Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially

When they rolled out the product with tiny tiles I always thought musk was being to ambitious. The smaller the tiles the harder a solar roof gets.

Surely there’s a middle ground where a roof is made of something big and panel-sized, rather than a conventional roof with panels as another layer on top?

Did any other manufacturers build their own version? It seems like the right long term idea but the lack of other players seems to indicate there's some underlying issue that isn't solved yet.

Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.

Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.

Everyone gets caught up in the thermal management stuff and the power density stuff and whatever but to me that's a red herring.

The real issue is that Tesla has never known the ability to produce solar panels at scale and Musk said in that recent interview with Dwarkesh that he intends to do all the solar production in house.

So where's he getting the sand from? How are they going to purify it at scale? How are they going to turn it into ingots and then wafers and then cells and panels when they haven't even been able to produce a slim fraction of panels without all those extra steps over the past decade for their roofs?

And if the goal is to have the industrial capacity to do all this in a few years and produce solar panels on the scale that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just lay those bad boys down en masse on Earth and solve the impending climate crisis and our current energy shortages?

It just doesn't make sense.

Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.

As someone who owns a Solar Roof, this news is disappointing. Many of my friends have said it's the best roof they've ever seen, and I even sometimes get compliments from people who drive past.

"The economics never worked either. An average Tesla Solar Roof costs approximately $106,000 before incentives, compared to roughly $60,000 for a traditional roof replacement plus conventional solar panels — a $46,000 premium. The payback period stretches to 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 years for traditional panels. In 2023, Tesla settled a class-action lawsuit for $6 million after customers accused the company of bait-and-switch pricing, with one plaintiff seeing their contracted price jump from $72,000 to $146,000."

Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.