Tesla is banned from Canada EV rebate program, gov freezes suspicous $43 million in rebates (electrek.co)
from juergen@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 16:23
https://feddit.org/post/9792150

#technology

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DogPeePoo@lemm.ee on 26 Mar 16:44 next collapse

The jig is up

TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca on 26 Mar 16:46 next collapse

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

roofuskit@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 16:47 next collapse

Bankruptcy! Woo!

dojan@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:02 next collapse

Hope so. They’ve been trying to undermine the Swedish job market here, and even fucking stalked their employees. Horrible company.

DaddleDew@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:06 collapse

Wait what? Can we give more details? What do you mean by stalked?

EisFrei@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:20 next collapse

Idk about Sweden, but in Germany middle management visited sick employees at their homes to check whether they were really sick.

tagesschau.de/…/tesla-hausbesuche-krankschreibung…

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:26 next collapse

I don’t know if it was all the sick workers, but a lot of those workers hadn’t been to work all year (around September at the time).

Apparently it’s not abnormal for people to abuse the system there and do things like this.

There was some stuff about patterns of a subset of workers taking Fridays off sick as well.

So it doesn’t actually seem as outright bad if they were investigating abuse. However, if it was just a random person being sick, that would be very bad.

Edit: This is a terrible source I’m sure, but just an example that its a prevalent problem and there’s even a business up about finding out if people are cheating the system - www.malaymail.com/news/money/2024/12/30/…/161436

SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de on 26 Mar 17:44 next collapse

the thing is: the employer has absolutely 0 say on if a person is sick or not. If a doctor says a person can’t work: that’s it. The company 0 in the matter.

In fact, the company isn’t even allowed to ask why a person is sick. An official note from the doctor is all that matters

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:52 next collapse

Well clearly there’s something that’s allowed to be done as that article is about a guy that has a business determining if its legit or not?

But that’s an investigator, not the employer, so maybe that makes a difference?

EisFrei@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:59 collapse

In Germany it’s legal for an employer to visit an employee. The employee is under no obligation to open the door, however.

As this article covers, it doesn’t really make sense to visit an employee, as the issue might not be visually apparent.

mdr.de/…/krankheit-kontrolle-arbeitgeber-erlaubt-…

T156@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 20:33 next collapse

I would love to know how much is spent trying to catch people trying to game the system, compared to lost compensation because of sick leave.

Past a point, they must surely be spending more hiring this whole team of detectives than they would be just letting the workers take Friday off.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 20:36 next collapse

That would be interesting ya. I don’t think there would be any way to recoup the cost for the person calling is sick on Friday semi frequently or similar things, but for the people who are gaming the system and didn’t work for a year, if they found a way to abuse it, it’d probably make sense if you truly were that suspicious.

half_fiction@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 20:58 collapse

Yes, that reminds me of when Florida(?) started requiring drug testing for welfare recipients and ended up spending more on the tests than whatever they saved uncovering fraud.

echodot@feddit.uk on 26 Mar 21:25 collapse

I’m sure other EU countries have variations on this but in the UK this has already been legally decided. If somebody is abusing the sickness system you document it, you confirm it via the terrible Branford system, and then you hold them in for a meeting.

You don’t randomly turn up at their house, there is absolutely no justification for that and it is a stalking crime for them to do that.

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 26 Mar 17:26 collapse

Holy fuck. I’m sorry, if I take a sick day I take a sick day - you might see me out shopping for groceries to survive the day, but I am by no means well.

b3an@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 19:47 collapse

Uhm excuse me. If you can walk and carry groceries, clearly you are well 👏 enough 👏 to work 👏. I’m waiting on those TPS* reports tetris11!

Them probably.

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 26 Mar 20:02 next collapse

I miss the days when the employees collectively knew where their bosses lived and how to tie fuel-soaked rags to sticks

b3an@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 20:06 collapse

Suomessa, tiedämme muutamia asioita Molotovin cocktaileista. ;)

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 26 Mar 20:12 collapse

I understood two of those words, and that’s all I need. We meet at nightfall.

IndiBrony@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 22:22 collapse

My completely uneducated guess would say that this is the language of a country who know a few things about a Molotov Cocktail!

The closest word in my mental vocabulary which comes close to “Suomessa” is Suomi which is Finnish for Finland

Tiedämme? They tied a dam?

Muutamia has to do with a mutiny!

Asioita, I have no clue.

Then they reference the infamous Flaming Sambucca!

