Hyundai and Boston Dynamics may have just stolen the robot factory narrative from Tesla

Hyundai isn’t claiming that robots will take over the world or save humanity, but on Monday at CES they may have shattered a key pillar of investor confidence in Elon Musk and Tesla.

Hyundai simply gives way, way, pathmore cars than Tesla. Over the past three years, Hyundai sold around 7 million cars per year worldwidewhile Tesla hovered 1.8 million sales per year over this same period.

What makes Tesla, not Hyundai, the darling of Wall Street is not the company’s current output, but the business stories that tempt investors to want to buy into it in anticipation of an exit that will make them fortunes. Specifically, this 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 are so powerful they could end poverty, become the “biggest product ever” and generate “infinite” income.

But Tesla’s robot lineup has a lot to prove in a short time. Less than five years ago, Elon Musk said he was revealing a robot prototypebut it turned out that it was actually a person wearing a lycra bodysuit, and It was all some kind of awkward fake joke, you can’t make fun of me if I laugh too much.

Hyundai, on the other hand, owns Boston Dynamicsa three-decade-old company and pioneer of the spooky, quadruped and then biped bots that went viral and made people repeat the same “kill him with fire” joke over and over again. Boston Dynamics absolutely wrote the book on today’s robots.

So with that in mind, watch Boston Dynamics’ Atlas program manager, Zachary Jackowski, tout his robot, and keep in mind that he knows his competition is Elon Musk:

He says that while this thing that moves is just a research prototype, his company has “worked hard to create the current version of Atlas” and that it will be “the best, simplest robot we’ve ever built.” It claims it will be water resistant and able to withstand temperatures as cold as minus 4 and as hot as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Jackowski says that Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are assembling “the world’s most comprehensive data set to train humanoid skills in manufacturing,” and that the automotive side of the company will soon use and manufacture these elements in “a new robotics factory capable of producing 30,000 Atlas robots per year.”

Of course, this is all just hype. There’s no way to know what is intended solely to appease worried investors and board members eager to reduce labor costs, and what is intended to attract the attention of companies considering becoming customers of humanoid robots.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk will only get the full version of his famous trillion-dollar pay package if he deploys 1 million Optimus robotsso it’s pretty clear what motivates him. He nevertheless postponed the launch date of the Optimus robots, which, in 2024, were expected to work in Tesla factories in 2025 and available for purchase by other companies in 2026. But Musk’s claims about the applications of his robots continue to grow. In November last year, he compared Optimus robots to have a “personal C-3PO/R2-D2”.

If you’re reading this, Tesla probably doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but neither should Hyundai. It’s a Chaebol, which means it’s one of the colossal, scandal-prone corporations with troubling ties to this country’s government. When it comes to creating robot armies that can crush the workforce and generate “infinite” revenue, the question isn’t whether you should favor a company like Tesla or a company like Hyundai. It is Which company’s far-fetched story do you find most plausible?