Solar Roof is form over function. It doesn't seem to deliver as much electricity as a regular solar panel, it costs tens of thousands of dollars more, and generates less electricity.
IMO, Tesla should just quit the Solar Roof project. Just keep it to regular solar panels.
It could be form over function. But my issue is that we have terrible power supply and no-one can fix the problem for themselves using solar. People here just get noisy generators that only provide partial power anyway.
A solar roof would also positively impact the sale price of your house. I don't have the answers here and maybe solar won't solve my country's issues. I am just throwing a rock into the bush.
Wouldn't you say that the original iPhone was also form over function? Blackberries had e-mail, a browser and a built in camera, didn't they? People do care about looks, and personally, if people buy a solar roof because they think it looks cool, I'm glad to see more people buying solar. The fact that Tesla can also sell them battery technology is great as well. I don't think that all solar vendors can sell you a compelling energy storage solution.
iPhone didn't go from 30%+ US American solar panel marketshare (SolarCity circa 2015) to 9% marketshare. Tesla is being a very, very poor steward of SolarCity's business.
Sunrun is now the #1 solar company in America, because its offering better tech these days. Also, SolarCity lost its deal with HomeDepot, and the Gigafactory2 (Solar Panel Gigafactory) is idling / wasting money.
All in all, Tesla is running SolarCity very poorly, by any measurement. You can only buy SolarCity products from Tesla stores, and those few Tesla stores are closing down (or maybe not, depending on the mood of the company...)
> People do care about looks, and personally, if people buy a solar roof because they think it looks cool, I'm glad to see more people buying solar.
Virtually no one is buying Solar Roof. Last time I checked, the number of installations was under 1000, maybe under 100. There's no market for $100,000+ Solar Panels that fail to generate electricity.
EDIT: Looking into it more: the Solar Roof does generate electricity decently. But to make it fit and look more like a normal roof, almost 60% of the tiles do NOT generate electricity. Any tile that needs to be cut to size is a pure-glass tile without any solar panels inside of them. This means that you get far less solar at far higher costs than a typical installation.
IMO, Tesla should just quit the Solar Roof project. Just keep it to regular solar panels.