Optimus robots will arrive in Robo taxis to install your Tesla solar roof which will also receive Internet and XAI LLM service from orbiting data centers. When? By the end of the year.
Blame both the warehouse and their insurance company and personal injury lawyers in general, they probably live in fear of lawsuits from a methed up forklift driver knocking over a pallet rack and killing several people.
You've mistaken the subject for the target. The subject of the derision is advanced technology, the target is Tesla promising what they're incapable of delivering.
> Tesla offloaded the hardest, least profitable part of the Solar Roof — the physical install and the customer relationship — onto small local companies, let them absorb the training and tooling costs, and then pulled the product out from under them.
I wonder how many of the companies understood this is what Tesla was doing, and recognized the risk inherent in their position.
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.
I would blame whatever team of figurative rocket scientists decided that putting something with many dozens of tiny discrete electrical connectors in a flat aesthetically pleasing format on a roof, exposed to rain/snow/ice.
There's a reason why the MC4 connector for traditional PV panel wiring and similar is designed the way it is, and why other things like IP67 and IP68 rated outdoor, 600/1000/1500V rated DC power connectors are as robust as they are.
This is entirely aside from the installation and mounting and labor issues to have such a weird custom solar roof tile and mount it in a way that doesn't make the roof impossible to maintain, doesn't cause leaks, and doesn't blow away in the wind.
And then secondarily blame Tesla's acquisition of solarcity to bail out Elon's brother.
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.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery?
I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."
Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.
I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.
To drive itself around safely, any ground vehicle will need some kind of awareness of those surroundings. Right now, that means cameras. I don't think people will be satisfied if those cameras get replaced with short wavelength radar given that WiFi-band radio goes through walls and would therefore allow spying inside houses and there's already people messing around with this as YouTube tech demos.
Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.
And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with that problem, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.
> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy
and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes
toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to
changes in the regulations governing them.
Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of
neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large
corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and
Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of
drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the
drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.
Aerial drone delivery services creating a fleet of flying lawnmower noises over my house is entirely a different thing than quiet electric based ground delivery vehicles... At least theoretical ground based delivery vehicles without humans aren't dumping gatorade piss bottles.
The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.
I think that's a legit question, but the way it plays out is not clear.
See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".
On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.
I think the long term plan is for the automated vehicles and last mile robots to defend themselves. We're already living in some form of a post-modern cyberpunk dystopia, it just isn't full distributed yet.
I'm not sure I understand the comparison. There's over 100k Flock ALPR cameras in the country, despite how many people passionately despise them and are willing to risk criminal charges to destroy them. Amazon is a much more popular business and delivery robots pose fewer privacy concerns, so I would expect street robots to face even fewer deployment problems if the tech becomes cost-competitive.
Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.
Colloquially, no. But do I think there will be W-2 employees of Amazon.com, Inc (dba Amazon) delivering packages? Definitely not. It's not like Amazon owned the Prime Air plane that crashed yesterday, or employed the pilots
I suspect they will continue to use “contractors” until regime change forces them not to. Midterms look good for swinging toward Dems (due to gestures broadly at everything), and this federal admin has an end date (relates to NLRB and employee classification enforcement). These issues change on an arch over years or decades.
I deliver packages for Amazon as an independent contractor (via Amazon Flex). While there are plenty of issues I have with it, I have an overall positive sentiment. For those who don’t want to work full time hours (you can schedule yourself in 1-5 hour blocks), immigrants, or are just in a bad spot it’s not a bad option. I’ve worked for food delivery apps as well and I think it’s a better gig compared to those other ones.
I’ve heard a rumor that ICE is using access to gig work platforms to pickup immigrants, so I’m unsure if it’s a positive for those in the US who aren’t citizens. They’ve already consumed IRS data to do so (in volition of the law, but laws don’t matter currently).
DoorDash specifically has strong signal it’s relying heavily on undocumented labor, for example.
So "employees" will drive for uber/amazon in their own cars, and will be unable to put gas and car maintenance into tax write offs as expenses (it is form of commute to work).
Altogether, no. But I do think a combination of Amazon Locker, autonomous vehicles and perhaps drones are likely to radically change how last-mile delivery looks, and I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of that network offloads the capital onto third-party contractors.
In my country they are really pushing parcel lockers. And it makes sense- most people are not at home during the day. If they can put a 24/7 locker in every neighborhood or apartment complex it would be much more efficient.
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.
> Electrek has a bias against Tesla/Musk, IMHO and so tend to paint everything in a negative way.
