Not doing the right thing? Musk said that robots are Tesla's most important product this year

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call that the humanoid robot is the "most important product" developed by Tesla this year, and its status is even higher than the much-watched Cyberruck and other vehicles.

Last August, Musk unveiled a trailer for the Tesla Bot at tesla AI day. At the time, he acknowledged that the project was at risk of failing, but he still hoped to make a prototype in 2022, "a robot that can replace people with dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks." ”

Referring to the project on Wednesday's conference call, Musk said: "This is our most important product, more important than the car." He also revealed that the company has already named the robot "Optimus", the same name as "Optimus" in the classic animation "Transformers".

Musk said that while the Tesla robot may still be years away, or may never even be realized, if it can complete tasks that can only be done by humans now, it has the potential to completely change today's economic model.

He explained that the economy is based on labor, and advances in robotics have enabled companies to replace certain workers with machines, but the limitations of current technology make most tasks still need to be done by humans.

"What happens if labor were replaced with robots? While I don't know what kind of changes will occur in the economy, it will certainly be very significant. That's what Optimus is all about. ”

Still, some of Tesla's innovative ideas don't seem to be very market-friendly. In August, Wade Bush, Tesla's long-time "majority head," pointed out sharply that Tesla's robotics program was "absolutely a headache" and that the company should focus on solving more pressing issues such as Chinese market demand, autonomous driving safety and chip shortages.

CNBC, a U.S. business channel, notes that this is one of Musk's many show cases, "he always claims that Tesla is planning to develop some novel products to stimulate the vitality of employees, customers and investors." However, it is often the case that these innovative products are not completed within the scheduled time frame. ”

For example, on Tesla Autopilot Day in April 2019, Musk said the company will have 1 million "robotaxis" on the road in 2020. To this day, not a single robotaxis has appeared.

During the day, Tesla's stock price fell to 10%, and the company warned that the bottleneck in the supply chain would run through the year, and said that it would not launch new models this year.