Elon Musk is a lot of things, and almost every one of them is not a positive, at least in my mind. Must I now consider that he might be a crook on top of everything else?
I’m not even entirely sure if the guy is actually human or some lab stunt that got away from the boys and girls who toil down in the Black Ops department. That’s a gate we want to fix, real fast.
Comedian Mike Myers captures it best when he does his Musk impersonation on Saturday Night Live. Like a lot of things with Myers, he sort of over-does it, and he may have as well with his Musk schtick, but there’s one part that he seems to nail bang-on.
The part where, in mid-impersonation, he suddenly stops, makes some unnatural body movements, and facial expressions, then says “glitch” followed by “buffering,” as if the insufferable little puke was some sort of Cyborg operating on Dollar Store AA batteries that just ran out.
Anyways, back to Elon, the potential crook. Or more to the point, the company he operates, Tesla.
Driving a Tesla in Canada these days is like wearing an authentic fur coat to an animal-rights rally. Basically, you’re just asking for it. I guess when Must tweeted, or X’ed a post saying that “Canada is not a real country,” it led to a bit of a schism between himself and Canadians. The fact that he’s a butt-smoocher of The Donald, as well as the most obnoxious billionaire ever made, also puts a bit of a bullseye on his head, and I mean that figuratively only, not wanting to be party to any suggestion that Musk should be targeted with any violence beyond a good stiff slap across the face, which is actually two slaps, a forehand and a backhand if done properly.
But this is about Tesla the company, the maker of electric vehicles, a brand we see more and more of on Canadian roads and highways. This second point is made easier by the fact that the Canadian government had subsidized consumers to purchase electric vehicles, and Tesla, by far, was the pre-eminent choice, given the range of models and price points.
Consumer incentive programs don’t last forever though, and this one didn’t either. A few weeks ago, the government put out notice to dealerships that the fund backing up the program was approaching bottom, and that there was no immediate intent to fill it back up. Before the announcement, Tesla had wracked up $713 million in incentive dollars from the feds, by far more than any other electric car maker.
And then the fun started.
It seems mere hours before the end of the rebate, Tesla sales rocketed from 300 to 5800/day. To make this even more astounding is the fact that these sales were reported from just four Tesla dealerships, in Toronto, Quebec City, and Vancouver, and pulled in over $43 million in rebates, some 60% of what was left in the fund. All this in a single day, a couple of Saturday’s ago. In the 72 hours before the end of the rebate, the number of “sold” Teslas reached 8600.
Isn’t that interesting?
If you do a Google satellite view of these dealerships, there’s no way the number of spots they have for vehicles approaches 5800, much less 8600, although I’m sure many of those phantom Teslas were “purchased” on order, meaning they haven’t even been assembled yet.
If this is true, imagine being a salesperson at one of these four Tesla dealerships? Lunch is on them for the rest of the month, is all I can say.
The government is looking into this, although they’re keeping their “looking into” close to their vests, revealing little or nothing in the process. So there’s no word yet on whether that money has flowed to Tesla already or not. We also don’t know if those 5800 cars exist, and if there are 5800 purchasers and owners of these Teslas. Or 8600 purchasers for that matter.
It’s been suggested that somehow Tesla “gamed” the system, as in found a way to cheat, and is there any wonder how billionaires become billionaires?
Musk doesn’t like Canada, but it appears he doesn’t mind our money so much.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 