Tesla has announced that it has no cars in development for 2022 - and it will not be announcing any new models in the year. But interestingly, the CEO of the world's most valuable automotive company revealed that the most important product for his team in 2022 will be the Tesla Bot which was announced last year. He revealed the prototype will be built in 2022 and it will be designed for dangerous, repetitive, or boring work that people don't want to do. A test robot dubbed Optimus internally has already been unveiled in Tesla's China R&D facility and Musk has already controversially claimed that it can help solve the labor shortage.
Tesla is calling it Optimus internally after taking the name from Optimus Prime from the Transformers franchise and saying that a lot of too long and engineering for the bot will happen for it. He even has said that it will leverage the autopilot technology that Tesla has been using for the ADAS functions of its electric cars and theorised that Tesla could be the biggest robotics company on the planet.
Elon Musk provided a legion of updates for what Tesla will be doing in 2022
"So, in terms of priority of products, I think the most important product development we're doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot. This, I think has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time. If you think about the economy, it is- the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. So, what happens if you don't actually have a labor shortage? I'm not sure what an economy even means at that point. That's what Optimus is about. So, very important," he said during the earnings call.
Musk has said that the Optimus would be stable at Tesla's factories. Tesla has been actively recruiting for the Bot project since November 2021. As for its vehicles, Musk revealed that the Cybertruck was postponed to 2023 and the Roadster was pushed back even further, while also pouring water on the $25,000 car project for which he revealed Tesla didn't have adequate resources.
