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STORY: Elon Musk's humanoid robot prototype 'Optimus' made a slow and gingerly entrance onto the stage at Tesla’s AI Day, and the billionaire predicted the electric car maker would be able to produce millions of the robots and sell them for less than a third of the price of its Model Y SUV.

“Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible and we’ve also designed it using the same discipline that we use in designing the car, which is to say, to design it for manufacturing, such that is possible to make the robot in high volume, at low cost with higher liability... Optimus is designed to be an extremely capable robot made but made in very high volume, probably ultimately millions of units and it’s expected to cost much less than a car, so, I would say probably less than $ 20,000 dollars, would be my guess.”

Musk said he expected Tesla would be ready to take orders for the robot in three to five years but that more work needed to be done.

"They’re missing a brain."

The Tesla CEO described an effort to develop the robots over a decade or more, giving the most detailed vision to date on a business he has said could be bigger than Tesla's electric vehicle revenue.

Musk, who has spoken before about the risks of artificial intelligence, said the mass rollout of robots had the potential to “transform civilization.”

Tesla's push to design and build mass-market robots also involves testing them working jobs in its factories, setting it apart from other manufacturers that have experimented with humanoid robots.