Very suspicious. (Dare I say "Concerning"? :p) From another source with a bit more context for those numbers:
> Tesla’s Canadian stores are company-owned and directly controlled by the company. [...] Four Tesla stores in Canada each sold an average of 30 cars per hour, amounting to 120 cars per hour across all four locations—essentially one car every minute, 24 hours a day… for three straight days. And yes, this includes hours when the stores were closed.
> Tesla’s $43.1 million in rebates took up more than half of the cash left allotted for EV subsidies remaining. That meant that by the time some other dealers attempted to get their own subsidies, the money had run out. [...] 226 [non-Tesla] dealerships submitted rebate claims for 2,295 electric vehicles but still haven’t been reimbursed, leaving them collectively out by C$10 million.
-- https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/tesla-accused-of-gaming-ca...
This is only "suspicious" because it's fake news.
So yes it is suspicious. Especially considering that the Model Y starts much more expensive then it's competitors like the Mach E, the Ioniq 5, the EV6, the Equinox/Blazer, and Prologue. The only main advantage Tesla has is the Supercharger network and better software experience.
Whether anything comes of it or not is an entirely different matter because there are ways of doing this that do not violate the letter of the law.
First, that single weekend's 8.6k sales (if the timestamps are to be believed) are than Tesla's Canada sales for the entire prior month (Dec 2024) as well as exceeding the total for any month in 2024.
Second, even a mob of frenzied Canadians car-buyers would probably fall more-evenly across different sellers, and across more days of the month, rather than being so unusually-concentrated.
Finally, remember that the incentive program was already slated to end within another month or two, not a year later or whatever. This places limits on how big we can expect the crowd of procrastinating car-buyers to be, especially since for most people cars are not impulse-buys.
https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/innovative-techn...
Sounds like Musk being a dick - sticking it to Canada to please/amuse his boss.
The "fraud" narrative being pushed about this is because this is fake news.
The most-charitable formulation I can can come up with is something like:
"We know Musk already possesses a personal staff of unscrupulous geeks and likes to illegally stop payments. Therefore it is likely they were engaged in payment fraud here too, where the "enemy" Canadian government is hurt by stolen funds, and "enemy" car-competitors are hurt by the rebate pool being suddenly empty."
