Tesla's Solar Roof Looks Great, Would Be Excellent For All Our Open-Source Benchmarking

[stiiixy]

A couple of things it seems people are forgetting.

First, the whole saving the world thing they are backing up by open sourcing technology related patents. Secondly, as someone else mentioned, they succeeded with electric cars where many other companies have failed for decades at this point. This like that is an engineering problem and there's significant overlap between the technology needed for an electric car and the electronics of a solar roof. Third look at the time from Powerwall 1.0 to Powerwall 2.0, I'm sure there will be a 3, 4, 5.... People are worried about the charge degradation over time, but I'm sure there will be a secondhand market for these things. Some people will be more than happy to buy degraded 2 n-1 or n-2 Powerwalls for a discount while others get rid of their 3-4 year old powerwalls for a brand new one. Lastly Tesla has had a bigger impact because they are pushing others with deeper pockets to innovate as well, much like how Google Fiber has pushed others to bump up their speeds.

And because they're a far more open company, they likely wont try locking down that second hand market as they likely realise they can offload a lot fo the recycling programme to 3rd party's who would pick up the slack. That could quite possibly drive up prices, like the spare- auto parts industry, but that's not their problem. So long as Tesla doesn't pro-actively lock out the whole 2nd-hand market like parts, books and music, you're gold.