Tesla has quietly discontinued its Solar Roof tiles after nearly a decade

[Edward71]

Tesla has told its network of certified third party installers that Solar Roof tiles are no longer available to order, according to reporting from Electrek that cited two sources close to the program. Going forward the company will only supply conventional solar panels, and one of the sources said Tesla concluded internally that the tile product simply wasn't financially viable.

The signs of the wind down are visible on Tesla's own website. The dedicated Solar Roof page now redirects straight to the standard solar panels page, and Solar Roof has been removed entirely from the Energy section of the site's navigation, which now lists only Solar Panels, Powerwall, and Megapack. Tesla hasn't made any official public statement about the change, but the company had already stopped reporting Solar Roof deployment figures in its quarterly earnings starting back in early 2024, a signal in hindsight that the product was already fading from priority status.

Elon Musk first unveiled Solar Roof back in 2016, pitching tiles that looked like ordinary shingles or slate but doubled as functioning solar panels, right around the same time Tesla shareholders approved the roughly 2.6 billion dollar acquisition of SolarCity. The pitch was elegant on paper, a roof that replaced itself while quietly generating electricity, but the execution never matched the ambition. Reports over the years pointed to underproduction issues, likely tied to heat management problems, along with installation costs that ballooned well past what customers were initially quoted.

Over roughly seven years on the market, Tesla only managed to install somewhere around 3,000 Solar Roofs total, a tiny fraction of the company's original target of a thousand installations per week. That gap between ambition and reality is about as stark as it gets for a Tesla product, and it puts the company's residential energy strategy fully behind conventional panels paired with Powerwall batteries going forward

Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof tiles, not economically viableelectrek.co