Canada investigates whether Tesla helped itself to a subsidy-fueled sales boom
fortune.com
fortune.com
Right. If, and only if, the stores were open 24/7.
Most are open 8 to 10 hours a day.
Tesla is claiming with a straight face that these three stores sold a new car EACH, every FIFTY SECONDS from opening to closing for three days straight.
> Moreover, according to Quebec-based Motor Illustrated, Tesla accounted for 89% of all claims filed during that period.
I think the word for this starts with "F" and ends in "raud".
> "No payments will be made until we are confident that the claims are valid," said Transport Minister Chrystia Freeland in a statement to the Toronto Star.
I'm sure in the US we'd happily pay Tesla and maaaaaaaybe claw it back several years later. Maybe.
The stores are open 24/7. They're online sales. The "dealership" is just the place you pick up your car from.
Not "online sales". "Tesla sold about 8,600 cars in three days at four separate stores in Canada".
Yes, cars were sold online. This references Tesla recording the place of sale as those showrooms.
The contortions to defend Tesla are ridiculous.
If you believe Tesla, nearly 20% of its annual sales for the entirety of Canada happened around these four locations in one weekend. It just so, coincidentally, happened to be conveniently timed for subsidies.
Almost all Tesla deliveries happen at dealerships no matter where they were ordered from. The delivery dealership is likely recorded as the place of sale.
Real purchases require real people, so simply asking who the buyers are should sort it out. If employees were filling out the forms and “buying” then it should be fairly straightforward to figure out.
For some reason the Canadian iZEV rebate was provided to the dealer, not the end customer. Dealers were to sell below cost and then get money back from the government, so they'd be on the hook for the difference if they couldn't get the rebate. The rebate was scheduled to cut off in March but was obviously running out of funding before schedule. Dealers had some leeway to batch their claims and Tesla sent an unprecedented number of claims right at the end that drained the remaining funds, but these claims are not necessarily all for sales from that small window. I can't find any specifics but surely the claims submitted have to substantiate that a car was sold to a Canadian resident. I'm still not sure that Tesla did anything illegal unless they are found to have sent fraudulent claims, which should be trivial to check.
It's really not. That's Tesla saying that one-fifth of its annual sales for the entire country of Canada happened on one weekend in one part of the province of Ottawa.
I mean, it’s going to take more than two minutes just to convince the finance guy that if he mentions “paint protection” one more time, you’re walking out.
> While a spike was to be expected and Tesla orders are typically filed online rather than at a physical store, that nonetheless works out to two cars sold every minute of every hour for three days straight.
I don't think anyone wants a larger slice of the pie, I think they want the share of the pie that they earned that was consumed by (what appears to be) outright fraud on Tesla's part. Tesla's numbers are implausible at best, at least showing some unusual and unexplained behavior. They exhausted the credits with the incredibly dubious sales. Why shouldn't they be investigated?
This just seems like sour grapes from traditional dealerships who subject their customers to multi-hour haggling sessions to close a sale. Is there any indication of malfeasance here other than Tesla selling a lot of cars?
It equates to two months of sales for the entirety of Canada happening in one weekend in one province.
Yes, for accuracy, a large city, but one that only accounts for less than 4% of Canada's population.
Either way it should be trivial for the government to verify this, and they should be doing regular audits anyways to make sure dealerships aren't scamming customers out of their rebates. Making a huge deal out of this now just seems like political grandstanding though, since there is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Which still entails dealerships covering 4% of the national population to account for 18% of last year's national sales in a fairly short time frame, and also piles on the deeply unlikely claim that Tesla was paying out these rebates without bothering to file them for months on end.
Highly implausible.
Also the terms of the rebate require finalized sales. The stores in question don't have the physical capacity to have made 8600 sales in 3 days. If they were batching earlier sales they shouldn't have used a later date as the sale date for the rebate.
So it's either fraud or sheer incompetence by Tesla Canada.
How do these statements compare? You know, on a hilarity scale from 1 to 10?
Given that he's cutting government workers and programs he despises (eg. "DEI" or foreign aid), that's not too surprising. What people think is important is in the eye of the beholder, so it's not incongruent for someone to be pro government subsidies in their industry, but against other forms of government spending.
It's bad when the government takes my money via income taxes and good when the government takes other people's money via wealth taxes
(btw: this is working on the assumption, if the government pays for a satellite launch, the government may get something, but it's still a subsidy. Even though SpaceX got plenty of subsidy too)
In fact, over the last century the mantle of richest man in the world has been worn by 12 people. In 7 cases it was a government that made them the richest man in the world. In 4 out of those 7 cases it was the US government.
