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Product Launch

Oct 25, 2019

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Hi, this is Elon. Welcome to the Tesla Solar Glass unveil, if you will. I'll start with a very brief introduction and then go into questions. The intent behind the Solar Glass roof is that we can make roofs come alive, that you have a live roof instead of a dead roof. You have all these roofs out there just gathering sunlight but not doing anything with it, and our intent is that you can convert that sunlight into energy. I think in the future, it will be odd for roofs to be dormant or dead or not gather energy. You have to say, what is the future that you want? The future that I think we all want, most of us, is a future where you look around at a neighborhood and the roofs are all gathering energy.

They're all doing something useful, and they look beautiful. They're very robust and resilient, and they're powering the houses that they shelter. I think this is what we want to say, like, 20 years from now, you look around the neighborhood, and that's how it is. Now, the Solar Roof is not going to make financial sense for somebody who has a relatively new roof because this is itself a roof that has integrated solar power generation. It has, therefore, the cost of roofing a house in addition to the cost of solar panels or solar cells. We've been able to achieve with V3 a price point that is less than what the average roof costs plus solar panels.

If you're looking at two options, one is you need a roof or either need a new roof or you need to reroof your house, and you look at the cost of that, the average cost of that, and then the cost of adding solar panels to that roof versus the cost of Tesla Solar Glass, which is an integrated roof plus solar panel, solar cell, that the Tesla Solar Glass roof will cost less. This is, to the best of our knowledge, accurate, and we'll obviously see now that it's debuted, whether this is correct. It's not going to be correct everywhere because there are going to be times when there's a very cheap roof and a very cheap solar panel and there's maybe some corner case where it is cheaper.

I think maybe 80% of the time or more, the Tesla Solar Roof should make the most economic sense and look the best, and be the longest lasting. That's our intent. It's been quite hard to get to this point. This is quite a difficult product because roofs have to last for a long time, and then when you add electrification to the roof, that's obviously a fair bit of complexity because now you have wires and you need to make sure that it's all going to be safe and not cause any risk to the house and also that it will last for many decades. We want this to last for something on the order of 30 years or more.

It's not easy to do accelerated life testing because you want to say, okay, well, how do we, in the course of, say, six months, try to accelerate the life of the roof such that we know what it will be like in 30 years? This is quite hard. The system has to be extremely robust, and then figuring out how to install it effectively is very non-trivial. We're actually going to have install-a-thons, if you will, where we have this now near our Fremont factory, two houses that are identical, and we have the two competing teams to say who can install the Solar Glass Roof the most efficiently. Then we're going to try to get some of the best roofing teams in the country to also give it a shot, so it's not just Tesla internal.

Actually, I should say that the Solar Glass Roof, while we were going to start out just having Tesla and SolarCity do it, this is something that we intend to open up for roofing contractors in general. Unlike vehicle sales, which only go through Tesla stores or online, and that's because we don't want to get trapped in franchise law and there's a lot of complexities in automotive distribution that if we break precedent there, it's highly problematic potentially in many places. For the Tesla Solar Glass Roof, I think it's a different situation. You don't have local sales monopolies.

It's a highly competitive market. I think it's going to make sense, therefore, you have Tesla-certified installers who can then install the Solar Glass Roof, and I think that will be a very powerful driver of demand and allow us to grow much faster than we could otherwise grow. This is all going to be produced at the bigger New York, the factory in Buffalo, where people have been working really hard. I'd just like to say note of appreciation for the team there. They've really been putting in a huge effort to ramp up production of the Solar Glass Roof. I was pretty impressed when I visited there earlier this year. That was like, okay, there seems to be a lot of talented people here. This seems like a good situation. I think we'll definitely make New York proud about that factory.

It's going to be great. Yeah. I think this is a really cool product. Like I said, in a nutshell, if you are getting a new roof, if you're reroofing or getting a new roof, this is, like, I feel quite confident this is a smart move. If your roof is already new, it will not be a smart move financially. You may still want to do it, but it's going to be financially punitive to do it on an existing roof that still has a long way to go. If you still have an existing roof and that has a lot of life left on it, we would recommend the Tesla solar panels. Just get solar retrofit is what we call it.

That's the right move if your roof still has, say, 10 years of life or more, and then Tesla Solar Glass, if it's a new roof or reroofing. All right. With that, we'll move to the questions, and I'll just repeat the questions and then do you want me to answer them?

Operator 1

Thank you.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

You're welcome.

