Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

Posted by voxadam 18 hours ago

Counter132Comment123OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by Zigurd 18 hours ago

Optimus robots will arrive in Robo taxis to install your Tesla solar roof which will also receive Internet and XAI LLM service from orbiting data centers. When? By the end of the year.

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

You forgot the "XAI LLM service powered by 60 gas turbines in Memphis running the grok CSAM generator"

Comment by delusional 17 hours ago

That'll be in space by mid next month*

Comment by moomoo11 17 hours ago

"Money won't matter in 10 years"

"Time won't matter either"

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

I think if you take enough Ketamine, it probably does seem like time ceases to matter.

Comment by TitaRusell 17 hours ago

True story I had to do a urine test for a warehouse job once. This was near minimum wage work.

Clown world.

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

Blame both the warehouse and their insurance company and personal injury lawyers in general, they probably live in fear of lawsuits from a methed up forklift driver knocking over a pallet rack and killing several people.

Comment by dgellow 17 hours ago

Don’t forget to pay the $10k to keep your spot in the waiting list!

Comment by TrainedMonkey 17 hours ago

Grok confidently said it can be done by the end of the year when Elon asked so it must be true.

Comment by jordanb 17 hours ago

But can I pay in dogecoin?

Comment by ben_w 17 hours ago

I hear that goes to the moon. :P

Comment by Zigurd 17 hours ago

Only after being refueled by 15 other giant rockets.

Comment by ben_w 17 hours ago

69, surely? This is Musk we're talking about, after all.

Comment by LoganDark 17 hours ago

Still can't get over the progression of Tesla car models going S, 3, X, Y

Comment by ben_w 6 hours ago

I remember at the time it was a refreshing change from all the stuffy corporate nonsense.

As with so many, their weaknesses are also what made them stand out initially.

Comment by LoganDark 5 hours ago

Oh, I just mean it was super funny once I realized. Not that it was an actual issue. The actual issues are more like the car uploading all camera footage to a private cloud, sending analytics and telemetry that I wouldn't want to share and being trivially remotely controllable, brickable and crashable

Comment by ben_w 2 hours ago

Same. Calling them that stood out positively, like the gull wings and the party mode; unfortunately, the same mind for that then gave us the Cybertruck and the not-legally-a-department DOGE.

Comment by formvoltron 17 hours ago

With $20T TAM!

Comment by moomoo11 17 hours ago

they will be built in Mars Factory X and similar to Titanfall they'll be orbital striked to where they need to go

Comment by boredatoms 18 hours ago

I enjoy this style of absurdism humor

Comment by ralph_cifaretto 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by otherme123 17 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

At the bottom. With links to comments as early as 2007 saying exactly the same.

Comment by ralph_cifaretto 17 hours ago

A site can't turn into Reddit when it is Reddit.

The same people post here but think it makes them smarter and wittier.

Comment by slater 17 hours ago

In the spirit of your Reddit accusations: I guess we've found the solar roof installer...?

Comment by ghostly_s 17 hours ago

There was nothing here to ruin, this is exactly the typical level of discourse.

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by queuebert 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by jaapbadlands 17 hours ago

You've mistaken the subject for the target. The subject of the derision is advanced technology, the target is Tesla promising what they're incapable of delivering.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by formvoltron 17 hours ago

"what I'm gonna do" is not advanced technology. More like a modern version of the Duke and the Dauphin.

Comment by Johnyjohnson123 18 hours ago

Hahahaha

Comment by senordevnyc 17 hours ago

Via hyperloop

Comment by ElProlactin 18 hours ago

> Tesla offloaded the hardest, least profitable part of the Solar Roof — the physical install and the customer relationship — onto small local companies, let them absorb the training and tooling costs, and then pulled the product out from under them.

I wonder how many of the companies understood this is what Tesla was doing, and recognized the risk inherent in their position.

Comment by iugtmkbdfil834 17 hours ago

It is going sound awful ( and I resist it myself, because of what it implies about us in general ), but best predictor of human behavior is what they have done in the past. There is a reason I don't own anything Tesla and last time I looked at solar roof, I explicitly noted that this brand is not an option. Nothing this expensive is allowed to become abandonware this easily. I have to assume he will be sued hard, because that kind of practice needs to be penalized hard by our society.

