The answer to your question depends on whether you think level 5 autonomous vehicles is remotely possibly today or if it is a decade away.

hmm kinda there can be more randomness and chaos in driving. Depends on the initial application for the Tesla bot

you can look at the latest boston dynamics demos to see what the cutting edge in humanoid robots is. This form factor, with a working prototype, shown in the next year is absurd.

Or it's doable precisely because BD have done the legwork (heh). Just make it different enough or deal with the lawsuits later.

Have you seen the Boston Dynanics videos? If Tesla can do even minor improvement, say with how they do the joints or packaging it better - deciding different constraints to use as guidelines - then it doesn't seem too far fetched; price point will be another factor.

Except Boston Dynamics is a large well-funded, dedicated operation with probably the best robotics people money can buy. Also, they've been it for years and even then their top end humanoid stuff is still super bulky compared to what Elon showed today in their concept.

Also considering Tesla use all 3rd-party assembly-arms in their factories to build their cars, I'm having trouble seeing Tesla shipping anything this sleek and compact to a consumer market..

Boston robotics is valued at 1.1bn. That's nothing. Musk could easily buy them from Hyundai without even thinking about it.

If they are happy to sell it.

My guess is he probably figured it'd be cheaper to spend the money on development, especially since it'll be a redevelopment from the ground up following different design-engineering principles as new constraints; including designed to be mass produced which BD robots don't seem streamlined for and are arguably overkill for general use (and not needing to handle heavy loads nor do parkour etc).

Boston Dynamics is one example, but there are loads of examples in manufacturing where the conditions are very tough for people to work on certain types of labor. This is to the point where at times you may have seen references to exoskelatons or specialized equipment to help with repetitive tasks during welding/bolting in a manufacture line that a large robotic arm can't do. A humanoid on the other hand...

Probably not today, but Elon has a Jobs-level Reality Distortion Field. It'll happen.

What do you mean, the robot or FSD?

The robot clearly not. And FSD yes, but they need to recognize the system will never be level 5. Basically as a company you don't want to be responsible of system failures.