Operator 1

We will start the call with the most upvoted questions related to Solar Roof from the retail investors on say.com. Justin asked, "What changes has Tesla implemented V1 to V2 and now V3, and what has been their impact on cost or performance?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

I mean, there's quite a few changes. I have Drew and Kunal here. Guys, do you want to talk about some of the changes that we've made? There's a lot.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. We really wanted to achieve all the goals that Elon just outlined there. That involved assessing cost, beauty, installability, manufacturability across all axes. Just to run through some of the key points there, we've increased the size of the tile, increased the power density of the tile, dramatically reduced the number of parts and subassemblies in the tile by more than half. All of this goes in the direction of lower cost and easier manufacturability. We also changed some of the materials in use, changed the methods that we're using, the technology that we're using to achieve the hidden solar cells to something that's more scalable.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

I should say, this is one of the hardest things about the Solar Glass Roof is not seeing the solar cells beneath the glass, because it's kind of off-putting to see the cells. The hard part is you want the photons from the sun to get to the solar cells, but not create something which is aesthetically unappealing. It's quite a hard challenge.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. Solar cells are optically isotropic, meaning it can look purple from one angle and green from another. We have, through a number of different iterations and technology experiments, landed on a technology that gets the solar tiles to the point where they're anisotropic, so they blend in with the surrounding non-solar tiles and the trim.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

They look the same from any angle.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Exactly.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Only if you're in a helicopter. It may look weird if you're in a helicopter.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Even from there-

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

it still looks damn good.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

The other key aspect was focusing on installation. We really wanted to achieve an installation time that was faster than a new roof plus traditional panels.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Well, in fact, we're trying to improve even the installation time for a roof.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yes.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

I think with the right tooling and equipment, and especially paying close attention to the edge conditions of where multiple planes of the roof meet, and just applying some of the world's best engineering to that, I think we can actually have the Solar Roof installed faster than comp shingle, that's the target.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

That's been the clear goal.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

We're definitely moving there quickly.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

We're coming after you, comp shingle.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

The install-a-thon is part of our ambition to achieve that. The key part of installability is looking at how the parts get from the factory to the field to the roof, and then how they come together on the roof. We did a lot of iterations on that. The final thing I would mention is the flashings.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Edges

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

the edges, the trim, the trimming of the roof, I would say in early versions of the product, was almost like custom handicrafts. What we've done is thought a lot about those problems and come up with beautiful solutions that are very achievable in the field.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah, totally. This is Kunal. Our installers have been working hard installing this. We have already seen this is much simpler, faster, and a lot more intuitive to install. All those things that you guys have said have led to really fast install times, and we're targeting even faster than comp shingle. Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, I think probably we'll get there, actually.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

There's quite a bit of R&D just in the installation process itself. The difference between having a few simple tools, one way or the other, it can dramatically affect the install, cost and time.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Right.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

It's also important to have the least amount of bother. It's hard to be in your house while a new roof is being put on. Having that occur doing basically an entire roof in eight hours is quite important. You can literally go to work, come back, and you have a new roof that's generating electricity. Well, that's our target, sort of eight-hour roof.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Okay, since that comes from a roofing company now.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. It's kind of like a roofing company. It's a roof.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah. We're building things now.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Building, yeah. Yeah.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Thank you.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

So

Operator 1

Alexander asked, "When can we expect Solar Roof V3 to be available for wide residential adoption?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, that's now, actually. Yeah. You can just literally go to the website and enter your address and place an order right now. We're doing installations, ramping up as fast as we possibly can, starting in the next few weeks, actually. I think actually some are underway right now. Yeah, our goal is to obviously get north of 1,000 roofs per week as quickly as possible. It's always hard to predict the early stages of a production ramp, because things move as fast as the slowest item. I think we should be, in the next several months, well past 1,000 roofs a week. I think that's our goal.

Operator 1

Thank you. Robert asked, "What is the current Solar Roof production capacity, and how should we think about the production ramp through 2020? How are you feeling about demand?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Well, I don't think we're really going to have much of a demand problem, to be honest. I think demand will be far in excess of supply. As always, it's very difficult to predict a production ramp, because it almost always looks like an S curve. It starts off very slow at first because of you have a number of constraints, and it could be a very trivial part that is limiting the production ramp, but that still will limit the production ramp. If it's missing even the simplest item, or just one little thing is taking longer than expected, that sets the total production rate. It's essentially impossible to predict with accuracy the fast-moving part of the production S curve. You can, I think, predict when the S curve starts to flatten out. That's much more predictable.

