CANCELLED: Tesla Decides To Discontinue Its Solar Roof Tiles After Only 3,000 Installations In Seven Years, As Elon Musk Simultaneously Buys Up Gas Turbine Manufacturer To Power AI Ambitions ☀️🚫
Tesla is discontinuing its Solar Roof tiles, according to two sources with inside knowledge of the program who spoke to Electrek, marking the end of a product meant to let homeowners generate renewable energy without relying on conventional solar panels. One of the sources said Tesla ultimately determined the product simply wasn’t financially viable. The company will continue selling standard solar panels, meaning it hasn’t abandoned solar power entirely, but the Solar Roof’s demise caps a rocky seven-year run that never came close to matching its original hype.
Tesla originally pitched the Solar Roof to investors back in 2016 as an affordable way to generate off-grid power at just $22 per square foot, but customers who signed up found actual installation costs ballooned far beyond that quoted price, a disparity significant enough to trigger a class-action lawsuit that Tesla later settled. The gap between promise and delivery extended to production volume as well: Musk once promised the company would install 1,000 Solar Roofs a week, but according to Electrek, actual installations peaked at only several dozen per week. Over the full seven years of the program, Tesla installed roughly 3,000 Solar Roofs total, a figure that underscores just how far the product fell short of functioning as a real alternative to conventional solar panels rather than, as Futurism puts it, “investor pitch and hype.”
Tesla isn’t stepping away from solar altogether, though. TechCrunch reported last week that the company is planning a $10 billion solar factory in Texas, a project dubbed “Project Crystal Sun,” with hopes of breaking ground this year and completing construction by 2028. But that continued solar investment sits awkwardly alongside Musk’s broader energy strategy elsewhere in his business empire. His AI startup, which was folded into SpaceX earlier this year, is reportedly running on dozens of gas turbines burning substantial amounts of fossil fuels, and the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Musk went so far as to acquire an entire gas turbine manufacturer to support that operation. The contrast is notable given Musk’s past positioning: he called burning fossil fuels the “dumbest experiment in history” back in 2015, a decade before Tesla quietly dropped the word “sustainable” from its official mission statement.