A solar roof is a feature that is expensive and difficult to do, Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker says.
“It is one thing to show a solar roof, it is another to make it work,” he says in an interview. “You have to get that energy into a high voltage energy pack. It’s a special converter device which we have filed a patent on. I don’t know how other people do it because it is not easy to do and really get all the power in.”
One thing Fisker has figured out is a way for the sun’s energy to be captured by the parked car, without using energy in the car to do so. “We kind of invented something that makes that happen. We don’t want to talk too much about it,” the CEO says
“Under ideal conditions if you go in snail traffic on the way to work, bumper-to-bumper, you could get up to 2,000 miles a year. There comes a point where it is quite efficient, quite a lot of miles you can get free, total zero emission, so I think if you can afford it, it’s a really cool feature.”
“It’s obviously still really expensive. We have spent a lot of time on developing it and making it work correctly. We put it in because I think it’s a technology that, as we start improving it, maybe in the later stage in some years, we can double or triple the energy. Then suddenly you get to the point where you can do small trips without even using any other power than solar. We are not there yet.”
Well, that was then, this is now. As you can see by the chart above, not even close. The 1,500 free miles, sounds good, the 2,000 miles sounds great, but reality is showing those estimates are no where near reality. When my car arrived on October 30, 2024, it showed 398.6 solar miles. I have no idea how long the car has been sitting inside versus outside and where sitting. In the year since, as of October 29, 2025, the screen shows 1,062.3 solar miles. That’s only 663.7 miles, less than half of initial estimates!
To that point, Henrik was correct when he said the solar roof is very expensive. Very, very expensive! Currently, a solar roof is selling for $7,500 at Tsunami Automotive. That’s 10% of the car cost! Whoa! Now think of this: I charged at Electrify America, adding 57.4 kWh of energy, which got me about 250 miles. So that takes about 6 charges to get 1,500 miles, (6 x 250 = 1,500, I think), so 6 x $24 = $144. And that’s public charging. My home charging is 1/3 of that, so about $53 at home. So $7,500 to pay for $144 of charging. Good thing this solar panel was only on the first 5,000 cars. Maybe that should have been on the first 1,000 cars!?!
But one interesting notion, the price difference between cars with and without the solar roof was almost $20,000. The Extreme model, with SolarSky Roof was listed at $68,999. The Ultra model, with no SolarSky, $49,999. But the Ultra also had another $10k worth of goodies removed: 10 miles of range, Adaptive Cruise Control, Park My Car, non-revolving central screen (it’s still 17″, just doesn’t rotate for Hollywood mode, so no videos), no Limo mode, and no California Mode from the key fob.