Looks like Tesla’s reliance on government subsidies has finally hit a wall in Canada.
After Tesla requested reimbursement for an unprecedented 8,669 Canadian EV rebates in just three days, the Canadian government froze Tesla’s rebate payments and paused all future eligibility for federal rebates while tariffs are in place.
Read the full details and the fallout here.
Ever since this broke I’ve been so curious to see which are dealers with bad, rushed paperwork before a deadline that they let pile up before mass-submitting, and how many are outright fraud. Neither would surprise me at this point.
One store in ontario had 1200 in one day and a store in quebec 4000 during a week-end so i vote for fraud
It would not surprise either if a lot of the swastikar vandalism was assurance fraud too
That’s the number they sent, we don’t know the sales dates on those so maybe they were just super bad at submitting the paperwork…
The rebate is quite large. $5,000 or thereabouts in most cases. The company also fronts that money to the customer, and then claims reimbursement from the government.
Have you ever known any business to delay in collecting $5,000, particularly when it is sitting as a liability on their books until they collect? Much less to do that more than 8,000 times?
I’ll never accuse Tesla of being managed by competent people 🤷
Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaair point XD
And risk losing the money? No, my friend. Safer to assume it’s fraud.
Occams blunt, used-in-the-shower, needs-a-replacement-blade razor.
Occam’s got hairy legs and razor burn from how often I been borrowing the razor lately
Safer and more reasonable to assume it is fraud.
Probably all of them are fraud. A friend bought a Tesla last year and they said Tesla DOESN’T do the paperwork for the EV rebate. The client must go after it and pocket the money. All other dealers do the job for you.
So maybe they found a way to identify customers that didn’t, and submitted the paperwork in order to get the rebate for themselves?
I suppose they sent the requests so they could sell the cars cheaper than the competitors when the rebate is cancelled.
For my money, that’s the most probable reasoning for why Tesla tried this.
Falls under the “cool motive, still fraud” umbrella, but it makes the most sense.
Yeah, it’s definitely some kind of fraud, although they might have found a loophole that wasn’t in the spirit of the law but still legal.
Well now they are not getting the money. So their loophole did not work so well.