Comment by cindyllm 17 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by chid 17 hours ago

If you look at the history it was doomed to fail. I wouldn’t blame it on Tesla.

Comment by vardalab 17 hours ago

Who would you blame it on? Physics, gravity, destiny?

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

I would blame whatever team of figurative rocket scientists decided that putting something with many dozens of tiny discrete electrical connectors in a flat aesthetically pleasing format on a roof, exposed to rain/snow/ice.

There's a reason why the MC4 connector for traditional PV panel wiring and similar is designed the way it is, and why other things like IP67 and IP68 rated outdoor, 600/1000/1500V rated DC power connectors are as robust as they are.

This is entirely aside from the installation and mounting and labor issues to have such a weird custom solar roof tile and mount it in a way that doesn't make the roof impossible to maintain, doesn't cause leaks, and doesn't blow away in the wind.

And then secondarily blame Tesla's acquisition of solarcity to bail out Elon's brother.

Comment by foolin 14 hours ago

Huh? Bad innovation ideas is an entire market that creates secondary markets. When the outcome is larger than an article in science direct and can only be described as inevitable then there is a conglomerate with some weak decision makers.

Comment by theflyinghorse 17 hours ago

It’s the whole business for the installers. You get margin where you can, and that for them is in the marketing and selling and installing and supporting for the customers.

Comment by delusional 17 hours ago

Coming from a family of local contractors, some of whom install HVAC and such. Most of them probably understood this. It's part of the business. Pretty much every product, you are going to install, has some sort of training required, to install it properly, such that the manufacturer warranty isn't voided.

Comment by MichaelZuo 17 hours ago

Yeah it would be more surprising if they didn’t have a mandatory expensive program considering how much more complex it is than normal roofing stuff.

Comment by queuebert 17 hours ago

Is it? Modern roofing is pretty complex and is begging for innovation, even with materials that don't generate electricity.

Comment by hyldmo 17 hours ago

Anyone wanna disrupt the roofing industry with me? YC W27, tagline "like uber but for roofing". roofies.ai?

Comment by cramer4next 16 hours ago

I'm from the same background of contractors. This stuff happens all the time and is nothing unqiue to Tesla. The regular anti: Musk, Ellison and Zuckerberg crowd out with their drums and masks again.

Comment by piva00 15 hours ago

> The regular anti: Musk, Ellison and Zuckerberg crowd out with their drums and masks again.

You understand that if you left this sentence out of your comment it'd read as absolutely reasonable, right? With that addition it verges on inflammatory for no added purpose whatsoever to the message.

Comment by cramer4next 15 hours ago

I was not aware of that. Nothing inflammatory here. Its the general counter to sediment of here. If it was solar city it wouldn't even have 2 points. What makes this so different then any other product cancellation? One word, "Musk". Its a trigger word for a small majority of the population.

Comment by NewJazz 15 hours ago

What is a "small majority"? Freudian slip?

Comment by cramer4next 14 hours ago

Your reading too deep. A small majority is a group of individuals that attempt to speak for masses when in fact their statements or beliefs are non-reflective of the majority. Its like that experiment they do with a group of children where they tell 9 out of 10 children to say 2+2=5 and the 10th child just goes along with it by answer 5 too. Either because they want to fit in or they are just angry and want to belong. Forced conformency for being the odd person out when surrounded by the "small majority".

Comment by kcplate 12 hours ago

> One word, "Musk". Its a trigger word for a small majority of the population

Well…it is fashionable to hate all things Elon.

Comment by shevy-java 17 hours ago

Some probably did not know, but they learned a hard lesson here.

Smaller companies should ideally help trade with one another and cut off those greedy billionaire corporations that will eat them up whenever they can - or betray them, as Tesla showed this here.

Comment by toomuchtodo 17 hours ago

Nah, same with Amazon delivery subcontractors. This is sophisticated capitalists and industrialists preying on the unsophisticated.

Comment by felixgallo 17 hours ago

Do you suspect Amazon is going to stop delivering packages?

Comment by a4isms 17 hours ago

I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery?

I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."

Comment by toomuchtodo 17 hours ago

Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.

Comment by afavour 17 hours ago

I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.