I would say Tesla and Musk are a little bit worse here than Siemens or Honda or whatever. Usually the manufacturers don't lie quite as loudly about the future of the product.
I'm sure Tesla has been more opaque then other manufacturers, but I agree that the consequence here is just normal course of business stuff.
I've never seen a person have such a frothing-at-the-mouth hate for any company as Fred Lambert at Elektrek has for Musk/Tesla.
Just filter for his posts, it's kind of crazy. After a few posts I started noticing a while back. Lambert writes like Elon Musk killed his puppies with his bare hands.
It causes Lambert to have nearly zero credibility in anything he writes about Tesla. It doesn't come from a place of good faith reporting.
I do agree that Lambert's coverage of Tesla appears to be pretty one-sided, and that the company has provided significant benefits to the world, but I also think there's a reasonable case to be made that Musk himself is a uniquely deleterious figure, even if the harm he brings isn't with his bare hands.
That may be true, but I feel that is a separate conversation (whether Elon Musk and his companies, taken whole, have had net good or net bad contributions to the world) from Lambert's coverage, which seems to pick any single _event_ and select the most heinous, corrupt, version full of malicious intent when often unwarranted, extremely bad faith and never adds informational value to that larger debate.
I wonder about those first adopters and where this leaves them with future support or warranty issues. The system itself looks so different from standard panel-based rooftop solar that installers will need to have been trained to install the tiles. After those installers get stiffed I feel like they might have zero incentive to come out and look at any systems that develop issues over time.
I looked at this tile-based solar when he (Musk) announced it and while it looks like a perfect system if you can make it all work, a standard roof-top solar system is easier to install and maintain. I have enough space at my place that I can install the panels in a ground mount so there was no reason to consider this specialty setup. If I had purchased a system like this I would definitely have extra components on hand in case something breaks.
I would treat it like the first model year of a new vehicle design. Buy the second or third model year so most of the problems are someone else's.
Tesla Solar Roof has been dead for years and years. Any installers continuing with this knew the writing was on the wall years ago. My friend got a solar roof and they doubled the price on him to over 100k after they signed the contract, and tried to strong arm him into agreeing to the new price. This was 3 or 4 years ago, and once the prices doubled to 100k+ you knew that the entire thing was dead.
Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.
Is there any competitor in the USA? The idea of roof tiles which are themselves solar panels seems sensible to me, and it's more aesthetically pleasing than putting panels on top of normal tiles.
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.
without having looked into the tesla roof tiles like at all (so stop reading here if you want any sort of informed discussion), are these things like placed individually and wired together individually? does every tile get a microinverter or is it like a net of tiles belong to one? is this potentially hundreds of connectors acrossed your roof that would be so many points of failure. if so that seems nuts and hardly worth the absurd cost just for aesthetics. feel like anyone who can afford this could just have whatever roof they want and then have their solar array farm nearby on their presumably many acres of land.
in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways
Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock.
PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.
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.
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 did want it. Would have looked great on my quite old house where it is highly impractical to have conventional solar panels, as there is essentially not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location, and I need new tiles soon anyway.
I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).
> not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location
That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.
Interesting. They look great on a single-surface roof with 90° edges. It seems that as soon as your roof deviates from that the aesthetics begin to trend toward conventional PV panels (which of course also do not accommodate more complex roof profiles).
They do the same thing with their cars! Incredibly expensive proprietary fasteners that you might only need 12 of sold in unit sizes like 500 or 1000. Sometimes they change multiple times per model year. You cannot buy them secondhand or share with other shops as part of the agreement to buy them in the first place. Know a couple auto body dudes that lost their ass thinking they would be like every other automaker. They have all since stopped doing work on Teslas.
Why did it fail? I remember seeing the launch announcement for SolarCity and being wowed (logic: every house needs a roof, so why not make the roof from solar tiles instead of regular tiles and get free energy).
I guess the unit-economics didn’t work? (but seems like a good thing to have tried given the massive TAM)
"…Tesla installed only about 3,000 Solar Roof systems across the US, peaking at just 21 to 32 installations a week — more than 95% short of Elon Musk’s repeated promise of 1,000 weekly installations by 2019-2020."
What was he smoking? (Oh, never mind that.) I mean was he expecting Federal tax incentives/rebates for installing solar to create that demand for 1,000/week?
(Or perhaps I should ask what were all these contractors smoking that thought it was a good idea to sink $100K of their money to go into business pedaling his wares?)
They seem to just be laying downside risk off onto suckers, and holding on to upside. They probably broke even on the Solar Roof project, while their contractors are ruined.
