Unitree G1 vs Tesla Optimus: one of them has a checkout button

One of these robots has a checkout button. On August 7, 2026 the Unitree G1 lists at $13,500 on Unitree's own store, flagged backordered, with shipping quoted separately at $300 to $1,200 and customs on the buyer. Tesla Optimus has no price, no order page, no waitlist, and Tesla has never sold one to a member of the public.

Unitree G1 vs Tesla Optimus is not a close comparison. The wrinkle underneath is what makes it worth writing up: the robot you can buy is smaller and weaker than the robot you cannot, and the one you cannot buy carries a target price nearly twice as high.

The rows that separate them

	Unitree G1	Tesla Optimus
Orderable today	Yes, cart at shop.unitree.com	No order channel exists
Price	$13,500	none published
Stated price target	n/a, this is the price	$20,000 to $30,000 at scale, stated October 2024
Stock (2026-08-07)	backordered, "will ship as soon as it is back in stock"	n/a
Shipping	$300 to $1,200, buyer pays duties and clearance	n/a
Warranty	8 months (18 on the EDU)	n/a
Units delivered to buyers	yes, routinely, into labs and event teams	none, ever
Newest generation with published specs	the G1 on sale now	v2.3, shown publicly December 2025; V3 unrevealed

The spec sheet, with a warning label on the right column

Unitree's numbers come from its own parameter table. Tesla's come from the last generation it publicly specified, as collected on Optimus's Wikipedia entry, because Tesla has published no spec sheet for the version it is currently tooling for.

	Unitree G1	Tesla Optimus (last specified generation)
Height	1,320 mm, about 4 ft 4 in	173 cm, 5 ft 8 in
Weight with battery	about 35 kg (77 lb)	57 kg (125 lb)
Load	about 2 kg per arm	20 kg (45 lb) carry
Battery	9,000 mAh, about 2 hours	not published
Sensing	depth camera, 3D LiDAR, 4-mic array	not published
Degrees of freedom	23, up to 43 on the EDU	no whole-body figure published
Price	$13,500	not for sale

Read the load row twice. The machine you can buy is about chest height on an adult and lifts roughly a bag of flour per arm. The machine you cannot buy is person sized and rated to carry 45 lb. That gap is the entire consumer humanoid pitch, and so far it exists only on the side of the table with no price on it.

What $13,500 actually gets you

A crate from Hangzhou, and a line of small print that decides most purchases. Unitree's store page says, on the G1 listing itself: "This product does not support secondary development. For customization needs, please select the EDU edition."

The base G1 walks, balances and runs Unitree's shipped software. Writing your own code on it means the EDU, which has no published price and routes through sales. Add the $300 to $1,200 shipping and buyer-paid duties and a G1 at a US door is a $14,000 to $15,000 event, on an 8 month warranty, with no described US service network. More of that fine print is on the G1 tracker page.

Unitree also prints a paragraph on its own product page that reads strangely on a page whose job is selling:

"Currently, the global humanoid robot industry is in the early stages of exploration. Individual users are strongly advised to thoroughly understand the limitations of humanoid robots before making a purchase."

A warning like that, at the point of sale, tells a buyer more than any spec row above it.

One more number, because it runs the wrong way for the industry: the G1's store price was $16,000 through late 2025 and has been $13,500 since, one cut of about 16 percent. The purchasable robot got cheaper while the promised one kept its target. The tracker entry carries the current figure.

What buying an Optimus looks like

Nothing. There is no step one.

The dated record is short and it has not moved toward a store. On January 22, 2026 Musk told Davos that Tesla would sell humanoid robots to the public by the end of next year, meaning the end of 2027, conditional on very high reliability, safety and range of functionality. Six days later he admitted no Optimus robots were doing useful work at Tesla. On the April 22, 2026 earnings call, V3 was still to be unveiled "closer to production start," Fremont production was pencilled for late July or August 2026, and the line was described as designed for a million robots a year, with Gigafactory Texas at ten million a year from 2027 (Electrek's Optimus guide). On July 2, 2026 Musk pushed back on the idea Tesla was secretly further along and said production would be extremely slow at first.

I can find no announcement that the volume line at Fremont has started building anything, and no cumulative Optimus build count published by Tesla at any point in five years. Design capacity, yes, in the millions. Robots actually assembled, never a figure.

What Optimus units have verifiably done in public is hospitality: popcorn at the Tesla Diner opening in Hollywood on July 21, 2025, and greeting attendees in London and Berlin in December 2025. The full promise ledger sits in the dated archive of Musk's robot claims.

Then the arithmetic on the target price. $20,000 to $30,000 at scale, first attached to Optimus in October 2024, is 1.5 to 2.2 times what a G1 costs today. The cheap robot of the future costs more than the real robot of the present. Our Optimus tracker entry files that number as a claim rather than a price.

Tesla has put one manufacturing update in its own words, on November 6, 2025, reposted by the market-news account below: "Optimus pilot production line is currently running in our Fremont Factory. Significantly larger Gen 3 production line coming in 2026", and "Our goal is $20k COGS per robot at scale." Two things worth separating there. A pilot line and a significantly larger Gen 3 line are not the same machine, and it is the second one, promised for 2026, that still has no announcement behind it in August. And $20k is a cost goal, not a sticker. Tesla is aiming to build one for $6,500 more than Unitree currently charges for a finished G1 with shipping quoted on top.

Tesla says the Optimus pilot line is running at Fremont, a significantly larger Gen 3 line is coming in 2026, and the goal is $20k COGS per robot at scale. (@StockMKTNewz, 2025-11-06)

The Boston Dynamics version of the same question

Plenty of people run this comparison against Atlas instead, and the answer rhymes. Boston Dynamics publishes a real spec panel for the production electric Atlas: 1.9 m tall, 90 kg, 30 kg sustained weight capacity (50 kg instant), 2.3 m reach, 4 hours of battery, per its own Atlas page. It publishes no price for it, or for anything else it makes. The purchase path is a contact form and a place among "select" early adopters, starting with Hyundai, which owns most of the company. The longer version is in Atlas: not for sale.

Line the three up and the pattern is uncomfortable but consistent.

Robot	Published capability	Can you buy it
Boston Dynamics Atlas	90 kg, 30 kg sustained lift, 4 h	No, contact form, factories only
Tesla Optimus	57 kg, 20 kg carry, runtime not published	No, no channel at all
Unitree G1	35 kg, about 2 kg per arm, about 2 h	Yes, $13,500, backordered

The better the robot on paper, the less likely you are allowed to own it. Everything with a working checkout in 2026 sits at the bottom of that capability list, which is the shape of the whole humanoid price ladder.

Which one to spend money on

If you want a walking biped in your building this year, the G1 at $13,500 is the answer, with the EDU quote in writing before you commit if you intend to program it. If you want a robot that carries the laundry basket, neither of these is that, and only one of them has ever asked you for money.

Neither company publishes how many robots it has made. Unitree began IPO tutoring with CITIC Securities in July 2025 and filed to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in March 2026, per Wikipedia's summary of contemporaneous reporting, so an audited shipment figure may eventually reach a prospectus. Tesla is under no such pressure, and after five years the count of Optimus robots in private hands is still a number I can state exactly: zero.