Comment by ben_w 17 hours ago

To drive itself around safely, any ground vehicle will need some kind of awareness of those surroundings. Right now, that means cameras. I don't think people will be satisfied if those cameras get replaced with short wavelength radar given that WiFi-band radio goes through walls and would therefore allow spying inside houses and there's already people messing around with this as YouTube tech demos.

Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.

And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem even with just websites, that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with it, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.

Comment by toomuchtodo 17 hours ago

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/4...

> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to changes in the regulations governing them. Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.

I think the comparison works.

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

Aerial drone delivery services creating a fleet of flying lawnmower noises over my house is entirely a different thing than quiet electric based ground delivery vehicles... At least theoretical ground based delivery vehicles without humans aren't dumping gatorade piss bottles.

The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.

Comment by ben_w 17 hours ago

I think that's a legit question, but the way it plays out is not clear.

See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".

On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

I think the long term plan is for the automated vehicles and last mile robots to defend themselves. We're already living in some form of a post-modern cyberpunk dystopia, it just isn't full distributed yet.

Comment by SpicyLemonZest 17 hours ago

I'm not sure I understand the comparison. There's over 100k Flock ALPR cameras in the country, despite how many people passionately despise them and are willing to risk criminal charges to destroy them. Amazon is a much more popular business and delivery robots pose fewer privacy concerns, so I would expect street robots to face even fewer deployment problems if the tech becomes cost-competitive.

Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.

Comment by ben_w 17 hours ago

To add to sibling comment about the "contractor" part being the key word: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Comment by Rebelgecko 17 hours ago

Colloquially, no. But do I think there will be W-2 employees of Amazon.com, Inc (dba Amazon) delivering packages? Definitely not. It's not like Amazon owned the Prime Air plane that crashed yesterday, or employed the pilots

Comment by toomuchtodo 17 hours ago

I suspect they will continue to use “contractors” until regime change forces them not to. Midterms look good for swinging toward Dems (due to gestures broadly at everything), and this federal admin has an end date (relates to NLRB and employee classification enforcement). These issues change on an arc over years or decades.

NYC has started to do this until then: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/08/mayor-mamdani...

Bloomberg investigation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-02/amazon-tr... | https://archive.today/3Nnj9

Comment by JLO64 17 hours ago

I deliver packages for Amazon as an independent contractor (via Amazon Flex). While there are plenty of issues I have with it, I have an overall positive sentiment. For those who don’t want to work full time hours (you can schedule yourself in 1-5 hour blocks), immigrants, or are just in a bad spot it’s not a bad option. I’ve worked for food delivery apps as well and I think it’s a better gig compared to those other ones.

Comment by toomuchtodo 17 hours ago

I’ve heard a rumor that ICE is using access to gig work platforms to pickup immigrants, so I’m unsure if it’s a positive for those in the US who aren’t citizens. They’ve already consumed IRS data to do so (in violation of the law, but laws don’t matter currently).

DoorDash specifically has strong signal it’s relying heavily on undocumented labor, for example.

The only folks it really works for are those who need to convert their vehicle equity to cash promptly without any regulation.

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...

Comment by throw93947309 17 hours ago

So "employees" will drive for uber/amazon in their own cars, and will be unable to put gas and car maintenance into tax write offs as expenses (it is form of commute to work).

Lovely!

Comment by SpicyLemonZest 17 hours ago

Altogether, no. But I do think a combination of Amazon Locker, autonomous vehicles and perhaps drones are likely to radically change how last-mile delivery looks, and I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of that network currently offloads the capital onto third-party contractors.

Comment by TitaRusell 17 hours ago

In my country they are really pushing parcel lockers. And it makes sense- most people are not at home during the day. If they can put a 24/7 locker in every neighborhood or apartment complex it would be much more efficient.

Comment by mytailorisrich 17 hours ago

It seems to me that this is standard practice in the industry (solar panels/batteries, HVAC, boilers, heat pumps, etc). And, yes it leaves you at risk if the supplier decides to cancel the product(s) or if they just go bust.

Electrek has a bias against Tesla/Musk, IMHO and so tend to paint everything in a negative way. You need to take what they write with a grain of salt.

Comment by atonse 17 hours ago

I've never seen a person have such a frothing-at-the-mouth hate for any company as Fred Lambert at Elektrek has for Musk/Tesla.

