Rabat – Tesla is facing allegations of fraud in Canada after four of its dealerships reportedly claimed $43 million in government rebates within 72 hours, leading to the premature suspension of the country’s Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicles (iZEV) program.
Canada launched the program in May 2019 in order to tackle the issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the time, GHG caused by transportation accounted for a quarter of Canada’s GHG emissions, half of which came from cars and light trucks.
Consequently, the country sought to encourage the adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by Canadians and Canadian businesses alike through introducing the iZEV program, which offered, among other things, a $5000 inducement on eligible ZEVs.
Although the iZEV program was due for conclusion on March 31, 2025, the increase in popularity and demand for the program led to the fast depletion of the allocated resources, thus causing the Canadian government to pause the iZEV prematurely.
Mere hours after officials announced the nearing cessation of the program, four Tesla stores claimed selling around 8,600 vehicles from January 10 through 12.
According to publicly available data, this has devoured $43 million of the iZEV fund, causing it to halt on January 12, just 72 hours after the original announcement.
Although it was expected that demand for electric cars would increase following the announcement, the claim that four stores would sell 2,558 vehicles in one day still sounds far-fetched, says Canadian media. In fact, upon surveying the physical location of the stores, it was estimated that the dealerships would not be able to contain even a tenth of that number of vehicles.
Furthermore, experts say that if each customer is allocated a 20-minute slot, it would take 850 hours; which would require 70 employees to simultaneously work on selling cars for 12 hours, non stop.
The news has caused an uproar among card dealers all over Canada, believing that Tesla had stiffed them of millions of dollars in rebates. At this stage, further investigations are reportedly being carried out by Transport Canada, the agency in charge of transportation policies and programs.
Tesla is yet to respond to the Canadian media regarding the allegations, and reportedly no one could be reached at the dealerships in question.
