Hyundai and Boston Dynamics May Have Just Stealed the Robot Industry Narrative Away from Tesla
Hyundai isn’t saying robots will take over the world, or save humanity, but on Monday at CES it may have just cracked a pillar of investor confidence in Elon Musk and Tesla.
Hyundai just made way, way, waymore cars than Tesla. In the past three years, Hyundai has sold about 7 million vehicles annually worldwide, while Tesla has sold 1.8 million vehicles annually during that time.
What makes Tesla, not Hyundai, the darling of Wall Street isn’t the company’s current product, but the business stories that make investors want to jump in expecting exits that will make them rich. In particular, that narrative stems in part from Elon Musk’s promise of a self-driving car future where, he says, Tesla will crush Waymo. But perhaps more importantly, it comes from Musk’s claim that his Optimus line of robots is so powerful, it could end poverty, become the “greatest product of all time,” and make “endless” money.
But Tesla’s line of robots has a lot to prove in a short amount of time. It was less than five years ago when Elon Musk said he unveiled a prototype robot, but it turned out that he was actually a person wearing a lycra bodysuit, and the whole thing was a kind of weird, you-can’t-laugh-at-me-when-I-laugh-joke that’s so fake.
In contrast, Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics, a three-decade-old company, and the first of the fearsome, quadrupedal and rear-bipedal robots that used to go viral and make people make the same “kill it with fire” joke over and over again. Boston Dynamics has completely written the book on modern robots.
So with that in mind, take a look at the head of the Atlas program at Boston Dynamics, Zachary Jackowski, singing about his robot, and remember that he knows his rival is Elon Musk:
He says that while the robot is just a research prototype, his company has “worked hard to make the real Atlas product,” and that “it’s going to be the best and lightest robot we’ve ever built.” He says it will be, water resistant, and able to tolerate temperatures as cold as minus 4 and as hot as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jackowski says that Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are combining, “the most complete dataset in the world to train humanoid skills in manufacturing,” and that the automotive side of the company will soon use and produce these materials in a “new robotics factory capable of producing 30,000 Atlas robots a year.”
All this, of course, is just hype. There’s no way to know what’s meant to placate investors and uneasy board members eager to cut labor costs, and what’s meant to attract the attention of businesses considering becoming customers for humanoid robots.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk will only get the full version of his famous trillion-dollar package if he uses a million Optimus robots, so it’s clear what motivates him. However, he postponed the first date of the Optimus robots, which, back in 2024, were supposed to work in Tesla factories in 2025, and be available for purchase by other companies in 2026. But Musk’s claims about the applications of his robots keep growing. In November of last year he compared the Optimus robots to having “a personal C-3PO/R2-D2.”
If you’re reading this, Tesla probably doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but Hyundai shouldn’t. A Chaebol, meaning one of the largest, often-disgraced companies with a difficult relationship with that country’s government. When it comes to creating armies of robots that have the power to crush the workforce and generate “endless” cash, the question isn’t whether you should focus on a company like Tesla or a company like Hyundai. That’s right Which unusual company narrative do you find more compelling?
