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Steer-by-wire is fundamentally a robotics control concept applied to an automotive use-case. via Hardware FYI
A car company just shut down car production to build robots
Modern cars are starting to operate as robot platforms, and that foreshadows how such systems architecture will spread to every industry that moves physical things. A Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid robot and a Tesla Cybertruck are closer architectural relatives than the Cybertruck is to any vehicle built before 2020. (Our upcoming Robotics Core covers this architecture across over a dozen interactive modules, spanning actuator physics to perception stacks.)
Yesterday, Tesla confirmed that Model S and Model X production is over. Roughly 600 vehicles remain in inventory worldwide. The Fremont factory lines that built those cars are converting to manufacture Optimus humanoid robots: one million units per year at $20,000 each, with public sales beginning in 2027. The company also reportedly placed a $685 million actuator order with Chinese supplier Sanhua Intelligent Controls, enough components for roughly 180,000 robots. A dedicated Optimus facility is breaking ground at Giga Texas, targeting 10 million annual units. The company plans to unveil Optimus v3 this quarter, its first design meant for mass production. While Tesla is literally converting automotive facilities to robot-production facilities, we’ve been seeing evidence from the cars themselves that a change was coming; the internal wiring tells a backstory.
Back in 2022, Ford CEO Jim Farley described what his engineers found when they disassembled a Tesla Model Y: "We had prejudice,“ but the proof was sprawled in front of them: the Mach-E wiring harness was 70 pounds heavier and 1.6 kilometers longer than Tesla's equivalent. (For mass-production, these differences meaningfully compound.)
The Cybtertruck’s distinctive design widened the gap further: 155 wires versus a traditional vehicle's 400-500, achieved through 48-volt architecture, Ethernet replacing the CAN (Controller Area Network) bus, and zone controllers handling local devices rather than routing everything to a central fuse box. (Munro’s 🎥 teardown series is fascinating.) S&P Global estimates Tesla holds a five-year lead in electrical/electronic architecture over every other automaker. Centralized compute, zonal controllers, software-defined actuation, sensor fusion through a unified data bus: these are not traditional automotive concepts but rather the foundational architecture of robotic systems, and they apply whether the robot carries passengers, welds chassis, or walks on two legs.
Ford is (now) converging on the same architecture from the other direction. The company's next-generation Universal Electric Vehicle platform adopts 48V zonal architecture with five in-house zone controllers and a wiring harness 1.2 kilometers (4,000 feet!) shorter than the Mach-E's. The first vehicle of this type, a $30,000 electric pickup, arrives in 2027.
via teslaoptimus on IG
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