Just filter for his posts, it's kind of crazy. After a few posts I started noticing a while back. Lambert writes like Elon Musk killed his puppies with his bare hands.

It causes Lambert to have nearly zero credibility in anything he writes about Tesla. It doesn't come from a place of good faith reporting.

Comment by tempestn 17 hours ago

I do agree that Lambert's coverage of Tesla appears to be pretty one-sided, and that the company has provided significant benefits to the world, but I also think there's a reasonable case to be made that Musk himself is a uniquely deleterious figure, even if the harm he brings isn't with his bare hands.

Comment by atonse 17 hours ago

That may be true, but I feel that is a separate conversation (whether Elon Musk and his companies, taken whole, have had net good or net bad contributions to the world) from Lambert's coverage, which seems to pick any single _event_ and select the most heinous, corrupt, version full of malicious intent when often unwarranted, extremely bad faith and never adds informational value to that larger debate.

Comment by rainsford 15 hours ago

I can't speak for everything the author has written about Tesla, but I don't see any intent stated or implied in this particular article. Instead it seems to mostly be accurately describing an action taken by Tesla that doesn't cast the company in an especially good light. That's not bad journalism just because some people might like Tesla or Musk and want to give them the benefit of the doubt or downplay anything negative they might do.

Comment by delusional 17 hours ago

> Electrek has a bias against Tesla/Musk, IMHO and so tend to paint everything in a negative way.

I would say Tesla and Musk are a little bit worse here than Siemens or Honda or whatever. Usually the manufacturers don't lie quite as loudly about the future of the product.

I'm sure Tesla has been more opaque then other manufacturers, but I agree that the consequence here is just normal course of business stuff.

Comment by freediddy 17 hours ago

Tesla Solar Roof has been dead for years and years. Any installers continuing with this knew the writing was on the wall years ago. My friend got a solar roof and they doubled the price on him to over 100k after they signed the contract, and tried to strong arm him into agreeing to the new price. This was 3 or 4 years ago, and once the prices doubled to 100k+ you knew that the entire thing was dead.

Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.

Comment by doodlebugging 17 hours ago

I wonder about those first adopters and where this leaves them with future support or warranty issues. The system itself looks so different from standard panel-based rooftop solar that installers will need to have been trained to install the tiles. After those installers get stiffed I feel like they might have zero incentive to come out and look at any systems that develop issues over time.

I looked at this tile-based solar when he (Musk) announced it and while it looks like a perfect system if you can make it all work, a standard roof-top solar system is easier to install and maintain. I have enough space at my place that I can install the panels in a ground mount so there was no reason to consider this specialty setup. If I had purchased a system like this I would definitely have extra components on hand in case something breaks.

I would treat it like the first model year of a new vehicle design. Buy the second or third model year so most of the problems are someone else's.

Comment by JKCalhoun 17 hours ago

Well, class-action lawsuits are a thing.

Comment by toomuchtodo 16 hours ago

Tesla mandates arbitration in their purchase agreements. Last I checked when buying a vehicle, you could opt out upon written snail mail request (I opted out, certified return receipt with a copy to my state’s Attorney General), unsure if that still applies or applies to this product.

Comment by Reubend 18 hours ago

Is there any competitor in the USA? The idea of roof tiles which are themselves solar panels seems sensible to me, and it's more aesthetically pleasing than putting panels on top of normal tiles.

Comment by walrus01 18 hours ago

It's extremely labor intensive and costly to put stuff up on the roof, and problematic in terms of electrical connector, electrical safety, and being proprietary for mounting and roof repair. Big ass PV panels that are 2.0 x 1.0 meter in size (or larger) are so cheap now for photovoltaic ground mounts that the labor and mounting can actually cost more than the panels.

460W panels can be something like $0.25 USD per STC watt in single pallet quantities shipped as LTL freight.

Or at least if you have to use your roof, just put them on boring aluminum rail mounts on roofs which are a much more known factor for roofing repair and labor.

Comment by trueno 17 hours ago

without having looked into the tesla roof tiles like at all (so stop reading here if you want any sort of informed discussion), are these things like placed individually and wired together individually? does every tile get a microinverter or is it like a net of tiles belong to one? is this potentially hundreds of connectors acrossed your roof that would be so many points of failure. if so that seems nuts and hardly worth the absurd cost just for aesthetics. feel like anyone who can afford this could just have whatever roof they want and then have their solar array farm nearby on their presumably many acres of land.

in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways

Comment by _JamesA_ 17 hours ago

How does one go about acquiring these?

