Tesla CEO Elon Musk let investors know early on that 2026 would be an expensive year for the company.

Coming off of its first-ever decline in revenue and its second consecutive year of falling deliveries in 2025, 2026 was always going to be a pivotal year for the electric vehicle maker.

Musk already says Tesla (TSLA) is much more than a car company, so when the company raised its capital expenditure forecast to over $25 billion for mostly non-car-related development, most analysts didn’t blink (though some did).

A significant portion of that money is going to retooling the company’s car production capacity to make room for the production of 1 million Optimus humanoid robots annually.

While Musk has been extremely optimistic about Optimus, calling it perhaps “the most important product” in Tesla’s history, there seems to be one major problem with his grand vision for the future: not many people are looking to buy a $30,000 humanoid robot.

The capital the company plans to spend on transforming Model S and Model X manufacturing capacity into Optimus manufacturing capacity won’t have much return until there is consumer demand for the product.

“We are replacing the S and X line in Fremont with a million units per year line of Optimus. Because it is a completely new supply chain, there’s really nothing from the existing supply chains that exist in Optimus,” Musk said during the first quarter earnings call.

“Frankly, if we can halt production of a line, dismantle the entire production line, reinstall a completely new one, and get it up and running within four months, that would be an incredibly fast pace… This process will take at least several months. You then need to install new production lines, provide all necessary wiring and communication, and test the machines on them. This also takes several months,” Musk said.

But while the Model S and Model X have been sales laggards for years, Tesla doesn’t really have a plan to replace the revenue from the tens of thousands of vehicles it sold last year.

Tesla Optimus plans are missing one key piece: demand

Lack of demand led Tesla to mothball the Model X and Model S, but the company is betting billions that demand for humanoid robots will be there to replace them. But there is scant evidence for this train of thought.

“Tesla’s humanoid robots have hardly demonstrated any notable capabilities, but they’re supposed to cost tens of thousands of dollars each once they’re launched,” Zachary Shahan of CleanTechnica wrote recently.

Part of the issue is that Optimus robots are extremely expensive. The robot costs $10,000 to produce at Giga Texas, according to Tesla Car World, and could retail for between $20,000 and $30,000, according to StandardBots.