Tesla Tore Down Its Most Historic Assembly Line in 46 Days. Robots Are Moving In.

Tesla has posted a time-lapse showing the full teardown of the original Model S and Model X assembly line at its Fremont factory in California, and the crew cleared the space in just 46 days.

It’s the end of an era. The line built the two cars that turned Tesla from a struggling startup into a real automaker. The last Model S and X vehicles rolled off the line in early May 2026, ending runs of 14 and 11 years respectively. The Model S kicked things off at Fremont in 2012, and the Model X followed in 2015 with its signature falcon-wing doors. Roughly 610,000 Model S and X vehicles were built there over the years.

Both cars helped bankroll the mass-market Model 3 and Model Y, but by the end they’d become low-volume flagships as Tesla shifted its focus. Elon Musk announced the wind-down on the Q4 earnings call back in January, calling it “time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge.” The company even threw a send-off, with a batch of final invitation-only vehicles signed by the workers who built them.

Check out the video below:

What’s going in its place

The freed-up floor at the 5.3-million-square-foot Fremont plant won’t sit idle. Tesla is turning the space into a production hub for its third-generation Optimus humanoid robot, which it’s billing as the first version built for mass production. Musk described the four-month teardown and rebuild as “incredibly fast,” with new modular assembly equipment, some shipped from Germany, installed to handle the roughly 10,000 unique parts that make up each Optimus unit.

The ambitions are huge. Musk has said Fremont will eventually house a “1 million unit per year line of Optimus,” and he’s flagged that it is a completely new supply chain, with really nothing from the existing supply chain carrying over to Optimus. Low-volume manufacturing is set to start later this year, with early units going to enterprise customers first. Some reporting also points to the site being used for Cybercab down the road.

It’s a big swing. Musk said the company is shifting its strategic focus away from low-volume flagship vehicles toward automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, and he’s gone as far as saying vehicles are no longer Tesla’s core product.

Worth noting Tesla is walking into a market that’s already crowded. Chinese firms shipped roughly 90% of the approximately 13,000 humanoid robots sold globally in 2025, with Unitree’s G1 starting at $16,000 and its cheaper R1 at $4,900.