That's why I think, if you say, probably several months from now will we be able to do more than 1,000 roofs a week? I think the answer is yes. Long term, we want to obviously do 10,000 roofs a week, then 20,000 roofs a week. I think the addressable market here is something on the order of 100 million houses worldwide. Obviously we want to ramp up as quickly as possible. We're starting off with the textured black glass. Hopefully we'll be able to bring to volume production other variants of the Solar Roof, I don't know, every 6-9 months, something like that. One of the most challenging is achieving a good earth tone Solar Roof, meaning like a clay tile type of thing. It's doable, but it's harder to achieve the right look.

That's something maybe is on the order of a year away, something like that. Yeah. Let's see.

Operator 1

Thank you. John asked, "How will Tesla handle logistics for installations? Do you already have partnerships with installation companies?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

We don't have any partnerships yet with installation companies. The current plan is to just iron out the broad brushstrokes with our internal installation crews, until we feel like we're hitting a flat part of the learning curve, and then bring in outside roofing companies and solars and say, "Okay, how can you help us make this better?" I think we'll see a very rapid improvement in the Solar Roof and the installation timing. Version 3 is really the first version that we think should be ramped up at scale. This is often true of new technologies, like Windows 1 and 2 didn't really work, frankly. Windows 3 was the first big one.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Sorry, 3.1 was.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, no, 3.1.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

kind of went, really-

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

True. Old school. 3.1.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

They needed the .1 release.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

The .1-

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

The finishing touches.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

was three minus really giant bugs. That's true. When we think of versions, hopefully it would not be 3.1 in our case, but we're going to keep improving the roof as we scale.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

We're hiring a lot of installers.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, we're hiring a lot of installers, yeah.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

We'll be partnering with installation companies in weeks to come. Lots of action deploying this product.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Operator 1

Thank you. From John from say.com, will Buffalo manufacture more than just solar? Any plans to add cell production and manufacture Powerwall/Packs there as well, so Giga One can focus on vehicle cells?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sure.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. Giga Two is already producing more than just solar. All of the Superchargers are actually manufactured there today, along with the inverter for Powerpack and the power electronics for the upcoming Megapack. Yeah, there's a real center of excellence of power electronics there, which couples well with solar when you think about it's frequently coupled to the solar. Yeah. Regarding beyond those Solar Roof and solar and power electronics, we don't have any plans at the moment.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

It's really primarily the solar glass roof. That's what our Buffalo factory will focus on. This will be for consumption worldwide. We thought of in the U.S., because we just need to have a tight feedback loop, so if there are any issues, we can fix them rapidly, and then scale. This will be something we provide worldwide.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our first question from the phone lines comes from Kyle Field with CleanTechnica. You may proceed with your question.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

Hey, it's Kyle from CleanTechnica. Thanks for taking my question.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

You're welcome.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

The cost of the solar roof has been a big barrier to date for version 2. Can you speak a little bit about the relative improvement in cost from version 2 to version 3 of the solar glass roof?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. You're right. Version 2 was too expensive. It's not like we were making a ton of money on it. We were just basically trying to not lose money on it. It just wasn't a version that was worth scaling because it was just too expensive. I think version 3 is something where we do think we can get below the cost of an average roof plus retrofit solar panels. We feel pretty good about our cost structure there. It's worth going big time with this version.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

Okay.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sorry, I should also say, one of the things that's obviously delayed Tesla Solar in general is that we had to focus for about 18 to 24 months, we had to focus the entire company on the Model 3 production ramp. That really kind of stripped resources from solar for a year and a half or thereabouts, because we had to make Model 3 work or Tesla wouldn't exist. Now that Model 3 is in relatively smooth operation, we've been able to redirect resources towards solar and stationary storage.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

Sure. No, that makes sense. Actually, we have version 2 of the Solar Roof on our house and the.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Oh, great.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

installation process looked like the LEGO version of building the Death Star on the roof.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

Can you talk a little bit about what you guys have done to streamline that process? That feels like a major barrier for cost and just the speed to installation.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sure.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah, I can talk about some of the installation improvements. One of the big things that Drew and Elon both touched upon when you installed V2 was that when two roofing planes met or the roof plane had an edge, what we call the edge conditions, we had to cut the tiles in V2. That was a very cumbersome process. It took a lot of time, created a lot of wastage on site, needed extra tools. We've gotten rid of all that in V3, and that's a big major improvement. Just total number of material and parts reduction from V2 to V3 has massively reduced the number of touches our installers have to do on site, and that reduces the time they have to take to install. There's tons of tiny improvements like that we've made across the product to make the installs really fast.