Comment by walrus01 17 hours ago

By googling wholesale solar panel dealers, one example would be https://krannich-solar.com/us-en/

Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock.

PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.

Comment by SwamyM 15 hours ago

Have you done this yourself?

I am curious what the installation process is like. It seems like all the home solar companies I've dealt with want to sell you the whole kit (panels, inverter, etc.). If you've done this, I am curious how your experience was.

Comment by walrus01 15 hours ago

I've done it for small scale off grid telecom projects in the 10 to 20kW class of total quantity of panels at one site, not actually at my home (which is surrounded by trees on all sides in the pacific northwest, I'd need to build a 40kW ground mount to have any reasonable amount of production). It's completely doable if you study electrical fundamentals but I'd also recommend hiring a pro to help out if you don't have the background.

There is considerable overlap between the knowledge base for -48VDC telecom battery/DC bus/breaker/fuse panel and distribution systems and PV/off grid solar stuff, so using some of the same people who do on-grid rectifier-to-telecom-DC-power-system work was fairly straightforward for us.

Comment by rsynnott 17 hours ago

It's a slightly weird proposition, in that, well, pitched roofs last about 50 to 100 years, typically (at least here; I gather it _is_ somewhat different in the US due to different materials and building standards). So you probably don't really _want_ to prematurely replace your whole roof, so your market is basically... people who happen to need a roof replaced right now?

They also appear to have been _extremely_ expensive. Like on the order of 10x the cost of a conventional solar installation.

Conventional solar panels look perfectly fine to me, FWIW.

Comment by IgorPartola 17 hours ago

There are apparently several traditional roof shingle makers who have previewed solar tiles. A friend of mine who is a roofer told me he would not trust Tesla and is waiting for a reliable supplier. Apparently he is a smart man.

Comment by tzs 13 hours ago

Yes. Both GAF and CertainTeed, the #1 (30% of the market) and #3 (15% of the market) shingle makers in the US, both have solar shingles.

Their solar shingles looks like regular shingles and install on the roof the same way as regular shingles. Installers just need to be regular roofers with some extra training to handle the peculiarities of solar shingles. I don't know about GAF but the extra training for CertainTeed can be done online.

Compare to Tesla Solar Roof where the physical installation requires completely different skills. As a result there are way more crews available who can install GAF or CertainTeed solar shingles than Tesla roofs.

The Tesla roof tiles are more efficient than the solar shingles and they cover the whole roof, whereas the solar shingles usually don't cover the whole roof, so the Tesla roof usually generates more power.

GAF is 140 years old and CertainTeed is 122 years old, and making building materials is their main business. This makes them a lot less risky than Tesla was. If they ever decide to stop doing solar shingles it is almost certain they will handle it better than Tesla since their core business depends on keeping roofing contractors happy. They will almost certainly keep repair parts available, crews will remain available for maintenance.

Even if decades from now replacement solar shingles are not available any dead solar shingle can be replaced with a regular shingle and an electrician can adjust the system accordingly. When the roof reaches end of life and needs to be replaced, you just need an electrician to de-energize the roof and then removing it is just like removing a regular roof.

The Tesla roof on the other hand requires a special crew, both for repairs and replacement. Removing the roof is a much more involved process than removing a solar shingles roof.

This is likely going to screw existing Tesla roof owners. With Tesla actively in the business it was seen as a premium feature, bumping the market value of your house by maybe 5 or so percent.

Now buyers will see a house with one as a potential maintenance liability that will be a nightmare when it reaches EOL. Sellers may have to offer a substantial discount to sell their houses.

It comes down to GAF and CertainTeed treat it as a roof first which has solar technology, whereas with Tesla is more solar technology that is a roof.

Comment by froggy 14 hours ago

I was getting solar quotes recently and came across the CertainTeed brand that makes a “solar shingle”. I have no idea where they are made or how they compare to regular panels.

Comment by JKCalhoun 17 hours ago

Hundreds (and hundreds?) of tiles with twice that number of electrical connectors… what could possible go wrong?

