And now, it’s dead. As of this past weekend, the last Model S and Model X were built at Tesla’s Fremont, California, production line. The company now leans on the Model 3 and Model Y as its bread-and-butter cars, with the Fremont facility now pivoting to produce a theoretical army of robots.

With Tesla, projections about what the company might do are a lot hazier than what it actually does. Happily, with the Model S and Model X, it’s easy to examine a legacy that entirely transformed the automotive industry. If Tesla as a company collapsed tomorrow, the Model S would still be counted among the most influential cars ever built, right up there with the Ford Model T and the Porsche 911.

A 2015 Model S P85D was the first electric vehicle to undergo a Car and Driver long-term test, and despite a hefty $136,720 price, we came away impressed. The car’s performance and features delivered in spades, but Tesla’s real ace in the hole here was its growing charging network. In just under two years with the car, this grew from 188 locations in the United States to 325. Now, there are more than 3000 Tesla Superchargers in the continental U.S.

As for the Model S itself, the biggest compliment that could have been paid to it was the imitation of other automakers. Electrification was long a fascination of Ferdinand Porsche, who put light bulbs in his parents’ home at the age of 18 and built a functioning electric vehicle before the dawn of the 20th century. Yet Porsche’s first mass-produced EV, the Taycan, was a response to the Model S, not a pioneering effort.

Since then, the public has come to accept that electric vehicles may have potential limitations with range and reliance on charging networks, depending on where they are driven, but their performance can’t be argued with. When the 1020-hp Model S Plaid turned up in 2021, its acceleration was brutally effective.

But the claimed top speed of 200 mph was a bit of a stretch. The car was electronically governed to 163 mph, and if you actually wanted to go that fast in a Model S, on a track or the autobahn, you’d really want the additional braking of the Track package that became available later. Even so, a 1000-hp sedan is a pretty stout riposte to any argument that EVs are glorified golf carts.

Alongside this headline-grabbing EV, the Tesla Model X provided much of the same performance in a family-friendly SUV. It wasn’t much of a looker, and the gullwing-style “falcon” rear doors were a child’s idea of what a car should have. But imagine being eight years old and your parents’ car has rear doors that fold like a spaceship and also something called Fart Mode. You might start to get interested in cars.

The Model S and Model X ended in a fashion befitting their long run, with a special invite-only delivery event postponed with barely three days’ notice and no explanation. If nothing else, Tesla has proved that making promises is more profitable than keeping them, at least on a projected timeline.

However, the Model S and X did mostly deliver as expected. They arrived with a seismic impact that forced change in the automotive industry. They changed the very meaning of performance with powerful battery-electric powertrains. They were desirable and fast, and they erased the image of EVs as compromised penalty boxes for green motoring. The original Model S was a four-wheeled crystal ball that previewed the future. And it got things mostly correct.

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Brendan McAleer

Contributing Editor

Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.