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- Hacker News
- The museum that is being built currently in Louisiana will dwarf all this sort of thing for decades to come.by formvoltron
- It was incredibly badly engineered product, sold in a stupid way.by elzbardico
- Why was it badly engineered?by Gee101
- 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.
by pessimizer - "…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?)
by JKCalhoun - A solar energy product from Tesla was an odd fit with the CEO’s anti-environmentalist MAGA stance anyway.by pavlov
- You're right! It is odd that someone who makes electrical storage and electrical cars would be interested in solar PV, too.by fortran77
- The reason Tesla acquired SolarCity was to bail Musk out. Same as xAI, and then SpaceX, bailed out his Twitter purchase.by torlok
- 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)
by nomilk - 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.by torlok
- 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.
- 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.by Reubend
- No, it's an impractical idea that nobody wanted.by dbt00
- Clearly it’s very expensive and people aren’t paying for it.by Vaslo
- Jackery Solar Roof.by sorenjan
- 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.
- 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.
by JKCalhoun - 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.by IgorPartola
- 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.
by rsynnott - 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.
by walrus01 - 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.
by freediddy - 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.
- Well, class-action lawsuits are a thing.by JKCalhoun
- > 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.
by ElProlactin - 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.
- Nah, same with Amazon delivery subcontractors. This is sophisticated capitalists and industrialists preying on the unsophisticated.by toomuchtodo
- 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.
by shevy-java - 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.by delusional
- 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.
- 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.