Fourteen years, over 610,000 deliveries, and a nostalgia post on X. That’s how you retire a legend in the Tesla universe. Elon Musk confirmed the end of Model S and Model X production with the kind of ceremony you’d expect from a man who names his children after algebraic variables. A throwback photo from the original June 2012 launch, a caption that reads “I love these cars” and just like that, two of the most important electric vehicles in automotive history are done. Custom orders closed. Configurator gone.
To be fair, this wasn’t breaking news. Musk had telegraphed the shutdown during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, framing it as an “honorable retirement”. VP Lars Moravy was even more blunt: Tesla is pivoting toward “transportation as a service”, and the Fremont production line is being converted to build Optimus humanoid robots.
The numbers tell the rest of the story without filters. Tesla quietly buried Model S and X sales data inside an “Other Models” category back in 2023 in what looked suspiciously like an attempt to keep the bleeding off the front page. Estimated deliveries for both models hovered around 30,000 units in 2025, against a production capacity of 100,000. A June 2025 refresh featuring a new color, improved range, and ambient lighting came with a $5,000 price increase.
The Model S was once the world’s best-selling plug-in electric vehicle, topping global charts in both 2015 and 2016 with over 50,000 units sold in a single year. The Model X followed in 2015 with its theatrical falcon-wing doors. Together, they proved that electric vehicles could be desirable, fast, and genuinely aspirational.
But that was then. Today, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, and Lucid have shown up to the luxury EV party with hardware that makes a decade-old platform feel its age. The refreshes came too late and asked too much. The market moved on.
Roughly 295 Model S and 301 Model X units remain in global inventory, almost all in the United States, with Canada and Europe already sold out. At current demand, they’ll be gone in weeks.
