Will the solar tiles have to be "qualified"/ "approved" under state/local building, electrical and fire codes before they can be installed?
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SunCatcher
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Tesla website says "Production begins mid 2017". I'm guessing we'll learn about cost when they start taking pre-orders this afternoon. That will be important news, and will really set the pace for order volumes. If it's as cheap as Elon has hinted it may be, it could be a gangbuster high demand product.
How about you Fred? Any guesses regarding cost, in advance of the announcement?
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Mike Smith
Active Member
He said 'about 10 hours', so it should be any day now.
FredLambert
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racer26
Active Member
My suspicion is that it will be competitive with tile roof on price alone, and with asphalt shingle on price accounting for power generated. But I have admittedly shaky grounds to base that on.
Two unknowns, particularly for replacement roofs, are how will installers handle penetrations and electrical connections in the field?
Reciprocity
Active Member
This is such a harder thing to get a handle on with the information given, but it is not likely to compete with the cheapest roofing solutions. But those solutions are cheap and do not last very long. 3 tab shingles last about 10 years (Warrantied for 10 years) as long as there isnt to much wind or any hail. Elon was talking about a life time warranty on the solar roof shingle, so its worth the cost of redoing your 3 tab roof 10 times, not including tear offs, though installing solar roof will be more expensive so that could be a wash. I would assume that the pricing is inline with a comparable roof + solar on the roof, but it will be a 50 year roof that could last as long as 100 years. Warranty can run out and the roof can still be good. The 10 year roof can last longer as well, but they dont typically last much longer because they are fairly fragile. My point is that you could justify the statement for the 10 year roof even though it will cost 8-10x as much as the 10 year roof with solar panels. Also, if you have solar, you know that over its entire lifetime it can generate tens of thousands of dollars in energy savings, so its kind of unfair to say its comparable in terms of energy creation because then the roof could cost $100,000 and still be accurate after 25+ years of production.
So in short, not a damn clue. My guess is that you wont know the pricing after today either. You will need a custom quote.
Reciprocity
Active Member
Well the penetration part is no problem. Roofers can put wholes in stuff just as good as anyone else. But they would need an electrician to complete the install. I would imagine that the times go onto rail, which they do for a lot of tile roofs anyway. This rail would have all the wiring and would be daisy chained together in sort of a plug and play solution. but the final wiring and inverter would need to be completed by an electrician, just like solar is today.
racer26
Active Member
They will have to publish some kind of pricing estimator. Sure, it varies by the exact roof design, but they'll have to be able to be compared against existing roof technologies on price.
Mike Smith
Active Member
I've been thinking the same thing. 'Same price' could mean same price per year of roof life.
racer26
Active Member
The conviction with which Elon asserted it would be a no-brainer is what i'm hung up on. Tile roof is already a better value proposition for most people, but people don't do it because of the upfront cost.
StapleGun
Member
That's my guess too. I'm expecting them just to put up something generic today like "On-site inspection required for quote. Prices are comparable to the cost of a new roof plus the cost of energy generated by solar roof."
I doubt it. The 10-K/Q usually are pretty specific and they would spell this out if that was the case. Plus, they recognized $35M from the 2016 Q4 AP2.0 sales (Q1 SH letter when they explained the increase of gross margin). So if this $81.1M includes that $35M, it would mean Q1 only had $46M in AP2.0 revenue. There shouldn't be more than 11k cars delivered with AP2.0 capability in Q4 (AP2.0 annouced Oct 20, if taking average 3 weeks of time for the new production to delivery, it would put us about half of Q4 deliveries with the possibility of having AP2.0). 11k total having $35M and 25k total having $46M is too out of proportion. Plus, if assuming 11k possible Q4 cars with AP2.0 and $35M revenue from it, it would put the take rate at 80% as well, which matches up pretty well with the assumption of $81M purely from Q1 deliveries.
racer26
Active Member
Reciprocity
Active Member
Well they deal with tiles now. I was a roofer in college and we didnt do a lot of fancy roofs, but they have saws for tile and need to be able to cut it do things like edges and gables and places where dormers meet the main roof. Glass is nice because it could actually be easy to work with. You can just score it and snap it, if its designed that way. They might need a special saw blade, but not a big issue. My guess is only the tiles that are active, ie.. have solar cells in them, would be super durable. There would be inactive tiles that are used on shaded parts of the roof and for edges and the other areas I identified above that will still be strong but also meant to be cut. If they cant cut these things, then the roof is a non-starter.
Edit: Sorry, wholes.. drill bits, just like any other roofing material. Its either something they can work with or it wont work as a roofing material. Nail wholes can be preformed, but the tiles that are active would snap into the rail. Screws are also used for fancier roofs.
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