Tesla’s mission-critical Optimus project is reportedly falling behind schedule. Traders are buying the stock anyway.

Elon Musk says Tesla’s Optimus robots will be the “biggest product of all time.”

But, as is so often the case, the company seems to be falling behind on the CEO’s timeline for producing them. As is also often the case, investors don’t seem to think that’s a problem.

A report from The Information on Friday says Optimus production is well behind Musk’s goal for 5,000 of the robots this year. “Hundreds” of the sleek black-and-white bots have been produced to date, and many of them sit without hands or forearms as the company works on replicating the mechanics of five fingers.

How did traders react, you ask? They don’t seem to think the speed bump will derail the company’s march upward, bidding Tesla stock up 4.9% by midday and putting it on track for its best day since July 2.

Tesla traders have a long and successful history of detaching from the fundamentals of the company in favor of dreams of an autonomous future (or maybe just big future stock returns).

For his part, Musk says Optimus could propel Tesla to be worth $25 trillion. He has a vision that every home and business will have a $20,000 Tesla Optimus toiling away on the tasks we can’t be bothered with.

During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call this week, Musk detailed some of the engineering challenges:

“It’s a very hard problem to solve. You have to design every part of it, from physics’ first principle, principles. There’s nothing that’s off the shelf that actually works. So you’ve got to design every motor, gearbox, power electronics, control electronics, sensors, the mechanical elements.”

And that’s just the hardware, which isn’t the hardest part. For these robots to truly be useful to the public, they need to know how to move through the world, use tools, walk dogs, and serve drinks all by themselves, unlike the human remote operators who were controlling the robots at Tesla’s Cybercab launch event.

On the earnings call, Musk acknowledged that autonomy is something the company needs to solve to unlock its next act, but it isn’t there yet. Musk said Tesla was in a “weird transition period,” which could hurt the company’s financials before full-service robotaxis and Optimus arrive.

“Does that mean, like, we could have a few rough quarters? Yeah, we probably could have a few rough quarters. I’m not saying we will, but we could, you know, Q4, Q1, maybe Q2. But once you get to autonomy at scale in the second half of next year — certainly by the end of next year — I’d be surprised if Tesla economics are not very compelling.”

Musk offered few specifics about Optimus on the call, but reiterated it was Tesla’s destiny:

“I’d be surprised if, at the end of five years, 60 months from now, if we are not roughly making 100,000 Optimus robots a month, I would be shocked.”