Tesla has discontinued the Solar Roof, its solar-tile roofing product, Electrek has learned.
The company has told third-party installers that it will no longer supply solar roof tiles going forward, only solar panels, according to two sources close to the program.
Two sources confirm the end of the Solar Roof
Two sources close to the program confirmed to Electrek that Tesla has informed its network of certified third-party installers that solar roof tiles are no longer available to order, and that the company will supply only conventional solar panels moving forward.
One of the sources said that internally, Tesla has concluded that the product is not financially viable.
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. The changes were live as of today.
The move formalizes a retreat that has been visible for years. 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.
A product built to sell the SolarCity merger
The Solar Roof was never just a product. It was a pitch.
Elon Musk unveiled it in October 2016 on a Hollywood back lot, using homes from the set of Desperate Housewives fitted with the tiles. Weeks later, Tesla shareholders voted to approve the company’s roughly $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity — a debt-laden solar installer where Musk was the largest shareholder and chairman, and which was run by his cousins.
The Solar Roof demo was central to selling that deal to investors, who were being asked to bail out a struggling company with deep ties to Tesla’s CEO. Years later, during shareholder litigation over the acquisition, it emerged that the tiles shown at the 2016 event were not yet functioning solar products.
Nearly a decade on, the roof that helped justify the merger is being shelved.
Prices that ballooned far beyond the pitch
The original promise was compelling: Tesla marketed the Solar Roof as costing less than a new conventional roof plus traditional solar panels combined, with early quotes in the neighborhood of $22 per square foot.
Reality diverged sharply. Installed prices came in far higher than the initial figures — and, for many customers, far higher than the quotes Tesla itself had provided. 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.
The 1,000-a-week promise that never came
The economics never scaled, and neither did the volume.
Musk repeatedly said Tesla would be producing and installing 1,000 Solar Roofs per week — a target he pinned to the end of 2019 and the first half of 2020. When Tesla claimed it had reached 1,000 roofs of weekly production in 2020, installations lagged far behind.
At its peak, Tesla was installing roughly 21 to 32 Solar Roofs per week, according to Wood Mackenzie data — more than 95% short of the goal. In total, the firm estimated Tesla installed only about 3,000 Solar Roof systems in the US across roughly seven years. As we’ve been tracking the widening gap between the Solar Roof’s promise and its reality, the product quietly slid toward irrelevance.
Tesla’s pivot to conventional panels is now complete. The company has leaned into standard rooftop solar paired with Powerwall, and Musk has talked up plans for large-scale US solar manufacturing — panels, not tiles.
Electrek’s Take
This one’s a bummer. I was genuinely excited about the Solar Roof when it launched. The concept made real sense to me: for new construction, or for anyone who needed a new roof anyway and wanted to fold solar into it, an integrated solar roof is a genuinely appealing product. You’re replacing the roof regardless — why not make it generate power and skip the racking-and-panels look a lot of people don’t want?
It obviously wasn’t as easy. A lot of engineering work went into making the product last long enough as both a roof and an energy-producing asset, while also keeping the interconnection simple enough that the installation wasn’t too labor-intensive.
But like several other Tesla products — hmm, hmm, Full Self-Driving — Tesla jumped the gun and sold something that wasn’t fully baked. The vision was announced years before the product could actually deliver on it, the pricing swung wildly, and customers who signed up on the early promise got burned.
The core problem is that the economics never got there. Between the manufacturing complexity, the labor-intensive install, and the shading limitations of the tiles, the Solar Roof only ever penciled out on very expensive homes where the buyer wasn’t especially price-sensitive.
I’ve also heard horror stories of post-installation servicing as homeowners have sometimes waited months without their expensive solar system producing any power.
If you have more information about Tesla’s solar roof tile program, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to learn more about where it went wrong. It would be great to debrief on this.
It’s also important to note that this is not a bad look for solar. The economics of solar panels installed on a roof have nothing to do with Tesla’s solar roof tiles. And depending on your roof and your electricity rates, it can make sense for many people. Furthermore, several competing solar shingle options are now available. I wonder how popular they are in comparison to Tesla’s.
While Tesla’s solar roof tiles failed, going solar (with solar panels) is often the best decision a homeowner can make. Thinking about going solar? EnergySage is a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them. Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get your free quotes here.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
