A California judge has deemed Tesla liable for fraud and negligent misrepresentation in a lawsuit over a Solar Roof installation that never produced a single unit of electricity, after the company repeatedly failed to hand over evidence in the case.

The ruling came in Conroy v. Tesla, a case filed in 2022 in San Diego Superior Court. Judge Cynthia Freeland issued the order on 11 September 2026 as an issue sanction, a penalty imposed when a party fails to meet its disclosure duties. It is not a jury verdict that Tesla committed fraud. What it does mean is that the trial on those two claims will now deal only with compensatory and punitive damages.

The homeowner, Ambrose Conroy of Rancho Santa Fe, signed a contract in March 2020 for $82,210 for a 13.1 kW system. After two amendments it had grown by February 2021 to roughly $110,000 for an 18.2 kW roof and six Powerwalls. The roof was never finished, never passed a county inspection, and never generated power for the house. It is now being removed.

Tesla has already conceded much of the case. In a joint trial readiness report filed on 20 October 2026, the company stipulated to liability on three of the five claims against it: breach of contract, breach of warranty and negligence. The fraud and negligent misrepresentation claims were the two that remained, and they were decided by the judge after the discovery failures.

Judge Freeland sanctioned Tesla twice before taking the further step, ordering it to pay $15,467.50 in February and $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. When Tesla missed the next deadline, the court acted, finding ample evidence that the defendants had acted wilfully.

Among the missing records were Microsoft Teams messages, safety logs, emails with San Diego County inspectors, and more than 20 quality, installation and safety reports from Tesla's internal Bolt system. The judge also wrote that Tesla's failure to comply was a tacit admission that the withheld information was damning.

Tesla asked the judge to reconsider, arguing that it had since produced everything. She refused in a ruling dated 27 October, writing that the late documents could support Conroy's theory that Tesla knowingly used his home as an experiment while knowing it lacked the experience to perform as promised.

That word, experiment, also appears in Tesla's own messages, according to the trial exhibit list. Exhibit 224 is described as text messages from 13 January 2021 between Tesla's director of model engineering, Bobby Yang, and other employees, discussing experimenting on the house. Electrek notes it has not seen the texts themselves. Musk is on Conroy's witness list. In another message quoted in the complaint, Yang called the house 99.5 percentile in complexity, and RJ Johnson, then head of Tesla's energy business, replied that Tesla needed to make it right. Johnson was fired in April 2021.

The installation itself went badly wrong, according to Conroy's account. A tear-off supposed to take two days took two weeks, and Tesla left in November 2020 with bare roof decking exposed. Tiles arrived scratched and damaged and were installed anyway, and glass tiles shattered in the driveway and lawn. The project went through at least seven project managers, and 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. Conroy says fixing the damage will cost well over $2.5 million. In February 2025, Tesla failed another county inspection after arriving without the plans for the venting system. This summer, Conroy's electrical expert concluded that the way Tesla ran wiring under the tiles created a short-circuit and fire risk in heavy rain, although Tesla's lawyers point out that even Conroy's counsel called that fire risk counterintuitive.

Tesla is now fighting the sanction. 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. The 20 November trial date has been vacated, and a trial readiness conference is set for 4 December, with Conroy's lawyers wanting to go to trial in December.

The case also casts light on the wider Solar Roof business. Tesla installed only about 3,000 of the roofs before ending the product this year, and Conroy's complaint cites a 2025 California Contractors State License Board action seeking to revoke Tesla's contractor licences over abandoned Solar Roof jobs. Whether the sanction survives the Court of Appeal remains to be seen, but Tesla has admitted it breached the contract, broke its warranty and was negligent.