Archive is currently down so paywall bypass link unavailable.
… frozen $43 million in payments to Tesla pending a line-by-line investigation into its last-minute surge in EV rebate claims on the final weekend of the government program.
That’s the critical part. Tesla is being investigated for fraud and for allegedly abusing the EV rebate program, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
They shouldn’t be given a penny because of that. But also, because Canada doesn’t support Nazis anyway 🤭
Somebody should be going to prison… Local “Business leaders” 🤡
Collaborators
CEO
We dislike Nazis so much we even renamed Berlin, Ontario to Windsor
You mean Kitchener
Maybe it was Waterloo
It was Kitchener
Perhaps it was Oshawa
Wrong! It has to be Brampton.
Pretty sure it was St. Catherines!
If I’m not mistaken the program had a set budget so the money would have been spent either way, it’s just that Tesla had tons of claims pending and they submitted all of them at once when dealers were told the program would end.
That’s my understanding of the situation anyway…
Dealerships are commission environments. They don’t pay their people until that rebate comes through.
At times they’ll hold back one or two sales to apply for the rebate at the beginning of the next month. This happens when a dealership has had a particularly good month and has already hit its quota to get its incentive bonus from Ford/Chrysler/Etc… so they might as well bank them for the next month.
But never in a million years would they hold back $56000 in rebates. Their salesmen would riot.
Source: Slogged in that hellpit of a career for two years before getting out.
Tesla doesn’t work the same way as other dealerships, they’re paid employees, you can’t negotiate the price, they just operate showrooms and offer test-drives.
Edit: don’t understand the downvotes when it was just an explanation that the job is different from other dealerships…
Jeez, really?
That then begs the question of why would anyone do that shit job if there wasn’t the possibility of making fat stacks of commission. The earning potential (if you’re good) is literally the only good part about a dealership sales job! Everything else is absolutely miserable.
Same for any service job honestly, some people would rather have the stability and because the process doesn’t involve negotiations I’m sure the job is much more pleasant.
No they claimed thousands of sales in one weekend.
That’s what I’m saying, they didn’t have to submit the paperwork as they did the sales, so that would have been sales for the past few months and they submitted all the paperwork at once.
The OP article is paywalled, so I can’t read it, but this one expands more on the issue.
For instance, “four Tesla stores claimed roughly 8,600 sales in one weekend from January 10 through 12, just hours after the feds announced the rebate program would be paused when it ran out of money.”
Red flag.
"Speaking as a person who once toiled in the dealership environment, this author will say it is not unheard of for the business office to backdate an occasional deal in order to make some sort of quota or qualify for a volume bonus. One or two machines recorded for yesterday instead of today isn’t generally the end of the world.
But the level of alleged chicanery on display at these Tesla stores seems egregious, particularly since it involves massive amounts of money from the public purse."
Very questionable, indeed.
Why would those stores wait to submit those claims, assuming that’s the explanation? They risked not getting the rebates at all, and it makes no sense to hold on to thousands of claims like that, regardless.
Then you get this report:
“Keep in mind that Tesla is struggling when it comes to sales in Canada right now,” Carscoops writes. “According to the National Post, deliveries nosedived some 70 percent between December 2024 and January 2025. When the Canadian government announced that it would soon end electric vehicle subsidies, it was expected that Tesla would see a small bump up in sales. However, a giant spike like this is a different ballgame altogether.”
How many red flags do we need?
I hope the findings of the investigation are made available to the public.
Paywalled… but. TheStar has 6 months for a buck right now -might be worth paying to follow their election and tariff coverage, which is pretty good, and avoid all those American owned papers entirely.
Honestly, as much as I agree with you on supporting Canadian media, the Stars website is such hot garbage I can’t recommend it.
And canceling is a whole multi step operation.
Isn’t the Star owned by PostMedia, which is an American company? If so, it’s not legitimate Canadian media.
Maybe? I haven’t kept up to date. I subscribed awhile ago and canceled after they broke the site when I used ad blockers.
That’s their claim, yes. I’m skeptical personally, but that’s what the investigation is for.
Does Tesla have independent dealers in Canada, or is it company owned showrooms like in the US?
If it’s the latter like I recall, then that would indicate that Tesla was sitting on them (not random local dealers) and only submitted them at the last moment.
Then why would the date be the same weekend?
Because it appears that Tesla may have fabricated the sales to claim the government credits before they went away.
We don’t know the date of sale on the claims, just the dates when they claims were sent.
Tesla does not have independent dealers. All stores are corporate owned.
Assuming it was fraudulent of course.
