Technology @lemmy.world juergen @feddit.org 2mo ago

Tesla is banned from Canada EV rebate program, gov freezes suspicous $43 million in rebates

electrek.co Tesla is banned from Canada EV rebate program, gov freezes suspicous $43 million in rebates

Tesla has been banned from upcoming federal EV rebate programs in Canada as the government freezes the suspicious $43 million...

BoycottUnitedStates @europe.pub tfm @europe.pub 2mo ago

electrek.co /2025/03/25/tesla-banned-canada-ev-rebate-program-gov-freezes-suspicous-43-million-rebates/

61 comments

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Thank God they're not just letting that shit slip
- What kind of first-world county would let it slip?
  
  Glances nervously in US
  
  We don't merely let it slip by nowadays. We lube up the grifting slide to make it faster.
  
  US? first-world? What? No! It really isn’t. Like health care is worse than some “third-world” countries…
Bankruptcy! Woo!
- Hope so. They’ve been trying to undermine the Swedish job market here, and even fucking stalked their employees. Horrible company.
  
  Wait what? Can we give more details? What do you mean by stalked?
- Jail time would be even better.
Maybe keep your shitty politics out of your shitty product next time, and then you won't face political consequences.
- In this case it looks like they commited fraud, so it's not even just political.
- That's not even what happened. I work in the auto industry, and they very blatantly abused the rebate program with what are almost certainly fake vouchers.
  
  Some individual dealerships reported thousands of sales in a single day, and that would be a miracle even at the best of times for a well established dealer. There's no way Tesla is declining around the world and still selling miraculous numbers of vehicles.
  
  Yeah I was really confused by the story, surely they actually have to provide some kind of evidence. Surely the Canadian government didn't just run it based on honesty. Wouldn't they have to provide the VIN or something.
  
  But the very least I would have assumed that they had to list the name of the person they sold the car to.
- I wonder if there is the possibility of the shareholders suing Elon because what he's doing is so demonstrably damaging the company. He could totally have done this and not had the big PR problem by just not doing random stuff without running it past anyone. But nooo.
  
  People weren't happy about him essentially buying a governmental position but what they really objected to is all the subsequent things he did.
  
  This is one way to deal with conflict of interests not being addressed. Too badly it can’t work for everything else. Like I can’t “boycott” space travel.
Trump calling this "Domestic Terrorism" and threatening Tariffs in response in 3.... 2.....
Hopefully, this amounts to a fraud investigation and shareholders dump their stocks and cause Musk to fall below the margin call and then he liquidates and Tesla goes to rock bottom.
- Doesn't he only own like 13% of the stock in Tesla? His wealth is barely affected by Tesla going bankrupt
Option 1: Tesla fraudulently filed rebates

Option 2: Tesla filed a backlog of rebates when they realized they had to

Both are possible, but everyone is jumping to conclusion that it's option 1, while option 2 is the easier answer.

Also the government said they're going to let all the other rebates that this pushed out at the last minute get the rebate regardless of if these were legit or not.
- Option 2 should be easy to prove, so why didn’t they do that already, like literally the same day they were accused of it? Then their funds wouldn’t have been frozen.
  
  Especially considering this was months ago
  
  I imagine they probably don't want to release the information that would prove it if they could, and if they did it'd be redacted enough that no one would believe it anyway. It also costs money to fight endless things like this.
  
  Ultimately, if the government comes back and says its legit, then people will believe it. If it's fraud, there should be punishment.
  
  That whole 1.5 billion accounting fraud story last week, I don't think Tesla said anything official about it or done anything at least to specifically disprove it, but the FT has now retracted the story saying they made a mistake.
- Maybe they shouldn't have kept a backlog then? That certainly sounds like a 'them' problem though, doesn't it?
  
  Doesn't strike me as very efficient either
  
  I don't think I'd ever call behemoth corporations efficient.
  
  Corpos are generally inefficient.
Now freeze the editor's paycheck - no editor worth that much should be misspelling 'suspicious' in a headline.
Canadians taking on the Nazis they should send canned food to tesla next.
What's going on in Quebec?

The federal government is following the same strategy as some provinces. British Columbia has recently banned Tesla products from its EV charger rebate. Nova Scotia just announced that it has excluded Tesla from its $2,000 rebate at the purchase of a new EV.

Quebec just relaunched its own EV incentive program today. It will come into effect next week, and so far, Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y vehicles are still included in the list of eligible vehicles.
- Quebec always marches to a different drummer. Nevertheless, I expect they will be dropping the Tesla vehicles from their list sooner or later. They may just not want to make any more adjustments so close to a launch.
after what US has done tariff wise I'm surprised that they haven't blocked all US companies from it.

61 comments