Tesla: Where's The Solar Roof?

Summary

• Installations were supposed to start in June.
• California market has less of a weather season
• Tesla continues to be late with another product.

I continue to be amazed at how many people continue to believe in Elon Musk and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), despite the company continuing to miss timelines, guidance, etc. Earlier this week, Elon Musk basically reduced his guidance for Model 3 production in 2017 for the second time, meaning many consumers will be waiting many more months to get their vehicles. Unfortunately, this isn't the only product consumers are waiting for, as Tesla still has not delivered its highly anticipated, game changing solar roof product.

In recent months, Tesla allowed consumers to place a deposit to get in line for the solar roof. The company also provided a calculator that showed how much money the product could make (or "save") them over 30 years, although the assumptions were questionable. Also, key items like additional property taxes were left out, and the high upfront cost of the product seemed to have many shy away. In the image below, you can see how Tesla stated the product would be rolled out.

(Source: Tesla solar roof site)

Recently, Bloomberg had reported that installations were going to start on June 30th, the last day of the month. However, InsideEvs found out through another source that Tesla denied this report, saying it had no installations scheduled to start on that Friday. At this point, we still have no definitive date on when the roofs will actually be rolled out.

If one thinks logically, however, Tesla is even further behind schedule than one may think. The company said that the average solar roof would take 5-7 days to be installed, roughly similar to a normal roof installation. However, starting on June 30th would put you up against a weekend leading into the July 4th holiday, where consumers may not be home and installers may not be working.

There are some US markets where a good weekend and holiday might not stop a roofing company, because you can't install 365 days a year. Any good weather days you can get are welcomed, as most of these types of workers only get paid when they work. However, California isn't considered to be one of these markets, because installations can happen throughout more of the year. Thus, I wouldn't have expected any installations to start close to a holiday weekend, the contractor would have wanted to be done before then, likely meaning starting on June 26th or perhaps even earlier.

The key takeaway here is that Q2 is going to be much worse than expected, especially after the company fell well short for vehicle deliveries. Part of the case for Q2 was the ramp of energy storage products, and even a few dozen solar roof installations in June could have delivered a few million in key revenues to this struggling segment. Now, solar roof revenues won't start until Q3 at the earliest.

In the end, Tesla seems to again be a day late and a dollar short. The solar roof product, which doesn't seem to be that appealing to consumers, is nowhere to be found at this point. Installations were supposed to start in June, and I would have expected some massive Tesla publicity showing the first few units going up. With nothing definite from the company, and most news sites unable to find any concrete data, it appears we can add this to the growing list of Tesla failures. So much for a game changing product.

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