Energy
Tesla patent hints at stunning colored Solar Roof tiles with zero compromises
Elon Musk recently noted on Twitter that Tesla would be prioritizing the production of its Solar Roof tiles this coming 2019. These updates were announced not long after the company invited local media from Buffalo, NY to tour Gigafactory 2, the company’s facility which is producing the unique solar shingles. As Tesla continues to prepare for the ramp of the Solar Roof tiles next year, a recent patent has been published outlining a design that would allow the company to offer colored variants of the solar shingles without compromising any functionality.
Tesla’s recent patent, titled “Uniformly and Directionally Colored Photovoltaic Modules,” was published last Thursday. In the document’s background, Tesla noted that PV modules are usually blue, dark blue, or black because these are the natural color of solar cells. Considering that homeowners have preferences in their roofing material’s color, though, there is a need for the Solar Roof tiles to have varying shades and textures. There are currently several conventional ways to colorize PV modules, such the utilization of tinted glass and/or encapsulation sheets. That said, such systems are prone to absorbing large amounts of sunlight, which results in PV power loss. The appearance of standard colored PV modules also tends to degrade over time.
“Shading, or absorption of incident sunlight, causes PV power loss, a consequential problem of existing coloring techniques. In addition, colored PV modules manufactured with these techniques, and colored glass more generally, commonly suffer from: sparkle, or glint; flop, or angle-dependent color appearance; and graininess. Note that sparkle refers to glint or localized bright spots. Flop, on the other hand, usually refers to angle-dependent color, i.e. an angular dependence of the peak reflected wavelength. The term flop, or light-dark flop, can also refer to angle-dependent brightness, i.e. an angular dependence of total reflectivity.”
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- An illustration of Tesla’s patent for its colored Solar Roof tiles. [Credit: US Patent Office]
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- An illustration of Tesla’s patent for its colored Solar Roof tiles. [Credit: US Patent Office]
An illustration of Tesla’s patent for its colored Solar Roof tiles. [Credit: US Patent Office]
Tesla’s system for its colored Solar Roof tiles utilizes a rather clever system to avoid the drawbacks of conventional PV module coloration methods. Instead of using traditional solutions like tinted glass, Tesla’s design employs a texturized surface of a glass cover that has a color filter layer, as well as a “transparent material with a predetermined refractive index.” Following is Tesla’s description of its colored Solar Roof tiles’ design.
“Embodiments of the present invention can produce PV roof tiles with a uniform color with little light absorption. As a result, a high proportion of the incident light (of colors other than the module’s intended color) is transmitted to the PV cells. To facilitate uniform coloring of PV modules and roof tiles, the inside surface of a top glass cover can be texturized, and a transparent material with a predetermined refractive index or combination of refractive indices can be deposited on the texturized surface. Such a micro-textured or frosted glass cover can display significantly less sparkle, flop, and graininess than conventional glass covers, thus improving color uniformity and appearance. Customizable directional coloring, and intentionally controlled angle-dependent color, can provide further aesthetic options, while still performing efficiently for solar conversion. It is also possible to produce a layer of sphere-shaped metal nanoparticles on the inside surface of the glass cover.
“These nanoparticles can produce colors efficiently while absorbing little light. Another feature described herein is directional coloring of PV modules or roof tiles. The texturized surface of a glass cover can have a color filter layer covering one or more facets of the texture. This color filter can include multiple thin film layers formed using a directional thin film deposition technique, such as chemical or physical vapor deposition (CVD or PVD), e.g. sputtering. The coating layer can be deposited by coating the textured glass surface in one or more directions. Such directional coating can reduce unwanted light absorption by the color filter, while still providing a uniform color appearance to viewers at a certain viewing angle.”
Tesla opted to design the colored Solar Roof tiles with textured “micro-structured” glass, which feature surface roughness on the order of 100 nm to 10 μιη. This allows the colored Solar Roof tiles to display a uniform color with little light absorption and less sparkle, flop, and graininess than conventional colored glass. The colored shingles’ design also provides customizable directional and multi-directional coating, improving the aesthetics of the Solar Roof tiles themselves while still being optimized for solar conversion.
Following is a comparison of conventional colored PV modules (504 and 508) and Tesla’s coloration system (502 and 506), showing how the electric car maker’s micro-structured glass design addresses sparkle, or glare; flop, or angle-dependent coloring.
The Solar Roof tiles are Tesla’s flagship residential solar product. Designed to mimic the appearance of conventional roofing materials while offering all the advantages of solar panels, the Solar Roofs are an excellent way for homeowners to utilize a PV system without compromising the aesthetics of their home. The shingles were warmly received when they were unveiled back in 2016, though the production and installation of Solar Roof tiles are yet to ramp. Elon Musk explained the delay in the shingles’ production ramp during the third quarter earnings call.
“We’ll also start going into volume production of the solar tile roof next year. That’s quite a long development cycle for — because anything that’s roof has got to last 30 years. So even if you do accelerate life testing as fast as possible, there’s still a minimum amount of time required to do that. And there’s a lot of engineering that goes into how do you put on the solar tile roof with a — and not be really labor-intensive in doing so. So there’s a lot of engineering not just in the tile but in the way it’s done,” Musk said.
Back in July, Tesla CTO JB Straubel noted that the company is “aggressively” ramping its capacity to produce and deliver its residential solar products, stating that “No one should see us as stepping back from solar. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like with Model 3. People have come flooding in and are waiting on the product. So now we’re aggressively ramping our capacity.”
The full text of Tesla’s patent for its colored Solar Roof tiles could be accessed here.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
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Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Elon Musk
Tesla Supercharger for Business exposes jaw-dropping ROI gap between best and worst locations
Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business calculator reveals an eye-opening all-in cost and location-based ROI projections.
