Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>In January, four showrooms in three major cities managed to sell 8,600 cars in the span of just a weekend following news that the country would no longer help fund part of the purchase price for a new electric car under its iZEV program.

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.

View on HN

Either you can believe that four dealers sold eighteen times the countrywide sales per day

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.

You don't think it's suspicious that those four showrooms each sold 2,150 cars in a single weekend?

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".

>You don't think it's suspicious that those four showrooms each sold 2,150 cars in a single weekend?

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.

I don't think those car sales numbers are as unsurprising as those Amazon numbers.

What's your basis for 8,600 cars being "surprising"? The article says that works out to 18% of annual volume, which means the cancellation of the rebate brought forward just over 2 months worth of sales. That seems plausible to me. I could totally imagine myself making the leap and buying a car immediately if it meant that I'd save $10k (or whatever the rebate is) compared to if I bought 2 months later.

> The article says that works out to 18% of annual volume, which means the cancellation of the rebate brought forward just over 2 months worth of sales.

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).

You and I evidently have different instincts here.

Why was it only at these dealerships. If it was a spike caused by the rebate ending, then it would been seen at all (or most) telsa dealerships across the country.

>Why was it only at these dealerships.

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.

Well for one, these 4 showrooms accounted for 89% of the subsidy for the entire country.

It’s possible there were cars sold before that weekend that didn’t have credits registers yet. And also possible that a lot of people placed orders that weekend to take advantage of the credit. (Which was how the program was supposed to work, consumers like credits, consumers sign deals to get credits).

This is just divisive political agendas from the Canadian media

Why are you blaming the Canadian media here? The story appears to be about action by a Canadian government.

"No payments will be made until we are confident that the claims are valid" - Freeland.

That seems like a very reasonable statement by the government, very different from the media reports.

Full context there is:

> “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.

Are we supposed to believe this not specifically designed to get engagement from the Elon-hate trend? Are the same media outlets going to be promoting apologetic stories when/if in 6 months the verdict comes back that everything was on the up-and-up? And they wonder why people hold journalists/media outlets in low regard. Full disclosure. I've never owned a Tesla, don't currently own a Telsa, and have no plans on owning a Tesla in the future. I have only been inside of Tesla for a 5-minute backseat car ride in ~2018. I don't own any Tesla stock, have never owned Tesla stock, and have no plans on owning Tesla stock in the future.

If a government takes action like this, it is newsworthy whether or not it's "designed to get engagement from the Elon-hate trend".

I would thinks a newsworthy-only story would end after "Tesla did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment." And I'd think a better wording for

"...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.

> "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."

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".

Wasn't it just last week that the Financial Times had to walk back the breathless $1.4 billion story about Tesla accounting fraud?

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.

The author writes for Fortune Europe from Germany.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com