That's disregarding that the military-industrial complex is full of rich companies that may not have conquered the very top spot, but are doing really, really well.
Getting the government to give you money, in the sense of sponsoring your business, has been THE path to incredible wealth.
This is supposed to be suspicious? What's next? It's "suspicious" that Amazon had 5x the orders in the weekend after the fourth thurdsay in November? There's a pretty straightforward explanation: the government announced the subsidies were going to end, so all the potential buyers sitting on the fence or planning to purchase some time in the future made the leap and purchased immediately, causing a spike.
I mean sure, there's a chance that happened for real, but "suspicious" doesn't mean "there was definitely something shady going on", it means "maybe there was something shady, this deserves a closer look".
This is just divisive political agendas from the Canadian media
"...reported on the suspiciously high number of EV rebate claims in the final January days of the program."
...might be:
"...reported on the unusually high number of EV rebate claims in the final January days of the program."
...and then maybe have a comparison to other dealerships sales increases in the same period, maybe even include a chart showing the weekly Tesla sales for the past year or two. And including a quote similar in spirit to pseudo0's observation in this thread:
"Yes, lots of people will want to buy Teslas when the government announces that the $5,000 subsidy is about to end. The other car manufacturers are just mad that they lost out due to their antiquated sales process. If they had direct purchase via online ordering, maybe they would have gotten a larger slice of that remaining subsidy money?"
...how about:
"Tesla's simple, direct, online-only sales methods probably helped them secure the bulk of the last-minute $5,000 subisidies because other dealers couldn't react to quickly enough."
...that would go a long way in my mind to raising the bar of journalistic integrity.
I think it's very telling that your definition of "journalistic integrity" includes a good amount of sycophancy for Musk.
"Simple, direct, online methods that other dealers can't react to"
Very "unusual" that in a city with 4% of Canada's population, that 20% of Canada's sales for the year were made in a year because of a US$3K price "drop".
https://www.ft.com/content/d2711678-af23-4b71-852b-1ef2e932e...
This is like a textbook case outlined in E.T. Jaynes, "Probability Theory -- The Logic of Science", section 5.3:
https://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussi...
...from my life experience with accounting departments and auditors at largish publicly traded companies, my priors for financial fraud of a company like Tesla at the corporate level is something like a probability of 0.001 (1 in a thousand companies). At the branch office level, something higher, say 0.01. Maybe double or triple that with Musk in charge. Someone reporting on an emotionally-charged topic in an effort to collect clicks? Especially when relying on second or third hand reported information? My prior for them misunderstanding or misrepresenting the numbers (like the time frames involved, etc.) is closer to 0.50. Other people's mileage may vary.
That seems like a very reasonable statement by the government, very different from the media reports.
> “No payments will be made until we are confident that the claims are valid,” said Freeland in a statement to the Tornoto Star.
That's a statement that was made to and then reported by the media. That's kind of how journalism works.
You don't think it's suspicious that Amazon has a huge order spike in the weekend after black friday? Maybe the FBI should investigate on the off chance they're trying to evade taxes, or launder money for Mexican cartels or whatever.
2150 cars seem pretty reasonable for sales that would otherwise have been made in the next 3-6 months, but were pulled forward by the threat of rebates being pulled.
For the country. This happened in one city of one province.
Ottawa has 1.4M people in a country of 37M (4%).
So 18% of the country's entire volume for the year was sold in a city that has less than 4% of the population. In a weekend.
8600 vehicles sold, representing 18% of the vehicles sold in Canada = 48,000 in a year. Two months of sales would be 8,000. Recognizing that the population isn't evenly distributed, that is actually more like 320 is the expectation... not 8,600. Even multiplying that number by 10 to factor in things like urban/rural still gets you to less than a third of what Tesla claims was sold...
> I'd save $10k (or whatever the rebate is) compared to if I bought 2 months later.
Just over $3k ($5k CAD).
The article didn't say that. They only said the 4 dealerships had a spike of 8,900 cars, but doesn't say anything about any other dealerships.
after an +80% drop in sales
in a country that has one tenth the population of the US
whose CEO was/is probably the second-most hated person in Canada
and all of the sales qualified for the rebate despite most of their models not qualifying for the rebates
and Tesla's vehicle sales were exactly enough to completely drain the fund but not a penny more
...or you can think that this is almost certainly fraud.
I'm amazed American's don't seem to grasp this. The president is threatening annexation, and several people below them in the administration are taking it seriously. This is deeply offensive.