The assembly line that birthed the world’s first truly modern electric car has been thoroughly gutted after fourteen years of duty. Tesla recently confirmed it dismantled the historic Fremont, California setup that started churning out the pioneering Model S sedan back in 2012 and the overly complicated, falcon-winged Model X SUV in 2015.
According to a corporate video that functions as a brief, bittersweet obituary, it took the company just 46 days to erase this foundational chapter of EV history. The floor space where hundreds of thousands of groundbreaking premium electric vehicles once stood is being aggressively re-engineered to manufacture something entirely different: Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot.
It is a classic Tesla twist. The Model S and Model X arguably revolutionized the entire global automotive industry, transitioning electric mobility from quirky science experiments into genuine status symbols. Yet, in the cold, unfeeling math of quarterly earnings reports, they slowly devolved from headline-grabbing icons into “expensive afterthoughts”. Pricing themselves out of the mass market, their plummeting sales numbers ultimately forced Tesla to bundle them into the generic “Other Models” category alongside the polarizing Cybertruck.
While the high-volume, highly profitable Model 3 and Model Y remain safely anchored as America’s favorite electric cars, production of the aging flagships quietly ground to a halt earlier this year, with the final units rolling off the Fremont floor in May.
Now, instead of high-end passenger vehicles, the factory floor will soon be dedicated to assembling two-legged androids. True to form, Elon Musk has already hyped Optimus as “the biggest product ever made”, boldly projecting an eventual output of one million robotic units per year. Naturally, a concrete timeline for this robotic revolution remains conveniently absent, and the public has not seen a meaningful technical update on the bipedal machine since late last year.
Nevertheless, Tesla is pressing ahead, expanding its pilot production line in California and ramping up hiring efforts to turn this ambitious sci-fi vision into assembly-line reality. Whether these walking computers will ever match the genuine industry impact of the pioneering Model S remains to be seen, but for now, the cars that built the empire have officially left the building.
