Tesla Model S

Tesla’s first car developed in-house rather than adapted from a Lotus chassis, on sale from 2012 and, at the time of writing, scheduled to end production in 2026 without ever having been given a second generation.^[1] The engineers who designed it began by buying a Mercedes-Benz CLS and cutting a Roadster battery pack into its floor, before settling on the CLS’s proportions as a starting point for an entirely new car. Markey covers it as a single long-running generation, in line with Wikipedia’s own treatment: one article, two major mid-life updates (2016 and the 2021 “Palladium” refresh that introduced the tri-motor Plaid), and no clean generational break to split it at.