Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss

Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.

Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.

The 2016 demo was the high point

The pitch in 2016 was a good one, and it still is. You need a roof anyway, so buy one that also makes power, in tiles you can't pick out from slate or terracotta at street level. Ten years later the shipping product had reached a few thousand houses, and it had reportedly been on life support for more than a year before Tesla pulled the plug.

The install was always the hard part. A Solar Roof replaces the roof instead of sitting on top of one, so whoever puts it up has to be a roofer and an electrician at the same time, and has to know Tesla's system well enough that the house doesn't leak.

The roofers staffed up for it

That's where the losses landed. Elevated Roofing & Siding in Ohio, PGT Home Energy Solutions and Saguaro Solar, Electric & Roofing in Arizona, and Westfall Roofing in Florida all built crews around a product Tesla has now stopped making. They put hundreds of thousands of dollars into hiring, tooling and training.

"It wasn't simply taking a training; there was investment in learning the system," said Westfall Roofing's president. Nobody has published a per-company figure and the installers haven't given one. What they describe is money sunk into people and process, the kind of spend you can't resell when the product disappears.

Tesla can absorb a discontinued product line. A roofing outfit in Dayton or Tucson that hired and trained for that product has a harder time doing the same.

What it means if you own one

Roughly 3,000 households now have a roof whose manufacturer just left the business. Tesla says it will honor existing warranties and keep supplying replacement parts for those systems. Plenty of companies exit a category with less.

The installers are less confident about year eight or year twelve. There are only about 3,000 of these roofs in the country, tile inventory is finite, and the number of people trained to work on one starts shrinking the day the product stops selling.

So if you own a Solar Roof, put the warranty paperwork somewhere you can actually find it, and figure out now which local contractor still services the system, while the crews who trained on it are still in business.