That's the advantage of Tesla having a vertically integrated chain from, we have a team of engineers and installers working day and night at the test home and giving rapid iterative feedback to improve minor installation efficiencies. We'll be doing a lot more of that.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. These edge conditions were basically a nightmare on V2.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Oh, yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

It was quite artisanal. It was like some artisanal glass factory, and a lot of the final production was actually at the house. It's sort of like if you're building airplanes and you finished your production on the runway. It was not great.

Kyle Field
Senior Editor, CleanTechnica

Yeah, we saw some of that. Appreciate the answers. Thanks, guys.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

No problem.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our next question comes from Phil LeBeau with CNBC. You may proceed with your question.

Phil LeBeau
Auto and Airline Industry Reporter, CNBC

Hi, Elon. Quick question on the installation crews. Can you give us some sense of how many crews you currently have, and what's the staffing per crew? Is it three people? Is it four people? Are they primarily based in California right now? Give us some kind of a geographic sense of where they are.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

I'm not sure that's like We're really trying to be product-focused here. I think, our current number of crews and how I'm not sure that's particularly helpful to end customers. This is really meant to be a call explaining the product to the consumer, as opposed to some sort of finance call or something like that.

Phil LeBeau
Auto and Airline Industry Reporter, CNBC

Well, I'm not looking for a finance, I'm just trying to get a sense of, you guys are talking about wanting to ramp up, and we're trying to get some sense of what that ability is right now in terms of, hey, we're planning on having 2,000 crews, 3,000 crews. What's that capacity like?

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Let's put it this way. We install Tesla Solar in 25 states in the country. We'll be definitely installing Solar Roof in all those states, because we already have energy warehouses, and we'll be installing Solar Roof there as well. As Elon said, we'll be expanding across the country with our own crews as well as third-party crews. That's all we can say right now. We are in 25 states installing solar, and Solar Roof will be there in all those states as well.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. Next question.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our next question comes from Sean O'Kane with The Verge. You may proceed with your question.

Sean O'Kane
Senior Reporter, The Verge

Hi, guys. It sounds like there is a little bit, while you simplified some of the stuff that makes it a little easier to install the new version, there's maybe a little bit more going on in the tiles themselves. Can you tell me what sort of process you went through to make sure you don't run into the same sort of production issues that you had with previous versions?

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah, I think-

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

To be clear, the issue with those prior versions was not so much the production, it was the installation was problematic. We could've ramped up production of version two, but it would've run into a fundamental obstacle with the difficulty of installation. If people are wondering, will we run into difficulty ramping version three? Absolutely. A massive amount of difficulty, and we'll go through a ton of pain. There'll be setbacks. I want to be clear.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

We have applied some preventative measures, however. By reducing the number of parts and sub-assemblies by half, we've dramatically reduced the number of processing steps and manufacturing steps, which simplifies any manufacturing ramp. I will say that the early production that we are in right now has gone smoothly. Now, as we ramp on the S-curve, we will find things that we have to overcome, but the road production looks good so far.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. It's always quite sort of jumpy and thorny on a short-term basis. I think a year from now it'll be pretty smooth sailing. Like I said, it feels like we often just get too focused on the short term. I think if you want to understand where a product's going to go long term, you scope and say, "What do you want the world to look like?" It's like, do you want a future where you look around at the houses in the neighborhood and they're generating electricity and they're beautiful and they're long-lasting? Of course. That's the future we need to make happen.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our next question comes from Kim Java from the YouTube channel Like Tesla. You may proceed with your question.

Kim Java
Content Creator, Like Tesla

Hi. I was curious if you could elaborate a little more on what the warranty is like for the tiles, and if you're using a third-party roofer, how that will affect the warranty.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sure.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah. This version, we are offering a 25-year warranty, which is weatherization, power, and we have 130 miles per hour wind resistance, hail resistance. 25 years is our warranty right now.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. These are things that are just fairly standard in the roofing industry.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Correct.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

So

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

More durability.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. We definitely don't have all the answers right now. To be frank, this is kind of like a weird and sort of odd product. You don't really hear of it. It's like, why would anyone want to make a Solar Roof? How strange. It's just the thing that should be. We're going to make it.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

It's going to be real confusing, because there's no actual product like this. That's the nature of the product.

