Hyundai is not claiming that robots will take over the world, or save mankind, but on Monday at CES it may have just cracked a load-bearing pillar of investor confidence in Elon Musk and Tesla.
Hyundai simply makes way, way, way, more cars than Tesla. Over the last three years, Hyundai sold roughly 7 million cars per year globally, while Tesla hovered around 1.8 million sales per year over that same period.
What makes Tesla, not Hyundai, the darling of Wall Street isn’t the company’s present day output, but the business narratives that make investors want to buy in with the expectation of an exit that will make them a fortune. Specifically, that narrative stems in part from Elon Musk’s promise of a self-driving car future in which, he claims, Tesla will crush Waymo. But perhaps more importantly, it comes from Musk’s claim that his Optimus line of robots is so powerful, they might end poverty, become the “biggest product of all time,” and generate “infinite” revenue.
But Tesla’s line of robots has a lot to prove in a short time. It was less than five years ago that Elon Musk said he was revealing a robot prototype, but it turned out to actually be a person in a lycra bodysuit, and the whole thing was a sort of awkward, you-can’t-laugh-at-me-if-I’m-laughing-too fake joke.
Hyundai, by contrast, owns Boston Dynamics, a company three decades old, and one that pioneered the creepy, quadrupedal and then bipedal robots that used to go viral and make people make the same “kill it with fire” joke over and over. Boston Dynamics absolutely wrote the book on present-day robots.
So with that in mind, watch the head of the Atlas program at Boston Dynamics, Zachary Jackowski, hype his robot, and keep in mind that he knows his competitor is Elon Musk:
He claims that while that thing moving around is just a research prototype, his company has been “hard at work on making the actual product version of Atlas,” and that it’s going to be “the best and actually simplest robot that we have ever built.” It’s going to be, he claims, water resistant, and able to endure temperatures as cold as minus 4 and as hot as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jackowski claims Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are putting together, the “most complete dataset in the world to train humanoid skills in manufacturing,” and that the car side of the company will soon be both using and manufacturing these things in “a new robotics factory capable of producing 30,000 Atlas robots a year.”
This is all, of course, just hype. There’s no way to know what’s purely meant to soothe uneasy investors and board members who are eager to slash labor costs, and what’s meant to attract the attention of businesses who are thinking of becoming humanoid robot customers.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk will only get the complete version of his famous trillion-dollar pay package if he deploys 1 million Optimus robots, so it’s pretty clear what’s motivating him. Nonetheless, he’s pushed back the start date for Optimus robots, which, back in 2024, were supposed to be doing work in Tesla factories in 2025, and available for purchase by other companies in 2026. But Musk’s claims about applications for his robots keep expanding. In November of last year he compared Optimus robots to having a “personal C-3PO/R2-D2.”
If you’re reading this, Tesla probably doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but Hyundai shouldn’t either. It’s a Chaebol, meaning it’s one of the colossal, scandal-prone companies with troubling ties to that country’s government. When it comes to creating armies of robots with the potential to crush labor power and generate “infinite” revenue, the question is not whether you should root for a company like Tesla or one like Hyundai. It’s which company’s outlandish narrative do you find more plausible?
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