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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It seems to me that this is absolutely standard practice in the industry (solar panels/batteries, 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"…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?)
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.
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.
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.
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)
Solar Roof was vaporware when it was presented by Musk. It was blatant fraud. Your definition of "free energy" is curious. Do you think the solar tiles cost the same as regular tiles?
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 8.8 ms ] threadI mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.
Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.
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.
The road to thousands of karma is apparently paved with one turd comment at a time.
*orange reddit intensifies*
Nothing ever really ends, he's just higher up in the stack now fraudulently bailing out everything below with SpaceX.
I wonder how many of the companies understood this is what Tesla was doing, and recognized the risk inherent in their position.
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.
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.
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.
Well…it is fashionable to hate all things Elon.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.
I guess the unit-economics didn’t work? (but seems like a good thing to have tried given the massive TAM)
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.
* BIPV is “Building-Integrated Photo Voltaic” and the company Tesla bought was a late entrant to an already failing sector.