- Tesla may face investigation after four stores in Canada snapped up $43 million in EV rebates in a single weekend
- The suspicious activity immediately after it was announced the iZEV program would soon be paused
- One Tesla store claimed 2,558 sales in a single Saturday—that’d be 70 people working 12 hours straight selling cars
Canada’s federally administered and now-paused Zero-Emission Vehicles (iZEV) rebate program, which once doled out up to $5,000 per electric vehicle sold in this country, took a major hit to its coffers over the span of just one weekend thanks to a quartet of Tesla delivery centres, to the point the mass claiming of all those incentives has pushed industry watchdogs to request a full Transport Canada investigation.
According to a report from the Toronto Star, publicly available data on funds dispersed by the iZEV program seem to show that four Tesla stores claimed roughly 8,600 sales in one weekend from January 10 through 12, just hours after the feds announced the rebate program would be paused when it ran out of money. Given that those sales centres are said to have gobbled up an estimated $43 million from the iZEV pot, it may be understandable to some why the iZEV program was halted just 72 hours after the initial announcement that money would soon run out.
If selling approximately 8,600 cars across four stores sounds like an impossible number, well, you’re exactly right. Everyone expected EV sales to spike once the government told Canadians the iZEV program was in imminent danger of running low on cash—but the numbers posted by these Tesla locations beggars belief. An analysis of data shows one spot claimed 2,558 sales in a single day, despite a quick survey of its physical location showing it’s not able to park even one-tenth that number of vehicles.
Never mind the logistics behind delivering that many vehicles in one working day. If each customer was allotted just 20 minutes per delivery, that works out to over 850 employee hours; they’d have required over 70 people simultaneously working 12 hours straight without any breaks, just delivering cars. That being said, the iZEV data shows deliveries on January 11 tied to a Quebec-based Tesla store associated with the G1N 2G3 postal code in many other provinces, including Alberta, British Columbia—heck, nearly every other province.
So what actually happened? Unsurprisingly, the corporate behemoth that is Tesla wouldn’t respond to The Star for any comment on this situation, nor apparently could anyone be reached at the stores. Speaking as a person who once toiled in the dealership environment, this author will say it is not unheard of for the business office to backdate an occasional deal in order to make some sort of quota or qualify for a volume bonus. One or two machines recorded for yesterday instead of today isn’t generally the end of the world.
But the level of alleged chicanery on display at these Tesla stores seems egregious, particularly since it involves massive amounts of money from the public purse. The Canadian Automobile Dealers Association in particular is not happy about it, and is asking Transport Canada to conduct a full investigation into whether the EV rebates were claimed properly.
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