Tesla's new Vice President of Solar Products is aggressively confident about his company's solar roofing product. In a recent interview with Austin Carr from Fast Company, the former CTO and co-founder of  SolarCity, acquired by Tesla, said that the Tesla/SolarCity combo is the only one that can pull off the technology successfully. He said, “If you just created a solar shingle, you’re kind of f****d. I don’t think anybody but the combination of SolarCity and Tesla can pull this off.”

Orders for the technology have been through the roof (pun intended), selling out well into the next year. Still, none of these pre-orders have shipped, so we will have to wait to see if the technology actually does live up to the hype.

Image Credit: Tesla

The market may not be saturated with competition, but it does exist. Fred Lambert at Electrek discusses Forward Labs' offering which was announced shortly before Tesla unveiled their roofing tech. Their tech is modeled after steel roofing, which is an entirely different market than Tesla's products would serve. Both technologies still have to prove themselves, but Tesla's option does have a leg up with its vertical integration capabilities. Tesla's technology fully integrates into their home battery storage systems, the Powerpack and the Powerwall.

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