The sales numbers provided by the company-owned shops allowed them to claim tens of millions in government rebates. Now those numbers are under scrutiny.
According to the article that would be 2 cars/min for 72 hours straight (that's three 24-hour shifts in a row) spread over 4 dealerships. It's so ridiculous, absolutely no possible way that happened. Not unless a billionaire came along and simply bought them en masse
I mean, did any of those dealers manage those sorts of sales in any month?
I don't know that much about dealerships, but I find it hard to believe that any but the exceedingly most exceptional manage four digit sales in an entire month in general, let alone in three days for a single brand that's been hemorrhaging popularity over the last two years or so.
Tesla does not have dealerships in the sense of dealerships being middleman franchises that have their own owners. Tesla is direct to consumer, meaning Tesla owns its stores.
I'm not saying this to negate what you said, rather to emphasize that the "suspicious" sales were not the act of some rogue local dealership owners, they are the actions of Tesla itself.
It's so obviously a scam. To even entertain the thought, each of the four lots would have to empty a stock of over 2000 cars in 3 days. Can any lot even hold that many cars?
If we're going for the cartoon reference, surely Steamed Hams would work:
"Thousands of premium car sales, in this part of the year, in his part of the country, localized entirely within the last seconds of a government incentive scheme?"
"Yes."
"May I see?"
"No."
(Musk's mother, off screen) "The company is on fire!"
It doesn't say that it was right before that rebate program ended no, but this story has been mentioned more than once, and that's the context.
To be fair, I was under the impression that it was all EV's but apparently it's only Tesla's.
The only possible explanation for this not being fraud is that Tesla was sloppy about submitting the rebates for purchases going back months and months and months and they had to scramble to get the legitimate claims in before the program ran out of money.
But I’m pretty much 100% certain that’s not the case because if it were true, Tesla would be loudly saying that’s all it was. Instead it’s silence or poop emojis or whatever that idiot has their communications department doing now.