"Time won't matter either"
Clown world.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
At the bottom. With links to comments as early as 2007 saying exactly the same.
The same people post here but think it makes them smarter and wittier.
I wonder how many of the companies understood this is what Tesla was doing, and recognized the risk inherent in their position.
There's a reason why the MC4 connector for traditional PV panel wiring and similar is designed the way it is, and why other things like IP67 and IP68 rated outdoor, 600/1000/1500V rated DC power connectors are as robust as they are.
This is entirely aside from the installation and mounting and labor issues to have such a weird custom solar roof tile and mount it in a way that doesn't make the roof impossible to maintain, doesn't cause leaks, and doesn't blow away in the wind.
And then secondarily blame Tesla's acquisition of solarcity to bail out Elon's brother.
You understand that if you left this sentence out of your comment it'd read as absolutely reasonable, right? With that addition it verges on inflammatory for no added purpose whatsoever to the message.
Well…it is fashionable to hate all things Elon.
Smaller companies should ideally help trade with one another and cut off those greedy billionaire corporations that will eat them up whenever they can - or betray them, as Tesla showed this here.
I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."
Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.
And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem even with just websites, that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with it, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.
> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to changes in the regulations governing them. Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.
I think the comparison works.
The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.
See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".
On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.
Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.
NYC has started to do this until then: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/08/mayor-mamdani...
Bloomberg investigation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-02/amazon-tr... | https://archive.today/3Nnj9
DoorDash specifically has strong signal it’s relying heavily on undocumented labor, for example.
The only folks it really works for are those who need to convert their vehicle equity to cash promptly without any regulation.
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
Lovely!
Electrek has a bias against Tesla/Musk, IMHO and so tend to paint everything in a negative way. You need to take what they write with a grain of salt.
Just filter for his posts, it's kind of crazy. After a few posts I started noticing a while back. Lambert writes like Elon Musk killed his puppies with his bare hands.
It causes Lambert to have nearly zero credibility in anything he writes about Tesla. It doesn't come from a place of good faith reporting.
I would say Tesla and Musk are a little bit worse here than Siemens or Honda or whatever. Usually the manufacturers don't lie quite as loudly about the future of the product.
I'm sure Tesla has been more opaque then other manufacturers, but I agree that the consequence here is just normal course of business stuff.
I looked at this tile-based solar when he (Musk) announced it and while it looks like a perfect system if you can make it all work, a standard roof-top solar system is easier to install and maintain. I have enough space at my place that I can install the panels in a ground mount so there was no reason to consider this specialty setup. If I had purchased a system like this I would definitely have extra components on hand in case something breaks.
I would treat it like the first model year of a new vehicle design. Buy the second or third model year so most of the problems are someone else's.
460W panels can be something like $0.25 USD per STC watt in single pallet quantities shipped as LTL freight.
Or at least if you have to use your roof, just put them on boring aluminum rail mounts on roofs which are a much more known factor for roofing repair and labor.
in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways
Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock.
PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.
I am curious what the installation process is like. It seems like all the home solar companies I've dealt with want to sell you the whole kit (panels, inverter, etc.). If you've done this, I am curious how your experience was.
There is considerable overlap between the knowledge base for -48VDC telecom battery/DC bus/breaker/fuse panel and distribution systems and PV/off grid solar stuff, so using some of the same people who do on-grid rectifier-to-telecom-DC-power-system work was fairly straightforward for us.
Their solar shingles looks like regular shingles and install on the roof the same way as regular shingles. Installers just need to be regular roofers with some extra training to handle the peculiarities of solar shingles. I don't know about GAF but the extra training for CertainTeed can be done online.
Compare to Tesla Solar Roof where the physical installation requires completely different skills. As a result there are way more crews available who can install GAF or CertainTeed solar shingles than Tesla roofs.
The Tesla roof tiles are more efficient than the solar shingles and they cover the whole roof, whereas the solar shingles usually don't cover the whole roof, so the Tesla roof usually generates more power.
