Tesla has officially settled a class-action lawsuit over a steep price hike on its solar roof that even affected signed contracts.
Back in March 2021, Tesla added a new “roof complexity” factor to its solar roof prices that resulted in drastically increasing the price of its solar roof. The price of solar roof projects increased between 30% to 150% for some.
That’s an incredible price increase in itself, but the strangest part of the situation is that Tesla even applied the new price hike to customers who already had a signed contract for their upcoming solar roof project.
In some cases, customers who had signed a contract for Tesla a year prior were asked to fork as much as 100% more for their new roof, even though they had a signed contract with Tesla. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in several legal actions, which were consolidated into a class action.
Amid the class action, Tesla launched a new program to revert some of the price changes with people who had signed contracts, but the legal action moved forward nonetheless.
Two years later, Tesla has agreed to settle the solar roof lawsuit for $6 million, which should be distributed among the affected solar roof buyers.
During these few years, Tesla has had issues gaining momentum with the solar roof.
In 2022, Electrek obtained figures for solar roof installations for the first time and confirmed that Tesla deployed 2.5 MW of solar roofs during the second quarter of 2022, or about 23 roofs per week – not even close to its goal.
Top comment by D. Ferri
I hope Tesla was assessed a penalty in addition to making the plaintiffs whole. What they attempted to do in violating an existing contract is so basic to contract law I think it was taught on the very first day of the business law class I took as a freshman undergrad.
But Tesla is still ramping up the product and signing new installers.
The product has received praise from new homebuilders in the higher end of the market. It remains a highly expensive product, but it makes sense in luxurious houses. Hopefully, the price goes down as production and deployment increase – like what happens with most technology.
In the meantime, regular solar panels and battery packs remain the best option for most houses to reduce or even eliminate their electric utility bill.
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