Tesla has released a new clip of its Optimus humanoid robot running inside a lab. The video comes from the official Optimus account on X and Elon Musk shared it with his followers soon after. The robot jogs past other units in the background and keeps a steady pace on the lab floor.
Also, The team said that they had set a new personal record in the lab. Musk also stressed the internal record had been broken, which puts fresh attention on how far the project has moved in a short time.
Just set a new PR in the lab pic.twitter.com/8kJ2om7uV7
— Tesla Optimus (@Tesla_Optimus) December 2, 2025
This update lands as Tesla works to move Optimus from a research effort into a product that could see mass production in the coming years.
Movement progress
Optimus has gone through several hardware and software revisions, and the latest footage points to better balance and more fluid motion during running. The robot’s gait now appears smoother than in earlier clips that focused on slow walking or basic motions.
On the Q3 2025 earnings call, Elon said: “I don’t want to downplay the difficulty, but it’s an incredibly difficult thing, especially to create a hand that is as dexterous and capable as the human hand, which is incredible. The human hand is an incredible thing. The more you study the human hand, the more incredible you realize it is, and why you need four fingers and a thumb, why the fingers have certain degrees of freedom, why the various muscles are of different strengths, and fingers are of different lengths. It turns out that those are all there for a reason.”
Musk has also said that the forearm and hand are, from an engineering view, tougher to build than the rest of the robot. This is because muscle and tendon systems in the human arm handle many fine forces and angles at the same time. And that biological setup is hard to copy with motors, gears, tendons, and sensors in a tight package.
Gen 3 hand design
The next main version, often called Optimus Gen 3, is expected to have a hand with about 22 degrees of freedom, which is roughly twice what earlier versions used. Engineers and analysts say Tesla is leaning on a tendon‑driven layout, where motors and ball‑screw drives in the forearm pull cable tendons that bend and extend each finger joint. This design tries to mimic how human forearm muscles control hand motion.
Reports and technical breakdowns also point to fingertip pressure sensors arranged in dense arrays. These act like artificial nerve endings and send touch data into the control system in real time.
Running is a clear step forward, but it is not the only thing that matters for a general‑purpose robot. Many of the jobs Musk talks about like cleaning floors, moving boxes, basic house chores, or line work in factories depend more on a strong and precise hand than on fast legs. And without a capable hand and flexible fingers, Optimus would end up limited to simple roles.
This is why hand development comes up in many internal updates and public comments. A robot that can walk but cannot grip tools, press buttons, or handle objects of many shapes will not replace much human labor. So, Tesla’s focus on finger count, thumb placement, degrees of freedom, and muscle‑like actuators is central to its plan to sell Optimus into homes and workplaces.
Production roadmap
Tesla has set an aggressive path for building Optimus at scale. The company is preparing early production lines at its Fremont facility. Those lines support pilot production and give the team a way to test how parts, assembly steps, and quality checks work in practice. And Tesla has said that a larger Gen 3 line is planned for 2026.
Public comments point to a target price of around $20,000 per robot once mass production is in place. Tesla has also spoken about reaching around 1 million units per year on high‑volume lines and then pushing capacity further at its Texas site, where plans talk about many millions of units per year in the long run.
Optimus is also a part of Tesla’s broader AI plan. The company uses a similar neural network stack for both Full Self‑Driving and robotics.
This setup should let Tesla push software updates that improve all deployed units once they learn new skills, just as it does with its vehicles.
Musk’s view of work and Optimus’s role
Elon Musk has linked Optimus to his long‑term view about work. In a talk with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, Musk said that “In less than 20 years, working will be optional. Working at all will be optional. Like a hobby,” arguing that AI and robotics will take over most labor.
At Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting, Musk also claimed that Optimus could help remove poverty and support wider access to high‑quality medical care. These are bold claims, and they rest on the idea that millions of robots can be deployed, and managed safely, with governments and companies agreeing on how to use the gains.
If the company hits its timeline and volume targets, Optimus may start to appear in more industrial settings later in the decade and, much later, in some homes.
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