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.

For roofs, hail is another consideration, hail damage causes complication. Age of roof is another consideration, you don't want to do solar anytime, the right time is when the roof needs to be replaced, which is usually ~25 years.

Solar shingles (Tesla roof, GAF) seem like a smart idea -- why do 2 layers of install, shingles and solar panels, instead save on both material and labor by using solar shingles.

It didn't work because the shingles are small, massively increasing the number of parts, connectors, and wiring -- and all the intensive skilled labor that it needs. Labor needs to be skilled as well as increases the number of hours. It also increases failure rates (at install time?) as well as lifecycle maintenance costs from repairs. Standard shingled roof (not the solar) is just an illegal immigrant working for $2/hour with a nail gun, unskilled labor, finishes things super super quick.

The above is a manual summary from this insightful thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166226

Could it work in future? We don't know. I think the fundamental constraint is people's existing belief system on what a roof is supposed to look like and unwillingness to consider that all roofs don't have to look the same. Perhaps its possible to let go of existing shingle design, build massive panels and make it a structural roof along with metal, but it may not have any buyers. And most definitely will not be accepted by any HOA. Most of the US in in a HOA regime. Any tiniest variation from the rigid HOA rules and regulations (slightly different shade) will require an entire roof rebuild. The constraint is not technological, but human beliefs (about what a roof should look like) and existing rigid structures on how we organized our society.

Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.

Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.

This seems to be overblown. I've seen plenty of string inverters around without issues, I'm not sure why this being used against Tesla in particular.

I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.

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.

Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?

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.

I’m open to understand why I might be wrong though.

I think marketwatch or financial times from the title…

I do think it's an interesting idea to use panels everywhere, but it can't be a complicated and expensive solution. You could maybe use them as a facade or lately people have used them for fences.

Elon Musk is like that developer you hired which always promises "this feature will be ready tommorow" and it end's up in the backlog for 6 years. The richest person in the world who understood that the world is not built on trust anymore and all you need is hype.

[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...

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.

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.