Tesla is ramping up Solar Roof Tile production to 1,000 roofs per week

Tesla Solar Roof Tiles are one of those products that have been delayed for a while at Tesla, but CEO Elon Musk now says that the company is ramping up production to “1,000 roofs per week” by the end of the year.

When Tesla launched its Solar Roof Tiles in 2017, the automaker said that they would start volume production and installation in 2018.

However, the rollout turned out to be much slower and installations have been limited to the homes of some executives and a few customers.

Tesla later delayed volume production to 2019.

CEO Elon Musk said that they had to make some changes to the product in order to make sure it will last for 30 years.

At Tesla’s 2019 shareholder’s meeting, Musk said that they are now completing a third version of the Tesla solar roof:

“We are about to complete version 3 of the solar roof. This is actually quite a hard technology problem to have an integrated solar cell with a roof tile, have it look good, and last for 30 years.”

The CEO explained that they had difficulties doing accelerated testing on the roof, but they now feel more confident.

Musk is confident that the third version of the product is going to be the one to roll out to consumers in volume and he expects that in higher volume, it will be cheaper.

Yesterday, Musk confirmed a first number volume production and a timeline for the first time (via Twitter):

“Spooling up production line rapidly. Hoping to manufacture ~1000 solar roofs/week by end of this year.”

It would represent a massive increase as Tesla is believed to have installed or is in the process of having installed only a few hundred solar roofs since launching the product to date.

Last month, Electrek released a first look at Tesla’s V3 solar roof tile technology with custom fittings and the first real Tesla Solar Roof quote. The price was shockingly high, but Tesla argues that it’s worth it when adding the electricity savings over time.

Electrek’s Take

This is a surprisingly high number to produce per week by the end of the year.

At an average of 8 kW per roof, which I think is probably on the low side since this is going to be used on bigger homes, it would represent over 100 MW per quarter.

For context, Tesla deployed only 29 MW of solar last quarter.

However, SolarCity used to regularly deploy over 100 MW of solar per quarter before it was acquired by Tesla.

It means that Tesla sees its solar business going back to growth with solar roofs and that’s without even accounting for its solar panel business.

I am not actually too concerned about Tesla reaching a production of 1,000 Solar roofs per week, but the installation is a little more concerning in my opinion.

Last we heard, it still took about 2 weeks for Tesla to install a solar roof system. At 1,000 per week, it represents a lot of labor hours.

That number probably needs to go down significantly for the installation rate to be possible, which should also reduce the cost.

What do you think? Is it possible to do this year or is it another overly-optimistic Elon goal? Let us know in the comment section below.