GoKawiilTesla’s abrupt decision to kill its Solar Roof has left the third-party contractors who sold and installed the product absorbing the fallout — including some who told Electrek they sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into the program and now have little to show for it.
Tesla stopped supplying the solar tiles in August, notifying its network of certified installers that it would ship only conventional solar panels going forward.
A product few could sell, killed overnight
The scale of the retreat is striking. Over roughly seven years, Tesla installed only about 3,000 Solar Roof systems across the US, peaking at just 21 to 32 installations a week — more than 95% short of Elon Musk’s repeated promise of 1,000 weekly installations by 2019-2020.
We reported last month that Tesla discontinued the Solar Roof after deciding internally that the product “is not financially viable”. The tesla.com/solarroof page now redirects to the company’s solar panel page, and “Solar Roof” has been stripped from the Energy navigation menu. It was the quiet end of a product that had been on life support for more than a year.
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Installers say the training alone cost them
The people left cleaning up are the certified roofers and solar contractors Tesla leaned on to actually put the product on houses.
In a report published this week, Roofing Contractor spoke to several of them, including Elevated Roofing & Siding in Dayton, Ohio, PGT Home Energy Solutions in Tempe, Arizona, Westfall Roofing in Florida, and Saguaro Solar, Electric & Roofing in Tucson.
Becoming a Solar Roof installer was not a weekend course. Contractors had to send crews to multi-week training on the West Coast, and some were required to complete three supervised installations before they were certified.
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