Tesla is ending production of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call.
The company will make the final versions of both electric vehicles next quarter, he said, adding that his company will offer support to existing Model S and Model X owners “for as long as people have the vehicles.”
“The time has come to effectively end the Model S and X programs with an honorable discharge, because we are truly moving into a future based on autonomy,” he said. “If you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order.”
The Model S and Model X are both built at the company’s factory in Fremont, California. Once production ends, Tesla will build Optimus robots in the same factory space, according to Musk.
Tesla launched the Model S in 2012, and is considered the first car to make electric vehicles widely appealing. The Model X was Tesla’s second major electric vehicle program.
Tesla has always intended its most affordable models — the Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV — to greatly outsell their predecessors.
But sales of both models have declined in recent years, despite interior and exterior refreshes along the way. Tesla has faced increased competition in the luxury electric vehicle space from legacy automakers, as well as pioneers such as Rivian and Lucid Motors.
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“So that’s slightly sad, but it’s … it’s time for the S and X programs to end,” Musk said.
Tesla’s first design
The Model S wasn’t Tesla’s first car — that title belongs to the original Roadster. But the Model S was the first car Tesla built from scratch.
This helped it lose much of its Roadster trade-off and paved the way for the Model S to become one of the first true mass-market electric vehicles.
Tesla launched the sedan in 2012 with a base price of $57,400. It had a battery in the floor which made it more spacious and much more dynamic to drive than the few other electric vehicles available at the time.
Tesla also offered the Model S with multiple battery sizes, allowing customers to pay for more EV range.
The car was instantly popular, with Tesla amassing more than 10,000 reservations for it by the time the first deliveries began in June of that year. By 2013, it had become MotorTrend’s car of the yearbeating the best petrol cars from around the world.
“At its core, the Tesla Model S is just a damn good car you happen to plug in to fuel up,” MotorTrend wrote.
Tesla iterated on the Model S in the years that followed. It changed battery options — at one point even offering larger battery packs with limited software range in an effort to get customers to adopt a buy-now-pay-later kind of attitude.
The Model S was also the first Tesla to get “Ludicrous Mode,” which allowed it to go from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.8 seconds. It was an exciting feature that also became one of Tesla’s sharpest word-of-mouth marketing tools.
Tesla has continued to improve the Model S, giving it an industry-leading range that still exceeds most other EVs and a total external and internal renewal in 2021. But by that point the company’s success had soared on the backs of the much cheaper Model 3 and Model Y.
The Fabergé SUV
The Model X wasn’t that simple.
First teased ahead of the Model S launch in 2012, the Model X SUV didn’t hit the roads until 2015. When it did, it arrived with overly complicated “Falcon Wing” folding rear doors.
These made it extremely easy to get in and out of the Model X. But the doors — along with the rest of the SUV — proved very difficult to scale with any reliable quality over the years. Musk eventually called it “the Fabergé of cars.” It was a nod to the luxurious styling and features, but also to the fragile nature of the Model X.
The Model X still sold quite well alongside the S and also received a major facelift in 2021. But production problems plagued the new version as well, and Musk admitted in early 2022 that Tesla made a mistake by stopping production before the redesigned Model X ready to be built to scale.
It’s been a long time coming
In retrospect, the retirement of the Model S and Model X has been a long time coming.
Musk himself said in 2019 that Tesla was still building these vehicles “specially” more for “emotional reasons than anything else.”
“It’s really secondary to our future,” Musk said at the time.
At that point, Tesla was still selling tens of thousands of Model S and Model X SUVs per quarter. But the company’s first truly new model was on the horizon: the Cybertruck.
Unveiled in 2019, Tesla had big plans for the Cybertruck. The company said it would sell a base version for $40,000 and make 250,000 of them a year. Delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, along with the vehicle’s complex new design, meant the vehicle hit the market much later than expected.
As soon as it hit the road, the Cybertruck became a bomb. A supposed backlog of 2 million orders never materialized, and neither did the base price of $40,000. Since then Tesla has struggled to sell just a few thousand of them per quarter.
The failure of the Cybertruck probably gave the Model S and Model X some cover. Not only did the two legacy EVs help slightly offset the flashy truck’s wild popularity, Tesla also labeled the three vehicles as “other models” when it reported quarterly sales figures, making it hard to tell how badly the Cybertruck was doing.
But Tesla is now a company that aims to solve autonomy in cars and robots, according to Musk. This apparently happened in the Model S and Model X.
They may have had ‘minor importance for [Tesla’s] future seven years ago. But it will always be vital to the company’s early years and Musk’s construction as a wealthy entrepreneur who looms over modern society.
