A California judge has deemed Tesla liable for fraud in a Solar Roof lawsuit, after the company repeatedly failed to hand over evidence. Tesla had already admitted it breached the contract, broke its warranty, and was negligent on the job.
The homeowner says fixing the damage will cost “well over $2.5 million.” Tesla once offered him $5,000.
The case is Conroy v. Tesla, filed in 2022 in San Diego Superior Court’s North County division (case No. 37-2022-00043670). Electrek reviewed the court orders, the complaint, and the parties’ joint trial readiness report. Here’s what’s in them.
Tesla has already admitted liability
Ambrose Conroy, who lives in Rancho Santa Fe, signed up for a Tesla Solar Roof in March 2020. The original contract was $82,210 for a 13.1 kW system. By February 2021, after two amendments, it had grown to roughly $110,000 for an 18.2 kW roof and six Powerwalls.
The roof was never finished. It never passed a county inspection, and it never produced a single kWh for the house.
Tesla isn’t contesting most of that anymore. In the joint report filed by both sides last month, Tesla stipulated to liability on three of the five claims.
The other two claims, fraud and negligent misrepresentation, are where things went badly for Tesla.
Two sanctions, then the big one
Judge Cynthia Freeland sanctioned Tesla twice over discovery before going further. She ordered it to pay $15,467.50 in February and another $13,500 in June, both times for failing to produce a proper privilege log and responsive documents, and both times warning that issue sanctions could follow.
Tesla missed the next deadline anyway. So on September 11, the court deemed Tesla liable for fraud and negligent misrepresentation, limiting the trial on those claims to compensatory and punitive damages.
The judge found “ample evidence to support that Defendants have acted willfully.” Among the missing records were Microsoft Teams messages (Tesla’s own corporate witness testified they’re kept “for infinity”), OSHA logs, emails with San Diego County inspectors, and more than 20 quality, install, and safety reports from Tesla’s internal Bolt system.
She also wrote this:
Tesla asked her to reconsider, arguing it had since produced everything. She said no in a ruling dated October 27, writing that the late documents could support Conroy’s theory that Tesla “knowingly used Plaintiff’s home as an experiment while knowing they lacked the experience to perform as promised.”
“Experimenting” on the house, and daily reports to Elon Musk
And the “experiment” word shows up in Tesla’s own messages, according to the trial exhibit list. Exhibit 224 is described as text messages from January 13, 2021, between Tesla’s director of model engineering Bobby Yang and other Tesla employees.
To be clear, that’s how Conroy’s side describes the messages on the exhibit list. We haven’t seen the texts themselves. But Elon Musk is on Conroy’s witness list, and internal emails quoted in the complaint point the same way.
On February 9, 2021, Yang wrote internally that the house was in the “99.5 percentile in terms of complexity” and that “if we can do this job well, we should be able to do any job well.” RJ Johnson, then head of Tesla’s energy business, replied that the project would “skew numbers” but that Tesla needed “to make it right.”
Then he added one more line.
Johnson was fired in April 2021. The roof had at least 59 mounting planes, and one employee called it the largest job Tesla had attempted at the time, according to the complaint.
A two-week job that never ended
Conroy’s account of the installation reads like a list of everything that can go wrong on a roof. These are his allegations, but Tesla has now conceded breach and negligence.
The tear-off was supposed to take two days and took two weeks. Tesla left in November 2020 with bare roof decking exposed, then had crews work overtime on December 27 to get underlayment down before a storm. Tiles arrived scratched and damaged and went on the roof anyway. Glass tiles shattered in the driveway and lawn, and the family says they still can’t walk there barefoot.
By March 2021, Johnson had agreed in writing that paying “when you’re happy with the outcome is completely reasonable.” Tesla’s billing department kept calling anyway.
In August 2021, an internal email weighed just leaving.
The project went through at least seven project managers. In November 2021, Tesla told Conroy the people behind its repair plan were gone and it had nobody in the area to do the work.
In April 2022, Tesla offered $5,000 to settle everything.
It didn’t end there. In February 2025, more than two years into the lawsuit, Tesla failed another San Diego County inspection after showing up without the plans for the venting system. And this summer, Conroy’s electrical expert opened up part of the roof and concluded that the way Tesla ran wiring and conduit under the tiles created a short-circuit and fire risk in heavy rain. The roof is now coming off. Tesla’s lawyers point out that even Conroy’s counsel called that fire risk “counterintuitive.”
Tesla wants the Court of Appeal to step in
Tesla is fighting the sanction hard. In an October 29 filing, it asked the court to freeze the case while it petitions the California Court of Appeal, arguing the order is “unduly punitive,” violates due process, and amounts to a directed verdict on fraud before trial.
Tesla also says the discovery fight had no connection to the fraud claims and that it has now produced everything relevant. The judge already rejected that argument once.
The November 20 trial date is off. A trial readiness conference is set for December 4, and Conroy’s lawyers want to go to trial in December.
This isn’t the first Solar Roof horror story in this case file. Conroy’s complaint attaches our 2020 report on a Solar Roof buyer left with tarps over his house after Tesla tried an untested underlayment on his home. It also cites a 2025 California Contractors State License Board action seeking to revoke Tesla’s contractor licenses over abandoned Solar Roof jobs.
Electrek’s Take
What a nightmare. This is the most damaging Solar Roof case I’ve seen, and I’ve been covering this product since Elon Musk unveiled it on a Universal Studios backlot in 2016.
A botched install isn’t news on its own. Tesla only installed about 3,000 of these roofs before killing the product this year, and plenty of them went sideways. What’s different here is the paper trail: internal emails calling a customer’s home a test of whether Tesla could do “any job,” texts describing the job as an “experiment” with daily reports going to Musk, and then years of Tesla failing to hand over its own records until a judge ran out of patience.
And Tesla’s response to all of it was $5,000.
Look, it’s normal for things not to go as planned with a new product, and early adopters need to be flexible. However, we are talking about someone’s literal roof over their head here and a trillion-dollar company. Tesla could have and should have made it right a long time ago.
The issue sanction might not survive the Court of Appeal. Courts don’t love deciding fraud through discovery orders, and Tesla’s due process argument isn’t frivolous. But even if it gets reversed, Tesla has still admitted it breached the contract and was negligent, and the jury will see how this customer was treated.
This also says a lot about how Tesla ran the Solar Roof business. It sold a product it knew was hard to install, on homes it knew were complex, while the people running the program kept leaving. Conroy’s house was one of the worst cases, but installers are still dealing with the fallout of Tesla walking away from the product earlier this year.
The real question is what’s in those Teams messages and texts Tesla fought so hard to keep out of this case. If this goes to trial in December, we might find out.
Solar Roof was supposed to make going solar effortless. For most homeowners, conventional panels from a reputable local installer are the safer bet. With electricity rates up almost 10% last year and expected to keep climbing, going solar is one of the best ways to protect yourself against rising costs. And with lease and PPA options, you can do it with zero upfront cost and start saving immediately. If you want to find the best deal, check out EnergySage. It’s a free service with hundreds of pre-vetted installers competing for your business, so you save 20 to 30% compared to going it alone. No sales calls until you pick an installer. Get your free quotes here.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