I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.

Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.

Comment by readthenotes1 18 hours ago

Sorta.

The closest I know of is https://www.gaf.com/en-us/roofing-materials/residential-roof...

The advantage is that you don't have to drill additional holes into your roof, nor do you have to have shingles under the solar panels.

Depending on where you live and how much you pay in taxes, they may be enticing.

Comment by sorenjan 17 hours ago

Jackery Solar Roof.

Comment by dbt00 18 hours ago

No, it's an impractical idea that nobody wanted.

Comment by bjelkeman-again 17 hours ago

I did want it. Would have looked great on my quite old house where it is highly impractical to have conventional solar panels, as there is essentially not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location, and I need new tiles soon anyway.

I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).

Comment by delecti 17 hours ago

> not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location

That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.

Comment by KeplerBoy 17 hours ago

Works perfectly fine in Europe.

https://www.prefa.at/produkt-katalog/solarsysteme/solardachp...

Comment by JKCalhoun 17 hours ago

Interesting. They look great on a single-surface roof with 90° edges. It seems that as soon as your roof deviates from that the aesthetics begin to trend toward conventional PV panels (which of course also do not accommodate more complex roof profiles).

Comment by rsynnott 16 hours ago

Bonkers roof profiles are primarily and American thing, to be honest; not that they’re totally non-existent elsewhere, but the super-complex roof on a detached house is very American.

Comment by JKCalhoun 15 hours ago

Interesting.

(Yeah, I kind of envy the "A-Frame" that I <rarely> spot in the wild here—so simple). I didn't know the manifold roof was an American thing.

Comment by rsynnott 2 hours ago

A (rather snarky) piece about it here: https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149948821221/mcmansions-101-r...

tl;dr - It's driven by internal room shape requirements (plus weak planning; in some jurisdictions "no, that's an eyesore mess, redesign it" it a thing in planning, but I gather largely not in most US juristicitions).

Comment by Vaslo 17 hours ago

Clearly it’s very expensive and people aren’t paying for it.

Comment by gumby 10 hours ago

BIPV* has always failed for difficult-to-address reasons and the “Tesla” version was no different from the others in the market so had no differentiation that would allow it to survive. I know why Tesla bought the company (bail out musk’s cousin) but don’t know why they kept trying to sell the product for so long.

* BIPV is “Building-Integrated Photo Voltaic” and the company Tesla bought was a late entrant to an already failing sector.

Comment by monster_truck 17 hours ago

They do the same thing with their cars! Incredibly expensive proprietary fasteners that you might only need 12 of sold in unit sizes like 500 or 1000. Sometimes they change multiple times per model year. You cannot buy them secondhand or share with other shops as part of the agreement to buy them in the first place. Know a couple auto body dudes that lost their ass thinking they would be like every other automaker. They have all since stopped doing work on Teslas.

Comment by nomilk 17 hours ago

Why did it fail? I remember seeing the launch announcement for SolarCity and being wowed (logic: every house needs a roof, so why not make the roof from solar tiles instead of regular tiles and get free energy).

I guess the unit-economics didn’t work? (but seems like a good thing to have tried given the massive TAM)

Comment by torlok 17 hours ago

Solar Roof was vaporware when it was presented by Musk. It was blatant fraud. There's no "free energy" here. The roof was way more expensive than a regular roof covered in solar panels.

Comment by pavlov 17 hours ago

A solar energy product from Tesla was an odd fit with the CEO’s anti-environmentalist MAGA stance anyway.

Comment by torlok 17 hours ago

The reason Tesla acquired SolarCity was to bail Musk out. Same as xAI, and then SpaceX, bailed out his Twitter purchase.

Comment by fortran77 17 hours ago

You're right! It is odd that someone who makes electrical storage and electrical cars would be interested in solar PV, too.

Comment by kingkandu 11 hours ago

Tesla is not and was never about the products and actual business. It's a shit business.

Its about hype farming so idiots take leveraged positions in the stock and get wiped out.

If you see Elon saying something particularly distasteful or stupid he is collecting puts to liquidate.

Comment by JKCalhoun 17 hours ago

"…Tesla installed only about 3,000 Solar Roof systems across the US, peaking at just 21 to 32 installations a week — more than 95% short of Elon Musk’s repeated promise of 1,000 weekly installations by 2019-2020."

