January 31, 2022: -On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that a humanoid robot is the “most important product” that Tesla developed this year, putting it ahead of the much-hyped Cybertruck and other vehicles, which include the Semi and the Roadster.

Musk teased the “Tesla Bot” in August, which uses a human in a robot suit, which warns during the company’s “AI Day” that it “probably won’t work” but added that he is hoping to have a prototype in the coming year.

“I think it has the potential to be more huge than the vehicle business over time,” Musk said of the robot, which is code-named Optimus.

The Tesla boss adds that the company has not planned to introduce the Cybertruck isn’t working on a $25,000 vehicle. The lingering chip shortage hampers the release of recent models without resulting in lesser total vehicles being delivered, he said.

While the Tesla robot could be years away and may not come to fruition, Musk said on Wednesday it does have the potential to revolutionize the economy if it can perform tasks that humans can only carry out.

“If you think about the economy, it is the foundation of the economy is labor,” he said. “Capital equipment is distilled labor. So what happens if you don’t have a labor shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point. That’s what Optimus is about, so very important.”

Advances in robotics allow companies to replace certain workers with machines, but the limitations of current technology are that many tasks still need to be done by humans.

″Optimus is intended to be friendly and navigate through a world of humans, and eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and tedious tasks,” Musk said in August.

The robot is an instance of Musk’s showmanship. He announces that Tesla works on exciting products scheduled for years into the future that helps to energize employees, customers, and investors. Often, the innovations announced aren’t realized within the projected timeline.

For example, at an “Autonomy Day” event in April 2019, Musk said that the company would have 1 million autonomous “robotaxis” on the road in 2020. Those robotaxis still do not exist.