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Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

electrek.co

121–130 of 363 posts

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#121

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 reporting on Elektrek is top notch. They care deeply about real sustainable energy and transportation and are willing to dig deep past the marketing and plainly report the facts. I can't count the number of times they've had exclusive scoops or found insightful angles nobody else was concerning.

This may be true, but from an editorial perspective they are openly and aggressively anti-Tesla. I think it's worth noting as this article is Tesla related.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They thought it would work That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.

Pretty sure this didn’t help either though: > Customer service complaints are pervasive and consistent. Tesla Energy has a 2.6 out of 5 rating on SolarReviews

Yeah, there's some tubers out there that have absolutely scathing reviews for their customer ervice.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#123
post #21

I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially

Nah, Elon Musk faked the demo [1] so he could defraud Tesla investors into bailing out his cousins. [1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...

The Steel Pulse idea actually sounds sort of possible...

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#124
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.

I wish that were true, but I suspect more people are doing it to be trendy/appear "green" than basing it on a system lifetime ROI calculation vs. alternatives.

You need only have read the HN front page 4 days ago to have seen one reason why 50,000 people may be motivated to get solar. Nothing trendy going on there, just poor regional planning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#125
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.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#126
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.

I wish that were true, but I suspect more people are doing it to be trendy/appear "green" than basing it on a system lifetime ROI calculation vs. alternatives.

What alternatives do you have in mind that also have an ROI for the homeowner?

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#127

> 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 bi…

Are these payback periods factoring in opportunity cost? If not the game is already lost. If so periods that long are so sensitive to alternate asset returns that they could easily be infinity.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#128
post #74

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.

Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.

They'd actually make economic sense where I live, the only thing that's held me from pulling the trigger is that I want to time it with when I need to have the roof inspected/replaced.

I'm aware of the arguments about how it can be that much cheaper when deployed at mass centralized scale rather than decentralized across a bunch of rooftops, however the way the electric markets are prices is based primarily on the cost to produce the marginal supply, which is usually gas.

So while the power company might flood a bunch of solar panels trying to capture the profit between cost to generate solar vs. cost to generate using gas, those profits haven't been lowering electric costs at residential rates. If anything those costs are still climbing.

It's actually not hard to get rooftop solar to pencil out in that situation, especially if you assume even moderate growth in future electricity rates or inflation. In my own tracker it would even be superior to paying down additional principle on my home mortgage!

Admittedly it would be less of a slam dunk if the net metering was less generous around here as you'd basically be required to add battery to the mix if you weren't already. But even that just prolongs the time to payoff, it still ends up having good ROI economically speaking.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#129
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.

I caught him a few times not writing significant details that go against his narrative. "FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD. "Tesla consistently hides information from the court." There are two different cases separated by years. The police got all the information they needed in the first case. "FSD is 10x worse than the avera…

"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD.

To be fair that's not a contradiction. If FSD is designed such that a user braking because FSD was about to plow into something, sure the user started driving at the last second, but that is Tesla making a design choice to artificially blame users for FSD being fundamentally unsafe.

Re: Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels

#130
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both self driving craze and car tunnel madness is only possible at all because how car centric US mindset is. If you even try to suggest that people could instead use good public transport and pedestrian infrastructure they would look at you like you are some sort of crazy. Musk just takes car centric society pipe dreams and sell it back to them. Like OMG you transiting to work and can safely stay in your phone 99% o…

But transit only solves your problem in cities like London. Some people - for some reason I’m still not entirely clear on - seem to like this. But other people - so far the majority - don’t. And for those, self-driving cars solve the transit problem. That’s valuable. And you only need to beat unit economics of taxis. So there is a significant margin to capture

For the 'don't want to live in transit-dense cities like London' crowd, beating the economics of taxis may not be enough since that's not what you're competing with out in the suburbs.

On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.

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