Tesla Pulls Solar Roof Tiles After Seven Years and Roughly 3,000 US Installs

Tesla has stopped accepting orders for its Solar Roof product, according to two sources who spoke with Electrek. The company notified its network of certified contractors of the decision, and the tile offering has since been removed from the website’s navigation menu, which now features only conventional solar panels and the Powerwall and Megapack storage lines.

One source told Electrek that Tesla concluded the product was financially unviable. According to Electrek’s analysis, the core difficulty lay in embedding power generation directly into roofing material: manufacturing complexity, a labor-intensive installation process, and shading issues affecting individual tiles meant the economics held up only for the most expensive properties.

The distance between early pricing expectations and actual project costs proved wide. Tesla had originally pointed to a figure of around $22 per square foot, positioning Solar Roof as cost-competitive with a conventional re-roof combined with standard panels. In at least one recorded case, a contracted price rose from $72,000 to $146,000 before installation work had even started.

Deployment numbers remained well below the company’s stated ambitions throughout the product’s lifespan. Wood Mackenzie figures show peak weekly installations of 21 to 32 systems — a figure more than 95 percent below a target of 1,000 per week. Across the full seven years Solar Roof was offered on the US market, approximately 3,000 units were installed in total.

Source: Electrek