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Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where they're getting their average price from, because I've never heard of a new roof and solar panel installation being that expensive.

EDIT: They're comparing it to concrete roof tiles, which a quick search say that they last for ~50 years, twice as long as the warranty for the Tesla solar roof.

https://www.tesla.com/solarroof/design

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Definitely, the solar price in that article is twice what I paid for my 9.4KW system. I wouldn't have gotten Tesla anyway, even if it was cheaper. This is not the sort of place I'm willing to be an early adopter - once they have proven they have decades of experience, like SMA and others, then maybe. Until then, no way.

Decades of experience are a bit much to ask when the market didn't even even exist 19 years ago.

Reminds me of job postings in our industry:

"Must have 5 years of experience with <framework that came out 2 years ago>"

Panel technology and traditional roofing do have decades of experience.

Leaving aside how unproven the tech is inside their new solar tile, they’re still trying to figure how how to hang them. That’s pretty bleeding edge.

The house I lived in during the late 90s definitely had solar panels, and had for a while.

I'm getting solar put in and it's about that much.

Same here. The numbers line up, roughly.

Warranty is different from how long something will last.

So, should we expect the Tesla roof, which has historically had so many issues that they’ve done very few installations, to suddenly be able to last 50 years?

What issues? They did very few installations of previous iterations because they took a long time to install, thus were expensive. Doesn't mean there were any quality issues

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-solar-panel-fires-beco...

The author of this article, Linette Lopez, is a personal friend of Jim Chanos, the biggest TSLA short as far as we know. She publicly recognized this friendship and she does not care whether it makes her biased against the company. It's up to you to trust her reporting regarding these accidents and how representative her coverage is. Note that she only seeks negative feedback about Tesla products, she discard positive and neutral ones. That's her filter, an interesting one.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, my last car, phone, laptop, all lasted much longer (3-6x) than their respective warranties.

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