So Finland once staged a mutiny with fiery alcohol and a dam!

Maybe bean (I forget how to tag people in Lemmy posts) can tell me how close I was.

jaybone@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 21:49 collapse

We call them “TPS reports” buddy. slaps back

b3an@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 21:56 collapse

Dang I was close-ish. Fixed

dojan@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 19:00 collapse

Here’s an article. It’s in Swedish.

portifornia@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 22:15 collapse

Here’s a video. It’s also in Swedish.

😏

spankmonkey@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:24 collapse

Jail time would be even better.

waddle_dee@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 16:50 next collapse

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.

ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 17:10 collapse

Doesn’t he only own like 13% of the stock in Tesla? His wealth is barely affected by Tesla going bankrupt

[deleted] on 26 Mar 17:32 next collapse

.

ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 17:35 collapse

Yeah I’m just shilling over here pointing out facts that it takes more than bankrupting Tesla to financially hurt that psycho…

NOT_RICK@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:49 collapse

Having been first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012,[4] around 75% of Musk’s wealth was derived from Tesla stock in November 2020.

ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 17:55 collapse

Key thing here is it’s in 2020… it isn’t anymore since the whole xitter debacle which forced him to sell most of his stocks in it.

Tanking Tesla now unfortunately doesn’t have even close to the same impact as it would have if it happened 5 years ago.

Tyfud@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 18:09 collapse

Yes, but that 13% is massively leveraged. So it would significantly impact his ability to pay his loans that use those shares as collateral.

ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 18:28 collapse

That’s true, everything helps I guess. But tanking Tesla isn’t the silver bullet that many seem to think it is.

Klear@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 08:19 collapse

Yeah, we don’t need a silver bullet.

sunzu2@thebrainbin.org on 26 Mar 17:07 next collapse

Put local parasites in prison...

Claw back all the payments

jasoman@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:15 next collapse

Canadians taking on the Nazis they should send canned food to tesla next.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:30 next collapse

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.

pennomi@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:36 next collapse

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.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:41 next collapse

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.

db2@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:47 collapse

They probably had their families threatened. That’s what fascist regimes do.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:57 collapse

The story explains what their mistake was that others pointed out to them.

altima_neo@lemmy.zip on 26 Mar 21:16 collapse

Especially considering this was months ago

alaphic@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:41 next collapse

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

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 17:48 next collapse

I don’t think I’d ever call behemoth corporations efficient.

alaphic@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 08:09 collapse

woosh

0xD@infosec.pub on 26 Mar 20:03 collapse

Corpos are generally inefficient.

Buelldozer@lemmy.today on 26 Mar 19:22 collapse

So I’m cruising through the rules surrounding Canada’s iZEV program and contrary to all of the media coverage I can’t find any requirement that the vehicle be “delivered”… It’s even described on the official Transport Canada website as a “Point of Sale” program. Delivery at the time of sale doesn’t seem to be a requirement.

Further if you look at the process, which also references this as a “Point of Sale or Lease” program, and the e-forms the end purchaser IS involved with this and consents to Transport Canada contacting them about their purchase.

The number of vehicles does seem high but only in the context of individuals however the iZEV program allows for Fleet Sales and some entities could claim up to 50 vehicles. Now all of a sudden what would need to be 8,000 individual sales could theoretically be as low as 160.

After reviewing the process and the forms it seems believable that Tesla slammed a bunch of legitimate sales into the system at the last minute. It’s a LOT less believable that Tesla made up all of these sales as the documentation requirements mean they’d certainly be caught the minute anyone checked.

dustyData@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 19:39 collapse

It still means they should have sold something crazy like several dozens of full fleets per hour on the short span of a few days. Or imply that just 4 companies bought 2000 vehicles each, in just two days, during a weekend!. Nobody has ever done or does that. They filed the same weekend that the rebates entered pause. It is fraud.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 19:53 collapse

Or as I said in my OP, a backlog they were forced to deal with when they were advised it was about to run out.

Saying it’s fraud doesn’t make it fraud. The investigation will tell us if it was fraud.

Telorand@reddthat.com on 26 Mar 20:15 collapse

I appreciate your skepticism, but the sales numbers reported by some of the dealerships in question are nothing short of miraculous. I know, because car dealers are my company’s clients.

So even if they had a backlog of rebates, the sales numbers would still be normal, and they’re not.

This looks and smells strongly of fraud.

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 20:27 next collapse

The Tesla show rooms / delivery centers aren’t dealerships in the traditional sense. It’s all Tesla. Tesla could have just dumped paperwork on a less busy area and said file all this shit.

