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

Reubend

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.

elzbardico

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

Zigurd

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.

stackghost

>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.

7e

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

ElProlactin

> 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.

riquettistudio

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

doodlebugging

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.

pavlov

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

JKCalhoun

"…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?)

kls0e

"Why wouldn't you?"

pessimizer

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.

formvoltron

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

dekhn

Business has risk.

shevy-java

Do not become dependent on corporations run by egoistic billionaires.

freediddy

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.

monster_truck

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.

nomilk

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)

kingkandu

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.

gumby

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.