I took delivery of my Tesla Model S on June 14, 2013, from their Grand Avenue service center in Chicago. The VIN ends in P12807, which means it was one of the first Production cars (not Alpha/Beta) to come off the California assembly line—most likely the 12,807th Model S ever produced.

I still own that car, twelve plus years and counting.

It wasn’t perfect. I replaced the battery pack. The suspension needed work. But the fundamentals—the drivetrain, the software, the core promise of what an EV could be—held up. More importantly, it kept getting better. Over-the-air updates meant the car I drove in 2025 was more capable than the one I took delivery of in 2013. That wasn’t normal. It was revolutionary.

The Model S proved something the auto industry had spent decades denying: electric cars could be premium, desirable, and viable. Not golf carts. Not compliance vehicles. Real cars that people actually wanted to drive.

The End of an Era

Tesla has announced they’re discontinuing the Model S and Model X next quarter. Production at the Fremont factory will shift to Optimus humanoid robots instead.

For context: Tesla has produced an estimated 400,000 to 450,000 Model S vehicles since 2012 (they stopped breaking out separate numbers in 2018 when they combined Model S and X reporting). My P12807 represents the first 0.003% of that production run.

The Model S wasn’t just Tesla’s second car. It was the origin story of the modern EV era.

A Brief History

The first serious attempt at a mass-market electric car came in 1996 when General Motors produced the EV1. But GM never intended it to succeed. The EV1 was a compliance vehicle—the minimum necessary to satisfy California’s 1990 Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. You couldn’t buy one. You could only lease it. And when California weakened the mandate in 2003, GM recalled every single EV1.

Except for a few donated to museums, they were all destroyed. Customers who loved their cars and wanted to buy them were refused. GM literally took them back and sent them to the crusher.

That’s what the auto industry thought of electric cars before Tesla.

The Model S changed that calculation. It forced every major automaker to take EVs seriously. Suddenly, electric wasn’t a regulatory obligation—it was a competitive threat.

The Industry’s Response

So how have traditional automakers responded over the past thirteen years?

There are more EVs to choose from now, certainly. But drive a few and you’ll see the problem: most feel like they were designed by people who don’t actually want to build electric cars. The software is clunky. The interfaces are frustrating. The updates are infrequent. The experience is analog thinking wrapped in digital hardware.

Building frictionless digital experiences isn’t in their DNA. They’re still fundamentally companies that build gas burning engines and transmissions, trying to bolt on software as an afterthought. They approach EVs the same way: take an existing platform, remove the gas engine, add batteries, ship it.

That’s not what Tesla did with the Model S. They started from first principles and asked: what should a car be if you’re not constrained by a century of internal combustion architecture?

The irony is that just as the rest of the industry is finally catching up, Tesla is walking away.

The Pivot

In last week’s earnings call, Elon Musk laid out Tesla’s future. It’s not about cars anymore. It’s about robotaxis without steering wheels. It’s about humanoid robots doing surgery. He claims his new robot, Optimus, will “create a world where there is no poverty” and provide “amazing abundance.”

He’s promising utopia through robots while discontinuing the car that proved Tesla’s original vision actually worked.

This is the same company that said it would have a million robotaxis on the road by 2020. That promised full self-driving was always just “next year” since 2016. That showed off Optimus robots at events that turned out to be largely teleoperated—meaning humans were controlling them remotely.

Meanwhile, the Model S—the actual product that works, that 450,000 people bought, that changed an entire industry—gets an “honorable discharge.” Not quite a a one-way trip to the crusher, but close.

What I Drive Now

In 2023, I gifted P12807 to my wife and bought a Lucid Air Touring.

Lucid is what Tesla used to be: a startup led by former engineers (many from Tesla) who are building a proper luxury EV from the ground up. The Air’s interior is what the Model S could have been—real materials, thoughtful design, attention to detail. The range is exceptional. The engineering is sophisticated.

I didn’t leave Tesla because the technology failed. I left because Tesla left. They stopped iterating on what worked and started chasing whatever Elon’s next obsession happened to be.

The Model S represented a company that believed electric cars could change the world by being better cars. That mission is over. Now it’s robots and promises and spectacle.

The Model S proved that electric cars could work. It forced an entire industry to change. It was the car that mattered. And now Tesla is killing it to build robots that will, somehow, end poverty.

The EV revolution happened. Tesla won. And then they walked away from the victory.

I’m glad I kept P12807 for as long as I did. I’m glad my wife still drives it. Because in a few years, when Tesla’s robotaxi promises are still “next year” and Optimus is still learning to walk without falling over, that 2013 Model S will still be doing exactly what it was built to do: proving that electric cars work.