I agree that dropping support of arranging for loans in the sign-up wizard is a let down, as I recently benefited by loans being included.
While I've wanted to install Solar a while and have lazily checked into getting solar several times, it always seemed like too much work to get all sorted out. I had done the numbers, and knew what I needed to make it work for my house, but at the point where it came to contacting somebody I always just seemed to get "busy", and never followed through. So, when Tesla sent an email saying they were installing solar and PWs in my area again, once again I kind of lazily "clicked" on the link in the email. And it all just flowed from there. After answering some questions in the online wizard and taking some pictures suddenly I was receiving loan docs via email to sign digitally, and boom, a few days later, without doing much else on my end I had an installation date. All done through the Tesla Energy web site, including financing. I guess this was just a few weeks before this change occurred.
It's been a busy time at work, and life in general for me, as is true for many people I'm sure. Because of this, I really don't know if I'd have solar installed today if the sign-up process for solar had at some point halted and thrown me out to figure out my own financing. I'm guessing I'd have just forgotten about it and let it slide just because it would have been an extra step with a 3rd party, that "maybe" I'll look into "tomorrow". For what ever odd reason I'm motivated and invigorated by what Tesla seems to be doing, and so engaging with "Tesla" somehow seems easier (at least when things flow smoothly like this did for me), where as contacting a 3rd party, on my own, about a "loan" seems like a chore, even now thinking about it, that I probably would have at best procrastinated, but most likely probably just dropped out.
But with the loan included at the time I signed up, for me, the sign-up and commitment process flowed like butter, and actually was kind of hard to slow down. Not that I wanted it to slow it down (I want the full tax credit and battery rebate!), but I just kept figuring there would be some kind of hiccup, but the process just kind of flowed with it's own inertia. However, now they've inserted a "pause" in the commitment process, even if in theory finding one's own loan is easy, I most likely would not have solar installed today.
For people like me, the change will probably create enough of a bump in the road to derail some portion of the population that could actually benefit from solar, but who aren't going to work too hard for it since it is still an otherwise fairly complex enough endeavor to understand and size in the first place in terms of overall cost benefit.
