Earlier this year, Tesla found itself in hot water when the company was accused of shady business dealings when it raked in millions of dollars in just days, thanks to a Canadian electric vehicle incentives program. It now appears that the incident was nothing more than a misunderstanding due to the use of an automated claims system, according to the Toronto Star.
In January 2025, the Canadian federal Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicles program was coming to an end. Tesla experienced a significant spike in vehicle sales and incentive claims, with over 8,600 vehicles being registered in a single weekend. That resulted in a haul of over $43 million in rebates. Because of the optics of the claim, the EV automaker was subject to a Transport Canada investigation.
While that investigation cleared Tesla of any wrongdoing, it also highlighted an interesting development. As reported by the Toronto Star, it was revealed that Tesla deployed a bot to file a backlog of rebate claims for cars that the company had sold at some point in the previous couple of years.
The Toronto Star also obtained a legal memo from Arun Thangaraj, Canada’s Deputy Minister of Transport, summarizing the results of the investigation.
“Since early in the iZEV Program, Tesla Motors Canada has used a tool that allows for (an) accelerate(d) submission of claims, and correspondingly, they have submitted claims at a faster rate than other dealerships,” stated the memo.
“The number of claims submitted by Tesla over two days just before the program pause has generated public and industry criticism,” the memo reads. “The public may not understand how Tesla Motors Canada could claim such a high volume of incentives between the pause announcement and the pause itself.”
Thanks to a number of controversies surrounding CEO Elon Musk, Tesla has struggled with declining car sales in many key automotive markets across the world in 2025. This includes in Canada, which revealed that there were just 9,000 new Tesla registrations throughout the country in the first half of the year. That’s a 67% drop in new vehicle registrations when compared to the same timeframe in 2024.
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