Sketchy sales bump for 8,600 Tesla vehicles in 3 days across Canada prompts official investigation
The Canadian transport minister thinks something smells funny with a suspicious explosion in Tesla sales over a three-day period. This was no ordinary hot streak, mind you. Tesla EV sales claimed millions in government reimbursed rebates over the weekend before Canada suspended its iZEV rebate program.
A suspicious 3-day surge in Canadian Tesla sales has launched an investigation into $43 million in possible rebate fraud
In January, Canada suspended its federal EV rebate program. The program provided $5,000 rebates for EV sales with the same premise as the U.S. federal tax credit, namely lowering the immediate financial burden of an EV purchase. During the same timeframe as the program’s suspension, Tesla locations reported a staggering sales bump of 8,653 EVs in just three days. As a result, the sales figures represented $43 million in reimbursable dealership rebates.
As brazen as it sounds, the massive sales uptick was spread out over just four Canadian locations. To give you an idea of how ridiculous that is, we need only look at the individual locations’ reported Tesla sales. One of the locations, in Québec City, Québec, submitted 4,000 rebate requests in a single weekend. Needless to say, they couldn’t possibly have sold 2,000 Teslas in one day.
In that same vein, a location in Toronto, Ontario, reported over 1,200 Tesla sales on January 11th. One day, over 1,200 EVs, four million dollars in rebates. As you might expect, Redditors were less than kind. A few users broke the math down, positing that the Toronto location would have to sell nearly 50 EVs per hour to make things work. And that’s if the dealer was open for 24 hours.
According to the Toronto Star, the money-grubbing move just before the rebate program’s shutdown has left dealerships accountable for $10 million already. Consequently, the Transport Minister of Canada, Anita Anand, ordered an investigation into the suspect sales and rebate figures. Transport Minister Anand says she was “disappointed” about what happened following the outrage of the Canadian dealerships.
