its hands are still assembled by people. Supplementary sources indicated the same, addressing both the expansion of production capacity and the persistence of manual work. The issue is not the increase in output itself, but which processes remain bottlenecks.

While Tesla is reported to have increased output, it is also said to still assemble the hands manually, so production volumes alone are not enough to assess the expansion of mass production. If the bottleneck remains manual work, the supply rate of humanoid robots will depend on how the final assembly process is designed.

What is new in this report is that the increase in Optimus output is described alongside a specific constraint: manual assembly. Rather than simply saying that production has increased, the report appears to show which parts of the final process have not yet been automated. At the same time, the nearly 10-fold increase in output is evidence of the planned expansion of mass production. Among this newspaper’s related articles, NeoTeo reports problems with Tesla’s Optimus production and Tesla reports production challenges with Optimus’ hands had highlighted hand production and difficulties in mass production. Those issues have resurfaced in the context of the output increase. The important continuity is that production capacity and the assembly difficulty of individual components are now being viewed separately. If there is a contradiction, it is that increased output and processes that still depend on human labor coexist. The industry implication is that mass production of humanoid robots involves more than assembling the main body: processes for moving parts such as hands and fingers can become supply constraints. Precision assembly of small components may carry more weight here than large components such as those in a car, shifting the supply chain’s focus beyond unit volumes to which parts still require manual labor. To assess costs and profitability, it is necessary to establish how many workers are needed for final assembly, which processes have been automated, and how the pace of production increases is constrained by yields for individual components. Unresolved questions include actual weekly and monthly production volumes, the point from which output increased nearly 10-fold, the extent of automation in processes other than hand assembly, and whether manual work is a temporary measure or a permanent arrangement. The publicly available excerpts do not provide enough information to assess the sustainability of mass production.

For Japanese companies, the report suggests that precision assembly, such as that of robot hands, could constrain humanoid robot mass production. Companies with strengths in areas such as precision reducers, microcomponent assembly and inspection equipment may focus on how to capture demand for automating these processes and reducing labor requirements.