GAF is 140 years old and CertainTeed is 122 years old, and making building materials is their main business. This makes them a lot less risky than Tesla was. If they ever decide to stop doing solar shingles it is almost certain they will handle it better than Tesla since their core business depends on keeping roofing contractors happy. They will almost certainly keep repair parts available, crews will remain available for maintenance.
Even if decades from now replacement solar shingles are not available any dead solar shingle can be replaced with a regular shingle and an electrician can adjust the system accordingly. When the roof reaches end of life and needs to be replaced, you just need an electrician to de-energize the roof and then removing it is just like removing a regular roof.
The Tesla roof on the other hand requires a special crew, both for repairs and replacement. Removing the roof is a much more involved process than removing a solar shingles roof.
This is likely going to screw existing Tesla roof owners. With Tesla actively in the business it was seen as a premium feature, bumping the market value of your house by maybe 5 or so percent.
Now buyers will see a house with one as a potential maintenance liability that will be a nightmare when it reaches EOL. Sellers may have to offer a substantial discount to sell their houses.
It comes down to GAF and CertainTeed treat it as a roof first which has solar technology, whereas with Tesla is more solar technology that is a roof.
They also appear to have been _extremely_ expensive. Like on the order of 10x the cost of a conventional solar installation.
Conventional solar panels look perfectly fine to me, FWIW.
I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.
Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.
The closest I know of is https://www.gaf.com/en-us/roofing-materials/residential-roof...
The advantage is that you don't have to drill additional holes into your roof, nor do you have to have shingles under the solar panels.
Depending on where you live and how much you pay in taxes, they may be enticing.
I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).
That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.
https://www.prefa.at/produkt-katalog/solarsysteme/solardachp...
(Yeah, I kind of envy the "A-Frame" that I <rarely> spot in the wild here—so simple). I didn't know the manifold roof was an American thing.
Its about hype farming so idiots take leveraged positions in the stock and get wiped out.
If you see Elon saying something particularly distasteful or stupid he is collecting puts to liquidate.
Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.
I guess the unit-economics didn’t work? (but seems like a good thing to have tried given the massive TAM)
What was he smoking? (Oh, never mind that.) I mean was he expecting Federal tax incentives/rebates for installing solar to create that demand for 1,000/week?
(Or perhaps I should ask what were all these contractors smoking that thought it was a good idea to sink $100K of their money to go into business pedaling his wares?)
They seem to just be laying downside risk off onto suckers, and holding on to upside. They probably broke even on the Solar Roof project, while their contractors are ruined.
One arbitrary day they could bail on cybercabs just as easily, probably walk away having made a pile of money anyway, while a bunch of people are stuck with a bunch of used up vehicles that they have to try and sell, and can only sell with the consent of Tesla itself.
Great model. Good followup on "do things that the state should be doing so the state pays you a ton of money, then have a luxury version of the same thing that you sell to wealthy customers (whose tech has been entirely subsidized by the state.)"
Musk's empire is a purely financial play that has nothing to do with tech, just like Palantir. It's all money games, like everything else in the West. Scam age.
Nothing ever really ends, he's just higher up in the stack now fraudulently bailing out everything below with SpaceX.
Well, that's certainly on-brand for Elon Musk. Over promise, under deliver, pay a PR firm to operate sock puppet accounts to tell you how great he is. That is his MO.
Read the installation manual. https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/Solar/Roof/Insta...
Now that we are on the same page. think about the problems of such a complex system when you turn an ordinary roof repair into an electrical system repair and vice-versa.
Your roof was damaged by a hailstorm? great now you need a specialized roofer who is also a solar system technician. Any solar system technician used to standard solar equipments? No, one that is familiar with the bespoke tesla system. Now every roofing issue is an electrical issue, and every electrical issue with your PVs is a roofing problem too. Need to
Everything seems to be oriented toward aesthetics. Eliminating the gap between the panels in a roof is more aesthetically pleasing, but that gap in traditional panel installations serves as an important element in thermal management.
If you compare it with traditional PVs it sacrifices, cooling, modularity, maintainability, firefighter response, conductor and connections visibility, and simplicity for good looks. It makes you dependent on a single vendor for your now dual-function roof.
For me, it is a text case of bad engineering.