Elon Musk’s Tesla is reportedly giving up on its Solar Roof in the latest sign that the EV company is shifting gears as its CEO continues to lean into fossil fuels to sustain his AI ambitions.
Two sources confirmed to Electrek that Tesla is discontinuing its solar roof tiles, which allow homeowners to turn their roofs into renewable energy generators without relying on more unsightly solar panels.
"Tesla has discontinued the Solar Roof, its solar-tile roofing product," Electrek learned.
According to one source, Tesla found that the product is simply not financially viable. However, Tesla will continue supplying solar panels, meaning that it hasn’t entirely given up on solar, Futurism reported.
The company told third-party installers that "it will no longer supply solar roof tiles going forward, only solar panels," two sources close to the program told Electrek.
Tesla’s own website corroborates the wind-down. The company’s long-standing Solar Roof page, tesla.com/solarroof, now redirects to tesla.com/solarpanels, and “Solar Roof” has been removed entirely from the Energy navigation menu, which today lists only Solar Panels, Powerwall, and Megapack.
Tesla stopped breaking out solar roof deployment figures in its quarterly reports in early 2024, and the product had all but disappeared from the company’s marketing, Electrek claimed in its report.
Tesla sold its Solar Roof to investors as a cheap way to generate off-grid power at just $22 per square foot back in 2016.
But customers who were willing to take the company up on the offer found that the prices for installing the solar tiles immediately ballooned far beyond what Tesla originally quoted, the report added.
In 2021, Tesla drastically increased Solar Roof prices, in some cases after customers had already signed contracts.
That triggered a class-action lawsuit that Tesla settled for $6 million in 2023. One customer’s contracted price reportedly jumped from about $72,000 to roughly $146,000 before installation, Electrek reported.
Moreover, while Musk promised the company would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week, reality lagged far behind at only several dozen a week at its peak, according to Electrek.
Over seven years, Tesla installed only roughly 3,000 Solar Roofs, a product that turned out to be far more investor pitch and hype than a viable alternative to more conventional solar panels.
At the same time, the EV maker is far from giving up on solar.
As TechCrunch reported last week, Tesla is looking to build a $10 billion solar factory in Texas. It’s hoped that the project, dubbed Project Crystal Sun, will break ground this year and be completed it by 2028.
