Tesla Quietly Kills the Solar Roof After Nearly a Decade

[Karen76]

Tesla has told its network of certified third party installers that Solar Roof tiles are no longer available to order and that only conventional solar panels will be supplied going forward. One source close to the program said Tesla concluded internally that the tiled product simply was not financially viable, and the company's own website now quietly redirects the old Solar Roof page directly to its regular solar panels page.

Elon Musk originally unveiled Solar Roof back in 2016 with a huge amount of fanfare, pitching tiles that would look identical to a normal roof while secretly generating electricity, shortly before Tesla shareholders approved the roughly 2.6 billion dollar acquisition of SolarCity, the debt laden solar installer Musk himself had helped found and lead. The pitch was always genuinely ambitious, a roof that looks completely ordinary but quietly powers your entire house.

Reality never really lived up to that original ambition though. Installation numbers reportedly topped out around only 3,000 units in the US over its first several years on the market, a tiny fraction of what Musk had originally promised when he said publicly the company would install 1,000 roofs per week by the end of 2019. Tesla actually stopped breaking out solar deployment figures in its own quarterly reports starting back in early 2024, which in hindsight was a pretty clear early sign this specific product was already quietly fading well before this week's news.

There has been no formal announcement or press release about the discontinuation, just quiet changes to the company's own website and direct confirmation to installers. The Energy section of Tesla's navigation menu now lists only Solar Panels, Powerwall, and Megapack, with Solar Roof simply removed entirely from the list without any explanation.

This comes in the same week Nevada cleared Tesla for large scale robotaxi operations, a reminder that the company is actively narrowing its residential energy ambitions even while expanding aggressively elsewhere in its broader portfolio

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