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My thoughts are generally in line with the conclusion. The growth in the rooftop solar market has come from right-sized installations that can be put up in a day or two by a small crew. Minimizing crew and paperwork costs is important when quoting solar competitively; plus it reduces the complexity of operations at headquarters.

Cheaper installations generally win, especially when the homeowner receives a credit on the install for its projected or actual power generation (only federal credits tended to scale proportionally to the install cost.) This cost pressure has been hard for premium flat panel installers, which are in turn cheaper than Tesla was.

As acceptance of rooftop solar has grown, comfort with its aesthetics has also increased, reducing the need for solar that hides its nature.

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In Australia solar panels are so ubiquitous I don't think you'd even notice them. They just blend in as much as any other functional part of a house.

My perception has long reached the flipping point where sun-facing roof without any solar installed makes the house look like a house in bad maintenance.

I like this perspective and we should propagandize it in the lifestyle magazines.

I've long thought of them as a visible signifier of prosperity and cluefulness, but since they've become standard on new build they just fade into the background.

I've not seen solar-over-thatch yet. I wonder if that exists in the Highlands somewhere.

It's odd that you confuse a massive capital investment with maintenance.

That's just how perception works. It's rarely fair. People who keep their car running perfectly fine for 20 years will appear like they don't care, people who return a young but worn out near-wreck every time the lease runs out will give the opposite impression. And don't get me started about fast fashion!

But it's more than that with residential solar: at least in places where with a heavy oversupply in real estate, "massive capital investment" is hardly a matching term. More like a drop in the ocean, given the amount of capital bound in the whole package.

When things get so widespread people stop crying about aesthetics.

Railways, highways, wind turbines- they become part of the landscape.

Roads covered with cars are an egregious eyesore and yet everyone is thoroughly acclimated to them. The amount of land we allocate just for parking would be shocking if it weren't so normal.

Speaking of which, solar roofs for parking lots always seemed like a thing we should be doing everywhere. I'm sure it's not cheap to build the structure but it has the added benefit of protecting cars.

This is also representative of Tesla’s stagnation as a company. They essentially have not made a new product since the Model Y came out. No, the Cybertruck doesn’t count, I don’t think we can even consider that a product brought to completion in terms of being an automobile of acceptable market competitiveness.

They are struggling in China which is pretty insane considering their head start in that country.

Clearly the solar roof idea could have been iterated on and made to make more financial sense. I think they could have built it into a panel solution that integrates a standard steel roof.

But again, what it looks like to me is that Tesla hasn’t actually been able to put real money and effort into any products at all. I think all their best people quit, and their leadership is distracted and ineffective.

I think the pattern is less "Tesla can't invent anymore" and more that the company seems much worse at turning ambitious concepts into mature, supported products

I think it’s both, but also they don’t even need ambitious concepts. They just need to make vehicles that compete in popular segments and become a proper full range automaker.

Tesla has no 3-row SUV/family vehicle, no subcompact SUV (Kia EV3), no city subcompact car (Renault 5), and no commercial vehicles.

Don't have still highest sales on model 3s?:

Tesla is now out of the top 10 list for EV sales in China as a brand.

The Model 3 is not one of the top 5 selling EVs in Europe. Everything in the top 3 has a hatch. Sedans are more popular in the American market but they’re also a dying segment compared to SUVs, while Europe always preferred vehicles with hatchbacks for space efficiency and practicality.

Volkswagen Group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The Skoda Elroq and VW ID.4 together (same platform) outsell the Model Y.

My next prediction is that the Rivian R2 steals about 30% of Model Y sales in the US. It’s priced similarly and it’s a way better vehicle according to early reviews and impressions, and it fits the boxy American SUV off-road aesthetic far better.

Europe now has lots of fairly-local EV options: VW (inc Cupra and Skoda), Renault, even Stellantis. Despite their poor rep they make a lot of cars: Vauxhall/Opel, Fiat etc.

UK now has a significant Chinese presence: Omoda, Jaecoo (Chery), and especially BYD.

This is essentially Tesla’s looming biggest problem: they just don’t compete in enough model segments.