Tesla has launched an online calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving property owners their first transparent look at what it really costs to install Superchargers on site and what kind of return they can expect.
The program itself launched in September 2025, allowing businesses to purchase and operate Supercharger hardware on their own property while Tesla handles installation, maintenance, software, and 24/7 driver support. As Teslarati reported at launch, hosts also get their logo placed on the chargers and their location integrated into Tesla’s in-car navigation, meaning drivers are actively routed there. The stalls are open to all EVs, not just Teslas.
We launched Supercharger for Business in 2025 to help companies get charging right. We found simplicity and transparency to be a problem in this industry.
We’re now sharing pricing and a financial calculator to help make informed decisions. The goal is to accelerate investments,…
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) April 8, 2026
The new online calculator, announced by Tesla on Wednesday with the note that “simplicity and transparency” have been a problem in the industry, lets any business enter a U.S. address and get a real cost and revenue model. A standard 8-stall V4 Supercharger site runs approximately $500,000 in hardware and $55,000 per post for installation, bringing an all-in price just shy of $1 million. Tesla charges a flat $0.10 per kWh fee to cover software, billing, and network operations. Businesses set their own retail price and keep the margin above that fee.
Taking a look at Tesla’s Supercharger for Business online calculator, we can see that ROI is not uniform, and the gap between a strong location and a poor one can stretch the breakeven point by several years.
The biggest driver is foot traffic and how long people stay. A busy rest station, hotel, or outlet mall brings in repeat visitors who need to charge while they’re already stopped, pushing utilization numbers higher and shortening payback time.
Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator
Local electricity rates matter just as much on the cost side. Markets like California carry some of the highest commercial electricity rates in the country, which eats into the margin between what a host pays per kWh and what they charge drivers. At the same time, dense urban areas with high EV adoption tend to support higher retail charging prices, which can offset that cost if demand is strong enough. Weather also plays a role. Cold climates reduce battery efficiency and increase charging frequency, but they can also suppress utilization in winter months if drivers avoid stopping in exposed outdoor locations. Suburban and rural sites face a different problem: lower baseline EV traffic, which means a site with cheaper power and lower operating costs can still take longer to pay back simply because the stalls sit idle more often. Tesla’s calculator uses real fleet data to pre-fill utilization estimates by ZIP code, so businesses can run their specific address against these variables rather than relying on averages.
The program has seen real adoption. Wawa, already the largest host of Tesla Superchargers with over 2,100 stalls across 223 locations, opened its first fully owned and branded site in Alachua, Florida earlier this year. Francis Energy of Oklahoma and the city of Alpharetta, Georgia have also deployed branded stations through the program, as Teslarati covered in January.
Tesla now exceeds 80,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide, and the calculator makes the economic case for accelerating that number through private investment rather than company-owned sites alone.
Energy
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla’s folding V4 Supercharger ships 33% more per truck, cuts deployment time and cost significantly.
Tesla is rolling out a folding V4 Supercharger design, an engineering change that allows 33% more units to fit on a single delivery truck, cuts deployment time in half, and reduces overall installation cost by roughly 20%.
The folding mechanism addresses one of the least glamorous but most consequential bottlenecks in charging infrastructure: getting hardware from factory floor to job site efficiently. By collapsing the form factor for transit and unfolding into an operational configuration on arrival, the new design dramatically reduces the logistics overhead that has historically slowed Supercharger rollouts, particularly at large or remote sites where multiple units are needed simultaneously.
The timing aligns with a broader acceleration in Tesla’s network strategy. In March 2026, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet after more than seven years and 15,000 units, pivoting entirely to V4 cabinet production. The V4 cabinet itself is already a generational leap, delivering up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, while supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. The folding transport innovation layers logistical efficiency on top of that technical foundation.
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Tesla Charging’s Director Max de Zegher, commenting on the V4 cabinet when it launched, captured the operational philosophy behind these changes: “Posts can peak up to 500kW for cars, but we need less than 1MW across 8 posts to deliver maximum power to cars 99% of the time.” The design philosophy has always been about maximizing real-world throughput, not just peak specs, and the folding transport upgrade extends that thinking into the supply chain itself.
Posts can peak up to 500kW for cars, but we need less than 1MW across 8 posts to deliver maximum power to cars 99% of the time.
No more DC busbar between cabinets. Power comes from a single V4 cabinet to 8 stalls. Easier to install, cheaper, more reliable.
Introducing Folding Unit Superchargers
– V4 cabinet with 500kW charging
– 8 posts per unit
– 2 units per truck
– 2 configurations: folded, unfoldedFaster. Cheaper. Better. pic.twitter.com/YyALz0U5cA
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) March 25, 2026
The network is expanding rapidly on multiple fronts. The first true 500 kW V4 Supercharger on the East Coast opened in Kissimmee, Florida in March 2026, followed closely by a new site in Nashville, Tennessee. A public Megacharger for the Tesla Semi launched in Ontario, California in early March, with 37 additional Megacharger sites targeted for completion by end of year. Meanwhile, more than 27,500 Supercharger stalls are now accessible to non-Tesla EVs from brands including Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, and most recently Stellantis, whose Dodge, Jeep, Ram, Fiat, and Maserati BEV customers gained access in March 2026.
As Tesla pushes toward a denser, faster, and more open charging network, innovations like the folding V4 Supercharger reflect the company’s growing focus on deployment velocity, not just hardware performance. Getting chargers to the ground faster, cheaper, and in greater volume per shipment may ultimately matter as much as the kilowatts they deliver.
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