Tesla kills Solar Roof, Cybercab launch, Genesis GV90, and more

**Fred Lambert** (0:06)
We are live.
I'm Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by the great Seth Weintraub. How are you doing today, Seth?

**Seth Weintraub** (0:14)
I'm great.

**Fred Lambert** (0:15)
All right. Before we jump in, I want to say a quick thank you to today's episode sponsor, GM. GM EV charging made easy with Energy Pass, Plug and Charge. Learn more at gmenergy.gm.com/energypass.
We're going to say a little bit more about their new charging effort at GM that we think are very interesting later on the show, so stay tuned for that. But let me tell you a little bit what we're going to talk about today because we're going to start out with a big Electrek exclusive that came out in the middle of the night last night that Tesla has officially killed the Solar Roof. The Solar Roof is dead. The Solar Roof is no more. So we're going to talk about that a little bit, do a little bit of a debrief on what happened with, you know, what was supposed to be some kind of revolutionary product for Tesla. But in hindsight, the product probably was not the story at all. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Then we're going to talk about Tesla doing it again, the same thing now with the Roadster. And that's coming from an ex-Tesla employee, an ex-Tesla president, really. Kind of an all-over-again situation. So you're going to understand what I mean by that in just a few minutes. We're going to talk about the Cybercab, apparently, launching officially in the next week or two. We're going to talk about the FSDV14, which I've been very impressed by. Almost killing me last weekend was a big article that I wrote on Monday after they tried to drove me off road in a very strange accident that I caught on dash cam. We're going to talk about Tesla Semi. Good news on the Tesla Semi in front. Tesla is expanding a little bit its vehicle to load capacity over the weekend. The Genesis GV90, it's brand new, very impressive, top of the line electric SUV from Genesis. We had our colleague, Peter, go check it out in California this week. He came back with a lot of details and pictures that we're going to show you guys. We're going to talk about BYD's latest SUV reaching 1,000 kilometers of range on a full charge, and the first Ferrari Luce being sold, yeah, that was this weekend, for an absolutely insane amount of money, like ridiculous amount of money, but it was for a good cause. So we're going to end on a good note with that. Some rich people are putting their money in the right place, at least, even though you still get expensive car, all of it, but I think it was more about the charity than the car, to be honest. Like, who's going to drop $40 million on the Luce? All right, let's start with the Solar Roof tiles here. All right, so what's new here? What's new? Just, I kind of called it. I kind of called it, I have to say it. In May, I have to give myself some credit here. Back in May, I came out with this report that the Solar Roof tiles was on live support at Tesla, and it looks like they were dwelling down the program. And sure enough, I can confirm as of yesterday that Tesla has officially killed the Solar Roof Tile program after, there is still a decade, I mean, not a decade of installation, maybe like six, seven years of installation, but a decade of, since the program was originally announced.
So I have two sources that were able to confirm that Tesla told third party installers that they won't be shipping any Solar Roof Tiles anymore.
And one of those sources close to Tesla's management on this basically said that they admitted that the financial viability of the Roof Tiles are not there. The math doesn't add up. It was supposed to be a mass market program. Tesla set up production for 1000 roofs of capacity per week. From our information, it peaked at 30 or 40 roofs, something like that, no more than that. So it's quite a failure of a program based on what they were expecting. And yeah, I think we need to do a little bit of a debrief on this because I think once you dive a little bit deeper, by the way, so this is based on our sources and Tesla hasn't confirmed anything on this, but on the website, if you go on the Tesla Solar Roof URL, it redirects now to the Tesla Solar Panels URL. So I mean, if that's not a confirmation from Tesla, I think it's the best information from Tesla we're going to get considering Tesla's level of communication on these things. But yeah, if we go back in time a little bit and go back to 2016 in Hollywood on the set of Desperate Housewives, because that's actually where it was on the VIL set. I'm not going to get a joke here.