alt Hacker NewsTesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels
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My thoughts are generally in line with the conclusion. The growth in the rooftop solar market has come from right-sized installations that can be put up in a day or two by a small crew. Minimizing crew and paperwork costs is important when quoting solar competitively; plus it reduces the complexity of operations at headquarters.
Cheaper installations generally win, especially when the homeowner receives a credit on the install for its projected or actual power generation (only federal credits tended to scale proportionally to the install cost.) This cost pressure has been hard for premium flat panel installers, which are in turn cheaper than Tesla was.
As acceptance of rooftop solar has grown, comfort with its aesthetics has also increased, reducing the need for solar that hides its nature.
I bet there's an aspect of normalisation here too. Tesla Solar Roofs were all about looks, all about not looking like you had solar panels, but as the world warms up (pun intended) to solar, having visible panels is less of a concern, and may even be desirable.
Shame.. I've seen one of these in person on a high-end home and its a very nice looking product. I assume the lifespan would be similar to a metal roof.
I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
please realize the author (frank lambert) has turned full anti-elon propaganda so take everything he writes with a grain of salt. or better - avoid.
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.
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?
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.
I don’t think it’s that good of an idea because only 50% of my roof was good for solar power (that is what faces the sun) so having the entire thing be panels is mostly a waste. I’m sure this is the case for a lot of houses. When I had panels installed, adding them on the “bad side” would only gain a few kwh.
Normal roof tiles are just as ugly as solar panels. They should simply make panels in all sizes so that they cover the roof properly. You probably need only a few custom size ones.
I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.
Tesla [Product] is poorly supported really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point.
Their cars have build quality issues, self driving continues to be "just around the corner", their service centers are cheap, the solar roof is it's own nightmare, the pivot to robots is laughable, the robot taxis are a PR stunt that are amusing but in a cringey way...
And the promises over the years of automatic chargers, replaceable batteries, sensors, etc.
The company had a great idea early, had tons of goodwill, a growing manufacturing capacity, and squandered it chasing whatever Elon dreamt up.
The problem with solar roofs is that it combines a changing technology, PV solar, to something that does not change, roofs. So now every time the new technology advances you need to pay for the new PV cells and the same roof tiles again. Solar roof will work once the PV tech settles down. From 20% eficiency to 100% it's a long way to go.
Solar shingles seems so smart. I guess they couldn’t get the cost down to be competitive.
Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?
Aside from power-independence, does solar on residential roofs ever make sense? For all the complexity of doing a few houses, you could do an entire parking lot (or empty land) and power the whole neighborhood.
My friend has Tesla solar roof. It's a great product but it's too expensive.
At one point after signing the contract, Tesla mailed him and notified that his previous signed contract was void and they sent him a new contract where the price had doubled to over $100k. They told he he had to sign the new contract in order for it to go forward.
This is classic Elon Musk tactic, which is to do whatever the fuck you want, laws be damned, and then try to bully your way through it. My friend didn't budge. They would call him or email him and kept harrassing him to sign the new contract and he said no. I don't remember there being a lot of news about this but I couldn't believe they had the gall to try this, although as I said, this is classic Elon Musk tactics.
Eventually I think other solar roof customers started to band together, and eventually Tesla caved and honored the original contract, as if they were doing him a favor. I'm not surprised that this technology is going to fail because it's too expensive and Musk's promise of dropping prices, surprise surprise!, never manifested.
Who could have expect that one big panel with one connection will have more reliability and better cost than lot of small panels with many connections.
This whole article is a summary of Elon Musk in general. Lots of promises, no delivery.
I hope somebody figures out at some point how to do roofing with large integrated panels that could be solar.
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.
No one should give money to this pedophile especially how killed every department looking into crimes committed by his company or his brothers companies. Such a disgrace to America. [1] [2] [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/jeffrey-epst...
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-jeffrey-epstein-h...
[3] https://www.denverpost.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-epstein-fi...
Any article on Solar Roof that doesn't mention Tesla buying solar roof from Elon musk's cousin when solar roof was going under is an article not worth reading
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.
"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.
This current crop of tech bros and companies really is the worst for humanity. Failed tech and projects I can understand, but it’s the total, consistent and persistent lack of care and disregard for people, customers & the planet. They never clean up their own mess either, and I even disliked the kids who did that at playgroup 40 years ago!! The sole ambition is always money & power. I read that article aghast at multiple points.
I recently had 9.2kw of solar panels installed in the SE of England, the actual cost of the panels themselves was ~£1k. I’ve seen new installs going up with standard cheap panels nicely inset, flush into the roof itself. The roofers themselves have told me they are cheaper than a traditional roof due to the decreasing price of panels and ever increasing price of tile. Got a listed property with a slate roof? Solar could save you potentially £10k+ according to one roofer I spoke to.
Panels were and always were going to be dumb commodity items. There’s literal fields literally filled with the things everywhere. Compare to say something like the PowerWall which they still sell bucket loads of and I have one myself, Elon be damned…
However, the PowerWall still suffers from that worst of all tech bro sins of trying to limit YOUR access to YOUR data. I wanted to add an ESP CYD to display all my Home Assistant data when we had solar installed to help us as a family see what was happening in realtime. It’s incredibly useful - In typical HN fashion I rolled my own and avoided ESPHome, making it just how I wanted and I love it! 3d printed case and all! Boots in 2 seconds and just works!
I had obviously and wrongly assumed the PW3 would be easy as pie. Getting realtime data out of the PW3 is a freaking Kafka-esque nightmare… the only workable solution to which was setting up another dedicated ESP32 to connect directly to the PW own perm on wifi and weird custom API and shunt the data over BT. Tesla could break it all at a moments notice with an update and i’ll be out of hours trying to fix it. The whole thing is cat&mouse hoop jumping, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the earlier console hacking days. Tesla will display the realtime data through their servers, through their app, but if you want that…
Anyway, please everybody who’s all gung ho on the Anthropic and OpenAI hype trains remember - every single big tech company has had the exact same disregard for you, your family, your home and your planet since the start. It’s probably more consistent than Moore’s law at this point. Nothing is going to be different this time around.
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
Why is this elektrek website still gets quoted? It is a very very biased website. I would dismiss any “opinions” or articles they post.
> 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.
Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.