One arbitrary day they could bail on cybercabs just as easily, probably walk away having made a pile of money anyway, while a bunch of people are stuck with a bunch of used up vehicles that they have to try and sell, and can only sell with the consent of Tesla itself.
Great model. Good followup on "do things that the state should be doing so the state pays you a ton of money, then have a luxury version of the same thing that you sell to wealthy customers (whose tech has been entirely subsidized by the state.)"
Musk's empire is a purely financial play that has nothing to do with tech, just like Palantir. It's all money games, like everything else in the West. Scam age.
The entire premise is stupid. Panels need to be large to have reduced install costs and wiring costs. Install costs dominate solar install pricing in the United states. It is far far cheaper to install a new roof and giant solar installation than to go with a solar roof. It's just a broken concept at the very start.
Was going to so ask the same. As much as I dislike Tesla and its products, I can't take away its value proposition ( good integration and simplicity for end user ).
"Time won't matter either"
Clown world.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
At the bottom. With links to comments as early as 2007 saying exactly the same.
The same people post here but think it makes them smarter and wittier.
I wonder how many of the companies understood this is what Tesla was doing, and recognized the risk inherent in their position.
There's a reason why the MC4 connector for traditional PV panel wiring and similar is designed the way it is, and why other things like IP67 and IP68 rated outdoor, 600/1000/1500V rated DC power connectors are as robust as they are.
This is entirely aside from the installation and mounting and labor issues to have such a weird custom solar roof tile and mount it in a way that doesn't make the roof impossible to maintain, doesn't cause leaks, and doesn't blow away in the wind.
And then secondarily blame Tesla's acquisition of solarcity to bail out Elon's brother.
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.
I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."
Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.
And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with that problem, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.
> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to changes in the regulations governing them. Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.
I think the comparison works.
The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.
See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".
On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.
Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.
NYC has started to do this until then: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/08/mayor-mamdani...
Bloomberg investigation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-02/amazon-tr... | https://archive.today/3Nnj9
DoorDash specifically has strong signal it’s relying heavily on undocumented labor, for example.
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...
Lovely!
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.
I would say Tesla and Musk are a little bit worse here than Siemens or Honda or whatever. Usually the manufacturers don't lie quite as loudly about the future of the product.
I'm sure Tesla has been more opaque then other manufacturers, but I agree that the consequence here is just normal course of business stuff.
Just filter for his posts, it's kind of crazy. After a few posts I started noticing a while back. Lambert writes like Elon Musk killed his puppies with his bare hands.
It causes Lambert to have nearly zero credibility in anything he writes about Tesla. It doesn't come from a place of good faith reporting.
I looked at this tile-based solar when he (Musk) announced it and while it looks like a perfect system if you can make it all work, a standard roof-top solar system is easier to install and maintain. I have enough space at my place that I can install the panels in a ground mount so there was no reason to consider this specialty setup. If I had purchased a system like this I would definitely have extra components on hand in case something breaks.
I would treat it like the first model year of a new vehicle design. Buy the second or third model year so most of the problems are someone else's.
Typical Musk behavior to try to break the contract and try to re-negotiate even though it's clearly illegal.
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.
in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways
Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock.
PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.
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.
I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.
Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.
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.
I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).
That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.
https://www.prefa.at/produkt-katalog/solarsysteme/solardachp...
I guess the unit-economics didn’t work? (but seems like a good thing to have tried given the massive TAM)
What was he smoking? (Oh, never mind that.) I mean was he expecting Federal tax incentives/rebates for installing solar to create that demand for 1,000/week?
(Or perhaps I should ask what were all these contractors smoking that thought it was a good idea to sink $100K of their money to go into business pedaling his wares?)
They seem to just be laying downside risk off onto suckers, and holding on to upside. They probably broke even on the Solar Roof project, while their contractors are ruined.
One arbitrary day they could bail on cybercabs just as easily, probably walk away having made a pile of money anyway, while a bunch of people are stuck with a bunch of used up vehicles that they have to try and sell, and can only sell with the consent of Tesla itself.
Great model. Good followup on "do things that the state should be doing so the state pays you a ton of money, then have a luxury version of the same thing that you sell to wealthy customers (whose tech has been entirely subsidized by the state.)"
Musk's empire is a purely financial play that has nothing to do with tech, just like Palantir. It's all money games, like everything else in the West. Scam age.
Nothing ever really ends, he's just higher up in the stack now fraudulently bailing out everything below with SpaceX.