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Comment by pseudo0 | Hacker News Reader

This story is hilarious. 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?

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More or less hilarious than "billionnaire that builds companies that utterly depend on government subsidies but the companies are not doing well, goes into government to make the government more efficient and spend less" ?

How do these statements compare? You know, on a hilarity scale from 1 to 10?

>"billionnaire that builds companies that utterly depend on government subsidies but the companies are not doing well, goes into government to make the government more efficient and spend less"

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 good when the government gives me money and bad when the government gives other people money" is the mentality of a child, and not a particularly bright one.

Wealth taxes have the same argument but plenty of people like them:

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

That's basically... every special interest group? Those teacher unions that more funding for schools, paid for by cuts to policing or more taxes? Clearly "the mentality of a child, and not a particularly bright one".

But "government gives me money" is how Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world (lookup interstate commerce tax exemption). And "government gives me money" is how Elon Musk became the richest man in the world (both Tesla and SpaceX are running on government subsidies. Running as in they couldn't have grown without subsidies and can't maintain themselves without constant subsidies). "Government gives me money" is how Carlos Slim became the richest man in the world. And so on.

(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.

> due to their antiquated sales process

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?

Those numbers aren't implausible at all. It equates to about two months of sales during a normal period, and is easily explained by people who were planning to buy a Tesla in the next 3-6 months rushing to get their orders in. People are very motivated when there is a $5,000 discount on the line.

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 about two months of sales during a normal period

It equates to two months of sales for the entirety of Canada happening in one weekend in one province.

... in one city of one province.

Yes, for accuracy, a large city, but one that only accounts for less than 4% of Canada's population.

Someone had a better suggestion in a comment chain above, which is that it's the responsibility of the dealer to request the rebate on behalf of the customer, and they apparently submit them in batches. So an even more plausible explanation is that it's a combination of people rushing to buy before the rebate expires, and the Tesla dealerships panicking to get all their paperwork for the last month or two submitted before the money ran out.

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.

> Someone had a better suggestion in a comment chain above, which is that it's the responsibility of the dealer to request the rebate on behalf of the customer, and they apparently submit them in batches. So an even more plausible explanation is that it's a combination of people rushing to buy before the rebate expires, and the Tesla dealerships panicking to get all their paperwork for the last month or two submitted before the money ran out.

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.

Thanks for the correction, I didn't realize the fraud was that ostentatious!

People rushed to get there orders in....3 months before the deadline all on the same weekend?

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.

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