Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a misunderstanding

Re:Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a mis... by s1artibartfast on Thursday April 10, 2025 @11:27PM (#43650239)

Misleading headline. Tesla says the Canadian government misunderstood its own program and the incentive claims were entirely legal.

I think Tesla is likely correct and this is manufactured outrage. It has been several weeks and it should be trivial to verify if the rebates correspond to sold cars or not.

The whole issue is a deflection. Tesla didn't "stiff" other auto dealers, the Canadian government did. The government abruptly shut down the public subsidy program with insufficient funds to cover cars sold.

Of course there was a race to get the claims in. A dealer backlog isn't shady or unusual, as evidenced by the fact 200 other Canadian dealers have backlogs they aren't able to claim.

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Re:Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a mis... by kibibu on Friday April 11, 2025 @12:19AM (#43650479)

> The government abruptly shut down the public subsidy program with insufficient funds to cover cars sold.

How would the Government know whether they had insufficient funds if nobody had put in their rebate claims?

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Re:Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a mis... by s1artibartfast on Friday April 11, 2025 @12:46AM (#43650583)

The program had been running since 2019, so the government knew, or should have known.

Trending would be an easy way. For example: if you get $1 million in rebates per day and the average rebate is 90 days old, you probably have 90 million outstanding. Accounting 101.

The common practice is announce that rebates will not be offered on future sales, not refusing to reimburse for past sales.

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Re:Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a mis... by hnburnsy on Friday April 11, 2025 @09:54AM (#43653814)

>this is manufactured outrage.

Yeah, seems like Electrek.co has an article hating on Musk 1-2 times a day.

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Re:Tesla Canada says its shady $43M incentive grab was a mis... by s1artibartfast on Friday April 11, 2025 @11:50AM (#43655214)

The story was pushed by the Canadian government due to tariffs and to shift the blame. Freezing funds and opening an investigation is good press. It doesn't matter if they know there was crime.

Electrek is thoughtless garbage. It wasn't that long ago it was a pro tesla hype machine.

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