Tesla is killing off the Model S and Model X

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 for existing Model S and Model X owners “for as long as people have the vehicles.”

“It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge, because we’re really moving into a future that is based on autonomy,” he said. “So if you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it.”

The Model S and Model X are both built at the company’s Fremont, California factory. Once production ends, Tesla will build Optimus robots in the same factory space, according to Musk. Production of Tesla’s Cybertruck, which is made at the company’s factory outside of Austin, will continue.

Tesla launched the Model S in 2012, and it’s regarded as the first car that made electric vehicles widely appealing. The Model X was Tesla’s second major electric vehicle program.

Tesla always intended for its more affordable models — the Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV — to greatly outsell their predecessors.

But sales of both models have flatlined in recent years, despite interior and exterior refreshes along the way. Tesla has faced increased competition in the luxury EV space from legacy automakers, as well as upstarts like Rivian and Lucid Motors.

“So that is slightly sad, but it’s… it is time to bring the S and X programs to an end,” Musk said.

Tesla’s first ground-up design

The Model S was not Tesla’s first car — that title goes to the original Roadster. But the Model S was the first car Tesla created from the ground up.

That helped it ditch a lot of the tradeoffs of the Roadster, 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 floor-mounted battery that helped make it roomier and far more dynamic to drive than the few other all-electric vehicles that were available at the time.

Tesla also offered the Model S with multiple battery sizes, allowing customers to pay up for more EV range.

The car was instantly popular, with Tesla collecting more than 10,000 reservations for it by the time the first deliveries started in June of that year. By 2013, it had become MotorTrend’s car of the year, beating out the best gas cars from around the world.

“At its core, the Tesla Model S is simply a damned good car you happen to plug in to refuel,” MotorTrend wrote.

Tesla iterated on the Model S in the years that followed. It changed up battery options — at one point even offering larger battery packs with range that was software-limited, in a bid to get customers to adopt a sort of “buy now pay later” attitude.

The Model S was also the first Tesla to get “Ludicrous Mode,” which made it possible to go from 0 to 60 m.p.h in just 2.8 seconds. It was an exhilarating feature that also became one of Tesla’s sharpest word-of-mouth marketing tools.

Tesla kept improving the Model S, giving it industry-leading range that still beats most other EVs and an overall exterior and interior refresh in 2021. But by that point the company’s success had skyrocketed on the backs of the much cheaper Model 3 and Model Y.

The Fabergé SUV

The Model X was not so straightforward.

First teased before the release of the Model S in 2012, the Model X SUV didn’t hit the streets until 2015. When it did, it arrived with overly complex “Falcon Wing” rear doors that folded up.

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 to be very hard to build at scale with any reliable quality over the years. Musk eventually called it the “Fabergé of cars.” It was a nod to the luxury stylings and features, but also to the Model X’s brittle nature.

The Model X still sold fairly well alongside the S, and it also received a big refresh in 2021. But production problems plagued the new version, too, and Musk admitted in early 2022 that Tesla made a mistake by halting production before the redesigned Model X was ready to be made at scale.

A long time coming

In hindsight, the retirement of the Model S and Model X have been a long time coming.

Musk himself said in 2019 that Tesla was still making these “niche” vehicles more for “sentimental reasons than anything else.”

“They are really of minor importance 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.

Revealed in 2019, Tesla had big plans for the Cybertruck. The company stated it would sell a base version for $40,000, and make 250,000 of them a year. Delays brought on by the Covid pandemic, along with the vehicle’s complex new design, meant the vehicle hit the market far later than anticipated.

Once it did hit the road, the Cybertruck bombed — although Tesla continues to publicly support it, including during Wednesday’s earnings call. A supposed backlog of 2 million orders never materialized, and neither did the $40,000 base price. Tesla has struggled to sell just a few thousand of them per quarter ever since.

The Cybertruck’s failure likely gave the Model S and Model X some cover. Not only did the two legacy EVs help slightly offset the garish truck’s terrible popularity, Tesla also bucketed the three vehicles as “other models” when reporting quarterly sales figures, making it hard to say just how badly the Cybertruck was doing.

But Tesla is now a company aimed at solving autonomy in cars, and in robots, according to Musk. That’s apparently what ultimately did in the Model S and Model X.

They may have been of “minor importance” to [Tesla’s] future seven years ago. But they will always be crucial to the company’s early years, and the construction of Musk as an uber-rich businessman who now looms over modern society.