Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 135 posts

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#71

Post by walrus01 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #58
afavour wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/4... > As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to changes in the regulations governing them. Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the…

Aerial drone delivery services creating a fleet of flying lawnmower noises over my house is entirely a different thing than quiet electric based ground delivery vehicles... At least theoretical ground based delivery vehicles without humans aren't dumping gatorade piss bottles.

The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#72

Post by ben_w »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
a4isms wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery? I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."

Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.

I think that's a legit question, but the way it plays out is not clear.

See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".

On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#73

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#76

Post by vardalab »

chid wrote: post #66
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bec…

If you look at the history it was doomed to fail. I wouldn’t blame it on Tesla.

Who would you blame it on? Physics, gravity, destiny?

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#78

Post by ben_w »

afavour wrote: post #46
toomuchtodo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.

I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.

To drive itself around safely, any ground vehicle will need some kind of awareness of those surroundings. Right now, that means cameras. I don't think people will be satisfied if those cameras get replaced with short wavelength radar given that WiFi-band radio goes through walls and would therefore allow spying inside houses and there's already people messing around with this as YouTube tech demos.

Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.

And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem even with just websites, that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with it, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#79

Post by freediddy »

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.

Re: Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses

#80

Post by shevy-java »

ElProlactin wrote: post #12

> 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.

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.

Post reply on HN