Kim Java
Content Creator, Like Tesla

Yeah.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

My one comment on if we have third-party installers, how will the warranty work? That is how roofing works today, right? There's a manufacturer of the tile or the asphalt shingle square.

If the certified installer or roofer has been trained and has been audited to install correctly, then eventually the warranty is extended to that installer. I wouldn't expect us to do anything different with this product. Okay. Thank you.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

There's quite a big market for roofs, actually. There's on the order of 100 million roofs in North America, and they get replaced about every 25 years. It's about maybe 4 million.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

4 million

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

roofs a year.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

5 million new homes a year. I mean, sorry, 1 million new homes a year.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, 1 million new homes a year. On the order of 5 million in North America, which is 5% of the world's population or thereabout. It's quite a big market. This is why I think we're going to be production and sort of installation constrained. On a percentage basis, it'll grow like kelp on steroids, but there's just so many things that have to be sorted out. I think it's going to be a very exciting product, and it's like this. It's the kind of thing that I think people will want their roof to be this way. Yeah.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our next question comes from Roberto Baldwin with Engadget. You may proceed with your question.

Roberto Baldwin
Contributor, Engadget

Hi. I'm curious on the energy efficiency of the tiles versus panels. If you have, let's say, a 200 sq ft area of the tiles and a 200 sq ft area of the panels, what is the difference in the sunlight to energy conversion?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sure. There's a slight impact.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Well, the target is equivalent to or better. There are some benefits to the Solar Roof in that we have a smaller integer size.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

The granularity of

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

A question of what's the cell efficiency. If you're purely looking at it on a cell efficiency basis, you're obviously going to take some knockdown in order to have better aesthetics. That knockdown, we want to try to keep that knockdown to something on the order of maybe 10%-ish. Hopefully less. Drew's saying less. From a best case, ideally, it's a single-digit effect on the energy efficiency on a cell level. You can put far more cells on the roof, and do so without affecting the aesthetics. In fact, you can't even tell which tiles are active and which ones are not active.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

The total power capability of the roof is significantly greater with the Solar Roof.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. If you haven't ever had solar, just drive around your neighborhood and look at homes and you can see the quantization problem of the panel. You've got skylights, you've got stove pipes.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Roofs are messy and complicated.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

By the way, generally look terrible.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

You normally don't pay attention to them.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

You normally don't pay attention to roofs, then you're like, "Wow." We had a lot of trouble finding good-looking roofs, because we want our roofs to be the best-looking roofs. It's not easy finding pictures of good roofs, let me tell you. It's very difficult. It's also the job of

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Maybe just sit here.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

For all of those reasons, we have equivalent or better in almost all cases, power generation.

Roberto Baldwin
Contributor, Engadget

Thank you.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. Absolutely. From a consumer standpoint, it will be a better outcome. If the right move, if you're going to get a new roof and put solar panels, this is a solar glass roof with integrated cells, it's going to be a better outcome, we believe, in terms of economic power generation, aesthetics, and durability.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. I just want to add one more comment. We're not married to a particular solar cell technology in our aesthetic solution. As solar cells get better, the Solar Roof will also get better. That was a very important target for the team, just to make sure that we do not take ourselves on a legacy solar cell technology while the industry moves forward.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Solar efficiency has-

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Started

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

like plateaued.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Starting to plateau.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin
Contributor, Engadget

Thank you.

Operator 1

Thank you. Our next question comes from Darrell Etherington with TechCrunch. You may proceed with your question.

Darrell Etherington
Writer, TechCrunch

Hi. Thanks for taking the call. I was just wondering, do you see any other potential formats or incarnations of this technology that might enter the market in different ways or be offered to consumers in different ways?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. We're really just scaling this one variant for now, which is the textured black glass look. Over time, we want to have something that has sort of an earth tone, looks sort of more like a clay tile. We want to have one that looks like a French slate. Not all houses should have black textured glass. Especially if it's more of Mediterranean architecture, it's going to look out of place. Making that work is next on the agenda from a product development standpoint in terms of a significant improvement. Significant, I should say, variant, not improvement. It's like we're getting earth tone version that looks right is the next major challenge for the engineering team. Yeah. I think we'll get some time probably next year.

Operator 2

Thank you. Our next question comes from Hope King with Cheddar. You may proceed with your question.