What was he smoking? (Oh, never mind that.) I mean was he expecting Federal tax incentives/rebates for installing solar to create that demand for 1,000/week?

(Or perhaps I should ask what were all these contractors smoking that thought it was a good idea to sink $100K of their money to go into business pedaling his wares?)

Comment by formvoltron 17 hours ago

The museum that is being built currently in Louisiana will dwarf all this sort of thing for decades to come.

Comment by pessimizer 17 hours ago

Seems very related to another electrek story today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599058 If a Tesla Cybercab fleet were profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you one

They seem to just be laying downside risk off onto suckers, and holding on to upside. They probably broke even on the Solar Roof project, while their contractors are ruined.

One arbitrary day they could bail on cybercabs just as easily, probably walk away having made a pile of money anyway, while a bunch of people are stuck with a bunch of used up vehicles that they have to try and sell, and can only sell with the consent of Tesla itself.

Great model. Good followup on "do things that the state should be doing so the state pays you a ton of money, then have a luxury version of the same thing that you sell to wealthy customers (whose tech has been entirely subsidized by the state.)"

Musk's empire is a purely financial play that has nothing to do with tech, just like Palantir. It's all money games, like everything else in the West. Scam age.

Comment by kls0e 17 hours ago

"Why wouldn't you?"

Comment by riquettistudio 17 hours ago

I hate how big companies always have the power to screw up the workers.

Comment by shevy-java 17 hours ago

Do not become dependent on corporations run by egoistic billionaires.

Comment by 7e 18 hours ago

Musk’e fraudulent bailout of Solar City (and himself) reaches its conclusion.

Comment by georgemcbay 17 hours ago

> Musk’e fraudulent bailout of Solar City (and himself) reaches its conclusion.

Nothing ever really ends, he's just higher up in the stack now fraudulently bailing out everything below with SpaceX.

Comment by stackghost 18 hours ago

>Tesla offloaded the hardest, least profitable part of the Solar Roof — the physical install and the customer relationship — onto small local companies, let them absorb the training and tooling costs, and then pulled the product out from under them. Tesla keeps a manageable warranty liability on 3,000 roofs. The installers keep the stranded investment, the abandoned pipelines, and the awkward job of servicing a discontinued product for the next two decades.

Well, that's certainly on-brand for Elon Musk. Over promise, under deliver, pay a PR firm to operate sock puppet accounts to tell you how great he is. That is his MO.

Comment by elzbardico 18 hours ago

It was incredibly badly engineered product, sold in a stupid way.

Comment by Gee101 18 hours ago

Why was it badly engineered?

Comment by fooblaster 17 hours ago

The entire premise is stupid. Panels need to be large to have reduced install costs and wiring costs. Install costs dominate solar install pricing in the United states. It is far far cheaper to install a new roof and giant solar installation than to go with a solar roof. It's just a broken concept at the very start.

Comment by iugtmkbdfil834 17 hours ago

Was going to so ask the same. As much as I dislike Tesla and its products, I can't take away its value proposition ( good integration and simplicity for end user ).

Comment by elzbardico 15 hours ago

The last thing we can call this thing is simple.

Comment by kingleopold 17 hours ago

costs made ROI very low, that comes to my mind

Comment by elzbardico 15 hours ago

First,

Read the installation manual. https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/Solar/Roof/Insta...

Now that we are on the same page. think about the problems of such a complex system when you turn an ordinary roof repair into an electrical system repair and vice-versa.

Your roof was damaged by a hailstorm? great now you need a specialized roofer who is also a solar system technician. Any solar system technician used to standard solar equipments? No, one that is familiar with the bespoke tesla system. Now every roofing issue is an electrical issue, and every electrical issue with your PVs is a roofing problem too. Need to

Everything seems to be oriented toward aesthetics. Eliminating the gap between the panels in a roof is more aesthetically pleasing, but that gap in traditional panel installations serves as an important element in thermal management.

If you compare it with traditional PVs it sacrifices, cooling, modularity, maintainability, firefighter response, conductor and connections visibility, and simplicity for good looks. It makes you dependent on a single vendor for your now dual-function roof.

For me, it is a text case of bad engineering.

Comment by dekhn 17 hours ago

Business has risk.