The Tesla Model Y Standard's Fabric Roof Makes No Sense

Tesla made a new headliner that covers up the glass roof in the Model Y Standard, so it’s still there, but you can’t see through it.

Tesla Roof Fabric

Photo by: YouTube

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Oct 9, 2025 at 9:33am ET

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The Tesla Model Y Standard has the Premium model's glass roof, but you can't see through it.
Tesla designed a new headliner that covers the glass roof in the Model Y Standard.
You can still see the sky in the cheaper Model 3 Standard, which has the same headliner as the Premium model.

Tesla has invented the world’s first glass roof that you can’t see through. It’s installed in the new Model Y Standard and is the same full-length glass roof as in the regular Model Y (now called Model Y Premium), but it’s hidden behind a new headliner so that you can’t enjoy it.

Yes, you read that right. This might seem unbelievably pointless, but publications that have actually seen the car, like Motor Trend and Car and Driver, confirm this is the case. And it’s just baffling. Why would Tesla design and manufacture an entirely new headliner to cover up the glass roof that it could have simply removed?

The new part uses more material than it already had, and it frankly sounds like it could be more expensive, not cheaper, unless Tesla has made it cost less somehow. Furthermore, a glass roof is more expensive than a simple metal roof or one made out of fiberglass (which is what some rumors suggested it was going to be).

You can see the new roofliner 27 seconds into this promo video. As you would expect, it only makes the car look cheaper from the inside, while from the outside it still has the same glass roof through which you presumably now see the back side of the newly added sound-insulating material.

And here's YouTuber Gjeebs, giving a better look at it about nine minutes into this video:

What Tesla did has to be a more expensive solution, unless the economies of scale come into play. Maybe designing a new roof panel to replace the glass would have cost Tesla even more. Stranger still is that the Model 3 kept its glass roof visible while the more expensive Model Y did not. How and why that happened is unclear. Our sister site Motor1 speculated it’s simply cheaper to produce a headliner without a cutout for the glass, while others think it may have been part of some supplier deal for Tesla.

After this story initially ran, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, shed some light on the company's decision making on X.

He said the Standard's roof glass lacks the reflective coating that helps keep the cabin from heating up too much in the Premium models. He added in another reply that the company went with a covered glass roof instead of a metal one due to "cost, supply chain and manufacturing efficiency in our factories."

In the fresh gallery of photos showing the Model Y Standard, Tesla seems to be deliberately hiding the covered-up roof and you can only barely see the corner of the new headliner in a single interior shot. All of this makes me think that maybe Tesla isn’t even trying to sell the Model Y Standard and launching it was purely meant to make the regular model look like it’s a better value.

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It’s not like you’re saving a whole lot going Standard. And for most people, especially those who lease, the $5,000 difference becomes negligible when split into monthly payments. Sure, you pay a little less, but you also lose a lot of features that people actually liked in their Teslas. In the Model 3 Standard, you even get manually adjustable mirrors, which probably cost Tesla a significant amount to reengineer and make for a much worse user experience.

What do you think?

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If you have theories about the roof, drop them into the comments.

Updated 10/10 2:15 p.m. ET with comments from Tesla vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy.