Aug 29 (edited)

Tesla Kills the Roof Shingle Product

A little off topic but related if you are trying to charge your car for next to nothing. Minus the installation costs of course. I had followed this product for a few years as we need a new roof and I hate the look of solar panels. The estimate for a regular roof job was about 35k 5 years ago and when I got the Tesla roof estimate it was 100k and unknown wait time for installation. Do any of you guys have panels and do you care what they look like?

https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/tesla-discontinues-solar-roof-panels-only/

Aug 29, 2026

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Replies (5)

· Aug 29

@TwilightChrome Needs to comment. He did the full roof analysis a few years ago. I'm a bit disappointed as this was a good idea in my mind. I'm the guy that would never put panels on my roof but would have considered the Tesla shingles.

· Aug 30

Reporting for duty. I paid the $100 down payment for them to do the CAD drawing and quote. I needed a new roof on a decent-sized home and I thought the Tesla roof would check two boxes - synthetic not Canadian Cedar shakes which are $$$ for nothing, and provide power enough to stop/reverse my electric meter. The proposal had generating tiles on less than half the roof and dummy tiles on the rest so for over $100,000 I was not eliminating my $700/month electric bill, I would maybe cut it in half. They were incredulous when I said no thanks please cancel. I was their target market and they could not close.

· Aug 30

Bingo. You described the exact reason the project was canceled. Coverage wasn't up to snuff and the efficiency of the roof tiles vs traditional panels was enough to justify the costs. A good idea but not a viable product.

· Aug 29

Nobody is surprised by this. A interesting and cool product that was so expensive and impossible to scale that Tesla just gave up on it. Yes, the roof looks amazing and you don't have ugly panels bolted to your house. But they were not as efficient as the panels and 5x the cost of installation.

A shame they never figured out how to get the costs down and scale the product.

· Aug 29

My understanding is that the total installed base of roof is only a few thousand. There original projections were for that many a month. So I would say the fell way short. Elon has no trouble killing products that are not profitable. See the Model X and Model S as examples.