Hope King
Anchor, Cheddar

Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. From a consumer standpoint, especially what we've seen happen in California, I mean, PG&E says it could take another 10 years before some of these outages are ratcheted down significantly. Elon, you've been tweeting recently to get folks to order Tesla Solar and Powerwall. Are you already seeing orders grow, demand grow as a result of the outages?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

I think we are seeing some demand growth as a result of that. It stands to reason that when you turn the lights off on people, they don't want that to keep happening for the next 10 years. There's no obvious solution. When you're just sort of sitting there in the dark and all of your devices are battery powered, so then you lose your phone connection, it's like a security risk. You can't even call 911 if there's a problem. We're definitely seeing people interested in solar plus the Powerwall batteries so they can have no blackouts and have renewable energy. That's definitely we've seen demand increase as a result, and I think we'll continue to see that in the future.

Hope King
Anchor, Cheddar

Just how important is this also to developing the overall Tesla energy ecosystem that you guys want to build out?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, I think this is very important. The fundamental goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. We have to therefore generate the energy in a sustainable way, which really means solar primarily, in our view. That's both solar at the residential level, at the commercial level, and at the utility level. Since the sun obviously doesn't shine at night, and you have cloudy weather at times, you have to have storage to have continuous power. There's really three parts to the sustainable energy future. From a Tesla standpoint, it's solar power generation, storing that solar with stationary storage, the Powerwall, Powerpack, and Megapack, and then consuming that energy in a sustainable way, which means electric transport.

I think the fundamental good of Tesla, in my view, is to what degree did we accelerate the advent of a sustainable energy future?

Hope King
Anchor, Cheddar

Thank you.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Thanks.

Operator 2

Thank you. Our next question comes from Karissa Bell with Mashable. You may proceed with your question.

Karissa Bell
Senior Reporter, Mashable

Hey, thanks for taking my question.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sure.

Karissa Bell
Senior Reporter, Mashable

You've talked a lot about how you're improving the installation process, making that more efficient, a lot faster. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what you're anticipating the wait time will be like for people who make a reservation or preorder for this and how long you're anticipating that they'll have to wait between that and when they'll actually be able to get it installed?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Well, it depends on how many people sign up for the Solar Roof. If it's a lot of people, we'll just sort of queue things accordingly. It might be a few months that people have to wait or several months. I think the sooner people sign up, the less time they'll have to wait. We will grow this exponentially. I don't know, it might be doubling every month or something like that. We want to get to the point next year where there's a very short wait time. If it's possible to do so, we'll do our best to achieve that.

Karissa Bell
Senior Reporter, Mashable

Do you anticipate that the?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Sorry, go ahead.

Karissa Bell
Senior Reporter, Mashable

Do you anticipate that the installation process will help speed things up overall, that this should be a much more efficient end-to-end from reservation to installation than it was with version one or two?

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, this is really intended to be easy to install. There will continue to be improvements that we make to version three that actually are mostly related to the edge conditions, like essentially the corners of the roofs where the planes of the roof meet and at the edge of the roof, where the rain gutters are and that kind of thing. Those will be very rapid evolution of those edge condition details, and that's, I think, is the key to growing this rapidly and like I said, getting our install time for a typical roof under eight hours.

Which means really, it's better to basically have a fairly big crew attack the roof all at once, kind of like surgical strike and just get it done quickly versus a small number of people take a long time to do the roof because having it be done fast just minimizes the inconvenience to the homeowner.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

There's less set up, tear down time every day.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah, exactly.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Fewer truck rolls

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Totally.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

We'll be installing starting next month in California. We already have customers lined up.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. One other comment on the wait time.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

We are actually installing some now, but yeah.

Kunal Girotra
Head of Tesla Energy, Tesla

Yeah. Installing now.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah. The wait time, one thing to consider is weather. In places where it's very covered in snow, obviously there's some wait time there.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Very rainy, hopefully.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yep. I guess the intention here is this is a roof. We want to install it faster than traditional roofs are installed. The benchmark is that calling somebody up saying you want a new roof and getting the roof installed, as soon as the weather is good. That's exactly how our products will work.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

Yeah. It's like seamlessly easy and not have to wait a long time.

Drew Baglino
SVP, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Tesla

Yeah.

Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla

All right, cool. I think that's probably our last question. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We look forward to installing ultimately millions of roofs. Thanks.

Operator 2

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.