You forgot the "XAI LLM service powered by 60 gas turbines in Memphis running the grok CSAM generator"

But can I pay in dogecoin?

Don’t forget to pay the $10k to keep your spot in the waiting list!

Grok confidently said it can be done by the end of the year when Elon asked so it must be true.

With $20T TAM!

they will be built in Mars Factory X and similar to Titanfall they'll be orbital striked to where they need to go

I enjoy this style of absurdism humor

Hahahaha

Via hyperloop

It is going sound awful ( and I resist it myself, because of what it implies about us in general ), but best predictor of human behavior is what they have done in the past. There is a reason I don't own anything Tesla and last time I looked at solar roof, I explicitly noted that this brand is not an option. Nothing this expensive is allowed to become abandonware this easily. I have to assume he will be sued hard, because that kind of practice needs to be penalized hard by our society.

It’s the whole business for the installers. You get margin where you can, and that for them is in the marketing and selling and installing and supporting for the customers.

Coming from a family of local contractors, some of whom install HVAC and such. Most of them probably understood this. It's part of the business. Pretty much every product, you are going to install, has some sort of training required, to install it properly, such that the manufacturer warranty isn't voided.

Some probably did not know, but they learned a hard lesson here.

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.

Nah, same with Amazon delivery subcontractors. This is sophisticated capitalists and industrialists preying on the unsophisticated.

It seems to me that this is standard practice in the industry (solar panels/batteries, HVAC, boilers, heat pumps, etc). And, yes it leaves you at risk if the supplier decides to cancel the product(s) or if they just go bust.

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.

Well, class-action lawsuits are a thing.

It's extremely labor intensive and costly to put stuff up on the roof, and problematic in terms of electrical connector, electrical safety, and being proprietary for mounting and roof repair. Big ass PV panels that are 2.0 x 1.0 meter in size (or larger) are so cheap now for photovoltaic ground mounts that the labor and mounting can actually cost more than the panels.

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.

It's a slightly weird proposition, in that, well, pitched roofs last about 50 to 100 years, typically (at least here; I gather it _is_ somewhat different in the US due to different materials and building standards). So you probably don't really _want_ to prematurely replace your whole roof, so your market is basically... people who happen to need a roof replaced right now?

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.

Yes. Both GAF and CertainTeed, the #1 (30% of the market) and #3 (15% of the market) shingle makers in the US, both have solar shingles.

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.

There are apparently several traditional roof shingle makers who have previewed solar tiles. A friend of mine who is a roofer told me he would not trust Tesla and is waiting for a reliable supplier. Apparently he is a smart man.

I was getting solar quotes recently and came across the CertainTeed brand that makes a “solar shingle”. I have no idea where they are made or how they compare to regular panels.

Hundreds (and hundreds?) of tiles with twice that number of electrical connectors… what could possible go wrong?

I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.

Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.

Sorta.

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.

Jackery Solar Roof.

No, it's an impractical idea that nobody wanted.

Clearly it’s very expensive and people aren’t paying for it.

Solar Roof was vaporware when it was presented by Musk. It was blatant fraud. There's no "free energy" here. The roof was way more expensive than a regular roof covered in solar panels.

The reason Tesla acquired SolarCity was to bail Musk out. Same as xAI, and then SpaceX, bailed out his Twitter purchase.

You're right! It is odd that someone who makes electrical storage and electrical cars would be interested in solar PV, too.

> Musk’e fraudulent bailout of Solar City (and himself) reaches its conclusion.

Nothing ever really ends, he's just higher up in the stack now fraudulently bailing out everything below with SpaceX.

Why was it badly engineered?