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 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.
This is just divisive political agendas from the Canadian media
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.
"...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.