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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by gumby
  • 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.
    by monster_truck
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.

    by doodlebugging
  • > 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
  • 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.
    by Zigurd

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