From the info I saw posted a few days after this whole something started with actual info… The same situation could also be explained by Tesla not submitting claims as they come, instead submitting them as a group after there were comments about the funding starting to end, therefore putting a deadline on submissions. Which would also make sense. Large companies paying and submitting claims for things in bulk on longer cycles like quarterly is very common.
I haven’t specifically looked up more info recently though, so there may be new stuff that came out that slipped through my feed.
The same situation could also be explained by Tesla not submitting claims as they come, instead submitting them as a group after there were comments about the funding starting to end
Yes, that’s possible. That’s why there’s an ongoing investigation.
Which would also make sense. Large companies paying and submitting claims for things in bulk on longer cycles like quarterly is very common.
These are not large companies, these are car dealerships. They operate and submit those independently from each other. And when they submit the form, they state when the sale was made. That’s how the investigation came to be, because they stated a surge of sales.
The simplest explanation is they registered sales that they intended to make later, just to get the rebates while it was still possible, which is fraud.
All Tesla dealers are corporate owned, they are not independent dealers like all other car companies.
All Tesla dealers are corporate owned, they are not independent dealers like all other car companies.
Yes, they are all owned by a parent company, Tesla. They are still managed independently, that’s why these dealerships are being investigated one by one, and why only four Tesla locations claimed a surge of rebates as opposed to all Canadian locations.
Take note that I said that they operate independently from each other, which is not a statement regarding their ownership structure.
This would be a good
Tell me you know nothing about Tesla without telling me you know nothing about Tesla statement that you had to reply to.
When you defend criminal behaviour then back-track with an “I’m just askin’”, let me ask you - have you stopped beating your spouse? I’m just askin’.
It’s suspicious behavior. Potentially criminal. This is far from clear fraud. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fraud, that’s why there’s an investigation of course.
There’s an actual reasonable explanation here that doesn’t require a bunch of mental gymnastics, just the regular corporate “we do shit when we want to” mentality and lenient reimbursement requirements, despite what some rabid and foaming at the mouth haters want to believe.
When you start trying to find excuses and possible explanations, a Nazi salute may as well be a high 5…
Don’t try to find a way out for them. Let them do the work.
I think you missed the point. Because of how they submitted these claims (“by the book” or not), they screwed over all other local dealers as a result.
"This left more than 200 independently owned Canadian auto dealers out of pocket approximately $10 million after they fronted rebates to customers and were not able to file for reimbursement. The Star spoke with four dealers who were all out more than $100,000 and were considering layoffs as a result."
And then you read…
“Tesla has been the biggest recipient of Canadian EV rebates, claiming $713 million since 2019.”
No more subsidizing this asshole. They want to talk about Canada being subsidized by the States? He’s the one being subsidized!
Teslas have been the most popular EVs on the market, so it makes sense that the majority of credits went to them prior to this current bullshit. And it’s not just subsidizing them, it’s subsidizing the buyers as well.
That’s not to excuse the fraud or Musk in general. Subsidizing EVs was a way to replace a lot of ICE cars and put less polluting vehicles on the road, and it did that. Some of the limits for subsidies were pretty dumb though. Like you could get the rebate on a model with a lower capacity battery, but the higher capacity battery would push you out of qualification.
That 713 million was freely available to anyone who cared to make EVs and scale them, for the purpose of helping make them more affordable so the companies could scale, and they had just as much time as Tesla to do it once there was a wake up call with the Model S.
The government offered the money, and Tesla executed effectively to take advantage of it.
Short of this illegal trade war, there isn’t really a way to not fund a specific company without putting a equal cap on everyone, such as the original 200k car 7500 USD rebate that used to exist or else it’d violate trade rules.
GM made 200k bolts for example before they dropped the ball and maxed out the US $7500 rebate.
So the best you could ever expect is something like vehicles under price xyz, and up to xxx thousand vehicles sold.
All bets are off though in a trade war.
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Misleading headline. It should read.
Canada freezes Tesla’s $43-million rebate payments due to fraud investigation, bars it from future rebates over tariffs
Good. And audit every rebate since 2019.
Claw that shit back!
Hurt the parasite properly in only language it understands…
Fuck em all
Thank fuck Canada has the balls to look into this.
CBC article on this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-freezes-rebates-tesla-1.7493434
Archive link is available at https://archive.is/fCfth
But I’ve noticed that it’s not resolving universally - e.g. if using cloudflare’s DNS then you can’t get to archive right now. But you can use something like https://www.croxyproxy.com/ to access the archive link…
Picking the “Archive” tab in this link allows the article to be read.
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