Edit: I understand the urge to downvote because I'm not singing praise, but I promise I'm not trying to be overly pessimistic or critical of what Tesla is doing. Fact of the matter is, solar tiles have been done before, and failed miserably.
There also seems to be some efficiency and aesthetic improvements over previous tiles, but those alone wouldn't be enough to make it viable.
And from that, hopefully, scale. Solar tiles have always seemed to be a very poor relation of solar panels. The approximately 1x1.5m panel is a sort of informal global standard, and that's meant that solar tiles have been much more fragmented, much lower scale, and much more expensive.
On the other hand in theory these solar integrated building materials should greatly reduce the associated costs of installing panels - labour is usually something like half the cost of installing rooftop solar, but if you can install a solar roof without much more effort than a normal roof, those extra labour costs are massively reduced.
If you can leverage this labour cost advantage to ramp up scale of the tiles, and get them close to the per watt cost of traditional panels, this is how you can really make rooftop solar competitive. These labour costs are why rooftop solar is so much more expensive than utility solar. If you can greatly reduce them, total costs are much more tied to the cost of the tiles themselves, the inverter, and so on, where there is enormous leeway for ongoing reductions. Very exciting.
[0] http://blogs-images.forbes.com/peterdiamandis/files/2014/09/...
[1] I got there by taking the '98% as efficient as regular solar' from https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/these-are-teslas-stunning-... and the current 22% number advertised by Sunpower here : https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/SunPower-Breaks...
There are also up-and-coming competitors such as SunTegra that hit 14.6% [2].
It seems like asthetic options and possibly efficiency improvements is what will set this apart from previous stumblings in this space. We'll see how this looks in the real world!
[1]http://www.solarelectricsupply.com/apollo-ii-solar-roofing-s...
The fact that you have to apologize for this on HN nowadays is hilarious. I agree. Both solar panels (and to a lesser extent solar roofing tiles) and the powerwall are have a lot of competition.
The idea looks good, though. I didn't catch pricing details in the presentation?