Tesla is winding down sales of its founding vehicles. The company has fewer than 600 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs left in inventory worldwide, according to a post by Elon Musk this week, and has raised prices on the remaining units by $15,000 — a scarcity premium applied to cars that were discontinued six weeks ago.
The numbers tell the story of an honorable exit. Tesla confirmed the final inventory count in early April: 295 new Model S units and 301 new Model X units, nearly all of them in the United States. Canada and Europe show zero remaining new units of either model. Tesla's website no longer offers a configurator for either vehicle. Buyers can only choose from the pre-configured inventory that remains (Electrek).
Custom orders of the Model S and Model X ended earlier this year. Musk announced the discontinuation during Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings call in January, framing it as an "honorable discharge" for two vehicles he called "slightly sad" to retire. Production officially stopped last week, ahead of the Q2 wind-down timeline he had outlined (Electrek) (Teslarati).
Tesla raised prices on the remaining inventory by $15,000 across all new and demo Model S and Model X vehicles in the United States, according to TeslaNorth.
The Model S launched in June 2012 as Tesla's first clean-sheet vehicle — the car that proved EVs could be desirable, fast, and practical for anyone who wanted the best sedan on the market. It was the world's best-selling plug-in electric vehicle in both 2015 and 2016. The Model X followed in 2015 with its signature falcon-wing doors. Together, they account for over 610,000 deliveries across their production runs (Electrek).
What killed them was neglect, not competition failure. Tesla stopped breaking out individual Model S and X sales figures in 2023, lumping them into an "Other Models" category alongside Cybertruck and Tesla Semi — a move that appeared designed to obscure how badly S/X sales were crashing. The actual numbers: Tesla sold roughly 30,000 Model S and Model X units in 2025, against a 100,000-unit annual production capacity at Fremont. Quarterly deliveries fell as low as 10,394 in Q2 2025. The June 2025 refresh — new paint, front bumper camera, improved range, and ambient lighting, paired with a $5,000 price increase — did little to reverse the decline. By then, the vehicles were competing against refreshed luxury EVs from Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, and Lucid that had received the engineering attention Tesla withheld (Electrek).
Tesla delivered 358,023 total vehicles in Q1 2026, up roughly 6% year-over-year but below analyst consensus of 368,000. Model 3 and Y accounted for 341,893 of those. The remaining 16,130 units across all other models — Cybertruck, Semi, and the final Model S/X batch combined — is the smallest category. The flagship sedans were always a small fraction of total volume — they were the halo product, the proof of concept, the car that made Tesla a car company rather than a niche manufacturer. That era is ending (TechCrunch).
BYD overtook Tesla as the top global EV seller in 2025, delivering 2.26 million vehicles versus Tesla's 1.69 million, which was a decrease for the second year in a row for Tesla (TechCrunch).
The Fremont factory is being repurposed. Tesla has leased 267,099 square feet of additional industrial space in Fremont to establish a robotics hub for Optimus, its humanoid robot program (Silicon Valley Business Journal). The company has confirmed it is retooling a portion of the Fremont campus for Optimus production. A pilot line is already running; a significantly larger Gen 3 production line is planned for 2026. Tesla has stated the retooling will not result in job losses and that Fremont headcount may increase (City of Fremont).
The Cybercab — Tesla's autonomous robotaxi — is already in production at Giga Texas. The first unit rolled off the line on February 17, 2026, and Tesla has reportedly ramped to a fleet of approximately 60 vehicles at the Austin facility. The Cybercab uses the same camera-only perception stack Tesla has bet on for FSD, without the sensor fusion approach favored by most other autonomous vehicle developers. Tesla has not filed for an NHTSA exemption to operate the Cybercab without steering wheel or pedals on public roads — a legal requirement it will eventually need to address (ThomasNet) (TechCrunch).
What Tesla is giving up is hard to understate. The Model S was the car that turned Tesla from a curiosity into a luxury brand. The Model X, while less commercially successful, demonstrated that an electric SUV could have mass appeal. Both vehicles earned their place in the EV history books. What they were not, by the end, was a priority.
The remaining inventory — at these prices, with these numbers — will be gone within weeks. Tesla has announced this chapter is closed.