No tiny city car hatchback for volume in Europe, no three row SUV for American families, no commercial delivery vehicles (the ideal EV use case), no subcompact SUV, and their pickup truck is way more of a failure than it should have been.

The Cybertruck should have just been called tho Model T, be made to look normal/big manly grill like a Silverado, and have ads for it plastered all over NFL games. Tesla should have easily been able to sell 100,000 units per year in North America but they designed the thing without considering demographic research at all. (Example: many families use the 6 seat configuration of the F-150 to fit the whole family in in lieu of a minivan).

Your information seems to be wrong. It looks like Tesla still has the best selling EV in Europe. Not sure where you are getting the idea it’s not in the top 5

https://www.reddit.com/r/electriccars/comments/1t4slmi/best_...

The biggest thing that could be done to reduce costs at this point is to make the systems sufficiently self contained (electrically) that the utility is comfortable taking just plugging them in. Cut the licensed electricians and the municipalities out. Make it a purely utility thing.

For small (i.e. residential) installation these parties taking their pounds of flesh represents a double digit percentage of system cost.

Many small solar installations are exactly that. Hang a solar panel over your balcony railing, and plug it into the socket.

Larger installations, of course, will never work that way, simply because they generate too much current for your standard wall plug to handle.

I meant plug them in like to the meter socket, not like the super low end apartment balcony stuff. But yeah upsizing that incrementally over time could get you there.

Those hanging versions are micro units for an apartment. Definitely only offload small amount of load.

All for it but not for simgle family home market.

Oh its wild. Ive been looking at getting solar for about 8 years now. 30k install for 10kw system. Arrays are 10k or less of the total install.

You can do that in Germany for up to 2kW panels and 800W inverters. You can just buy them off the shelf and plug them in yourself, with no electrician or permit required.

Rooftop solar should be more heavily incentivized.

From a disaster situation/civil defense perspective, it provides offgrid durability to communities, and it could be life or death in cold waves or heat waves.

For all the utility companies complaining about EV and alt energy infrastructure adaptation... well, fine, then let consumer PV do a large part of the work. Oh wait, did someone say consumer choice? The utility companies shut up real fast.

So it also counterbalances the political power of utility companies, who are no longer a monopoly, and provides economic competition so utilities can't jack rates if corporate/industrial/(ahem, AI) starts increasing demand and prices.

> it provides offgrid durability to communities

This needs a small asterisk that many systems are deliberately not "islanding" capable. Mine isn't, but in the ten years I've had my panels I've only ever had a couple of power cuts, one of which was at night.

I'm having solar installed next month and I specifically had to ask for islanding capability. This added about £1500 to the cost of the system, which I can see many people not opting for.

Ive seen Battery + islanding sold as a deal sweetener with fed funding part of it. If you live in a grid stable place its kind of expensive for what it is… and no arbitrage wont make the money back in 99% of the places

IMHO there should be extra incentives for BIPV just to the amount that would offset the classic shingles underneath because not just doing a simple barn roof (single gable, two pitch) or triangle roof (single pitch) with the slope entirely covered by solar glass of usual 400~800 Wp size modules is where a big part of the excess wasted cost is from. Just make sure to allow structures that allow module-sized parts of the grid to be replaced with human occupancy windows in a nice and simple way.

And this is probably the core issue. Solar Roof was trying to be a roofing product, an energy product, and a design product all at once

That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, Building-Integrated Photovoltaics are its own market of products. But you have many much cheaper options there, at least in Europe. For example https://solroof.eu/en/discover-solroof/what-is-solroof/ or https://metsolar.eu/products/bipv-roof/

Do you have any pointers like that solroof that don't bother trying to be inactive anymore?

My benchmark there is a ventilated attic with insulation between attic and house, using traditional glass roof structure filled with frameless glass-glass panels instead of human-below rated laminated safety glass.

Like, it can't be that hard to do better when you're not trying to be substantially fancier than a classic gable roof, it's just that the panels need to not be shear-loaded much, and the structure doesn't have to be so pretty from underneath as traditional glass roofs.

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