Edit: and I agree, it’s fishy and should be investigated, but all the calls that it IS fraud are really premature.

Buelldozer@lemmy.today on 26 Mar 21:05 collapse

Tesla could have just dumped paperwork on a less busy area and said file all this shit.

I wondered about that myself but I’m not familiar with how Tesla dealerships operate, especially since it’s Canada.

Buelldozer@lemmy.today on 26 Mar 20:44 collapse

but the sales numbers reported by some of the dealerships in question are nothing short of miraculous.

Eh, maybe. I appreciate your skepticism but as a former Sales Guy the ending of the iZEV program would have made sales, including fleet sales, pretty damn easy.

Let say you’ve had a company considering buying 50 EVs for their fleet and suddenly its in the news that the rebate program is ending. You now have 250,000 reasons to call the Dealership and get those vehicles under contract (Sale or Lease).

It works the other way around too. The Sales Schmuck from the dealership goes through his book of recent visitors to the dealership and calls them up. “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that the iZEV program is going to close down. So if you want to save $5,000 you should get down to the dealership right away.” so the person who was interested runs down there and inks a deal.

Those scenarios aren’t just plausible I’ve personally done them. The ending of a rebate program worth thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars is a powerful closing tool.

Also the sales numbers only appear “miraculous” if you assume that the transactions all happened in those two days when they almost certainly didn’t. A couple hundred individuals buy cars in January meanwhile the phone is ringing off the hook with fleet sales and suddenly the paperwork is behind.

This looks and smells strongly of fraud.

Transport Canada has the paperwork, you can’t file a rebate claim without it, so its just a matter of time until the truth comes out. If Tesla tried to defraud the Canadian Government then I hope they get crucified for it.

Pika@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 17:48 next collapse

after what US has done tariff wise I’m surprised that they haven’t blocked all US companies from it.

brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 26 Mar 18:15 next collapse

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.

nyan@lemmy.cafe on 26 Mar 19:40 collapse

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.

CileTheSane@lemmy.ca on 26 Mar 18:45 next collapse

Trump calling this “Domestic Terrorism” and threatening Tariffs in response in 3… 2…

But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 01:07 collapse

“Illegal boycott!” Was one of the stupidest things I’ve seen Trump say and that’s saying a lot

SkyNTP@lemmy.ml on 26 Mar 18:48 next collapse

Maybe keep your shitty politics out of your shitty product next time, and then you won’t face political consequences.

Telorand@reddthat.com on 26 Mar 20:11 next collapse

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.

echodot@feddit.uk on 26 Mar 21:19 collapse

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.

Telorand@reddthat.com on 26 Mar 21:40 next collapse

I’m open to being wrong, but this certainly doesn’t pass a smell test. We’ll see what happens.

jaybone@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 21:53 collapse

Right, you’d think they would provide vin numbers, which the government would then check against vehicle registrations with whatever DMV equivalent.

finitebanjo@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 22:06 collapse

The iZEV program began in 2019 I believe, and given the timeline these sort of investigations and hearings take I would bet they did catch it pretty quickly.

Rather than comparing VINs another way to compare would be to go off the monthly or quarterly tax statements from corporations comparing sales to volume of rebates that way, but if they were committing fraud on the rebates that means they would also be committing tax fraud, but I have absolutely no idea how it was actually implemented I’m just spitballing here.

Sybilvane@lemmy.ca on 26 Mar 20:12 next collapse

In this case it looks like they commited fraud, so it’s not even just political.

echodot@feddit.uk on 26 Mar 21:17 collapse

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.

jaybone@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 21:57 collapse

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.

echodot@feddit.uk on 27 Mar 07:35 collapse

Well I ain’t doing any.

dominiquec@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 09:08 collapse

Neither is their CEO.

straightjorkin@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 20:04 next collapse

Thank God they’re not just letting that shit slip

Prox@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 22:03 collapse

What kind of first-world county would let it slip?

Glances nervously in US

Ozeback@lemm.ee on 26 Mar 22:37 next collapse

We don’t merely let it slip by nowadays. We lube up the grifting slide to make it faster.

Petter1@lemm.ee on 27 Mar 11:10 collapse

US? first-world? What? No! It really isn’t. Like health care is worse than some “third-world” countries…

PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 27 Mar 10:20 collapse

Now freeze the editor’s paycheck - no editor worth that much should be misspelling ‘suspicious’ in a headline.