I actually thought the solar rooftop was really cool when it launched, and if I owned a home I would consider buying it. What happened? It sounds like Tesla intentionally sabotaged it.
The launch price -- $42/sq ft for the solar tiles, $11/sq ft for inert tiles that look the same -- is too high, and manufacturing yield is too low.
Finally, the first few roofs they installed took a Tesla team 3-4 weeks. I've read a couple cases in 2019 that took 2 weeks. I think they need to get installation time down to a week before they want to scale that any further.
In short, they probably lost money on every solar roof they installed in 2018, because that house is essentially acting as a real-world test bench. I think they will only install as many roofs as they need for testing purposes as they refine the design, manufacturing, and installation procedure.
If and when they cross the 20% margin point at a price that's still a premium over a new roof + panels, but not eye-wateringly so, they will scale production and start actually working through their order book.
Its really a headscratcher as to how they thought this would work out.
Tesla buys batteries from Panasonic. Why would Tesla have excess supply?
Every time some approach fails economically/financially, Musk comes up new technology that needs some financing and sells it. He is cashing in his reputation as technical genius again and again. He hopes that that nobody notices how his ideas to turn profit constantly change and are just out of reach.
Tesla was supposed to make 20,000 Model 3 cars by December 2017. If that plan would have worked, Tesla would have needed those cells.
Large scale ramp-up of Model 3 has slowed down to crawl, and has not reached even 6000 cars per month. With those volumes debt will drown Tesla and something must be done. Musk gained new investors with full-autonomy and taxi service idea. Completely insane proposition considering the state-of-the-art and the fact that the regulation is something that the company can't really influence.
Musk also takes loans against his stocks to invest other ventures - 40 percent of his Tesla stocks are leveraged to do other things. There is a fear that if one business crumbles, it will take healthy businesses with it.
Well this is a lie lol. They are doing at least 5k cars a week.
> Large scale ramp-up of Model 3 has slowed down to crawl,
is 100% correct. They hit 5000 cars per week in Q3'18 and then their ramp flatlined. They remain stuck there with only 5,821 made last week.[1]
Sounds like their just nearing capacity. Did you expect them to just grow forever from the same factory?