Tesla appears to be calling it quits on its Solar Roof tiles nearly 10 years after their debut.
Electrek reports, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, that Tesla has told its network of certified third-party installers it will no longer supply Solar Roof tiles and will only provide conventional solar panels in the future.
Changes to Tesla’s website seem to support the report. The company’s former Solar Roof page, tesla.com/solarroof, now redirects to its solar panels page. Solar Roof has also disappeared from the website’s Energy navigation menu and support page.
The apparent end of Solar Roof follows years of signs that the product was struggling to live up to Tesla’s ambitions.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk first unveiled Solar Roof in 2016, pitching a line of solar-powered tiles that could generate electricity while also serving as a home’s roof. Musk showed off the technology at a splashy event using homes that had appeared on the popular TV show Desperate Housewives. The event came just weeks before Tesla shareholders voted to approve the company’s roughly $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity, the struggling solar installer founded by Musk’s cousins. The Tesla CEO also served as chairman of SolarCity and was its largest shareholder at the time.
Years later, litigation over the deal revealed that the Solar Roof tiles Musk showed off at the event were prototypes that were not actually operational.
That was just the beginning of the problems with Solar Roof.
One of Tesla’s big selling points was that Solar Roof could make financial sense for homeowners who needed both a new roof and wanted solar power panels. But installation turned out to be more complicated and expensive than Tesla initially expected.
In 2021, Musk admitted that the company had made “significant mistakes,” specifically with “assessing the difficulty of certain roofs.”
He said issues like roof protuberances and problems with some roofs’ underlying structures could cause installation costs to be up to three times higher than Tesla’s initial estimates.
Those price increases eventually led to a class-action lawsuit from customers who said Tesla had sharply raised the cost of their Solar Roof projects after contracts were signed. In one case cited in the lawsuit, an installation originally priced at around $72,000 jumped to roughly $146,000. Tesla agreed to a $6 million settlement in 2023.
Between high installation prices and production delays, Solar Roof never really took off.
Tesla aimed to manufacture and install around 1,000 roofs by 2020. A 2023 report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie revealed a very different reality.
The firm estimated that Tesla had installed only around 3,000 Solar Roof systems nationwide since the product’s 2016 launch. In 2022, Tesla averaged just 21 installations per week.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
