Tesla's solar roof dies at 2 percent of target, and premium BIPV loses its biggest backer

The loop that killed the product is legible in the tooling bill. Conventional panels got cheap because the world builds billions of standardized cells and assembles them into largely standardized panels ^[14]. The tiles were specific to Tesla's system, so Tesla designed and bought its own manufacturing equipment, and when the sales did not arrive, the per-unit cost of that equipment rose ^[13]. A fixed cost split across a small number is a large number, and the price it produced was the reason the number stayed small. Some homeowners reported quotes of $200,000 ^[11].

Integration charged a second fee, in physics. Cells lose roughly half a percent of voltage per degree Celsius, and ordinary panels handle that by standing off the deck with an air gap; the solar roof's gap was much smaller, which may have pushed temperatures up and output down ^[16]. There were reports of non-solar parts warping and roof underlayment melting, and separately of systems generating less electricity than Tesla had said they would ^[15].

The run rate is worth converting. Twenty to forty installs a week is 2 to 4 percent of a thousand ^[28]. The roughly 3,000 US systems Wood Mackenzie counted over the product's life ^[5] amount to about three weeks of output at the target rate ^[22]. Mass production only started in March 2020 ^[10], so if most of that base was built after that date, the implied average through the end of 2022 is about 21 a week ^[29], which is what Gizmodo reports Tesla actually averaged that year ^[26]. There is no interrupted ramp in those figures, only a rate that sat at a fortieth of plan for the whole of the product's manufacturing life. The 2023 settlement, spread across every system ever installed, works out near $2,000 apiece ^[24].

The beginning explains some of what was missing later. Musk unveiled the tiles in 2016 on houses from the Desperate Housewives set, weeks before shareholders approved the roughly $2.6 billion purchase of SolarCity, where he was chairman and the largest shareholder ^[19]; litigation over that deal later established that the tiles at the event were non-operational prototypes ^[20]. Nine years on the capital is moving the other way, into a planned $10 billion factory near Houston to make more conventional panels ^[7], close to four times the SolarCity price ^[23].

The product will outlive the decision for a while. Two installers told TechCrunch their company was still offering the solar roof, one saying availability would depend on the project's timeline, which reads like a warehouse being cleared ^[17]. Tesla did not immediately respond to Gizmodo's request for comment ^[8]. What survives of the category is the buyer Tesla opened with and never got past: someone who dislikes the look of panels enough to pay a premium for the alternative ^[21].