Tesla Makes a Desperate Move in Canada As Sales Collapse

From the article: Tesla is making a desperate move to stay alive in Canada as its sales suffer from the fallout of Donald Trump’s trade war. In a quiet but shocking update to its website, the electric vehicle maker has drastically lowered the price of its best-selling Model Y SUV by a staggering $20,000. The move is a direct response to a brutal trade dispute that has crippled Tesla’s Canadian operations. In retaliation for tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, Ottawa slapped a 25% surtax on all cars imported from the United States starting on April 9, 2025. Faced with this new cost, Tesla had no choice but to raise the price of a Canadian Model Y to nearly CAD $84,990 (USD $61,500). The result was catastrophic. According to reports from Electrek, the massive price hike caused demand to completely evaporate, with Tesla’s sales in Canada grinding to a virtual halt in recent months. Tesla, which does not provide sales figures by region and country, saw its overall sales drop by 13.5% in the second quarter compared to a year earlier. Now, in a bid to reignite sales, Tesla has reversed course. The Model Y Long Range All-Wheel Drive now has a starting price of, according to the company’s website. $64,990, a full $20,000 less than its peak. The likely explanation for this dramatic reversal is a major strategic pivot: the new, cheaper Model Ys are reportedly being imported from Tesla’s Gigafactory in Berlin, Germany, allowing the company to bypass the steep tariffs on U.S.-made vehicles. While a win for new buyers, the decision has created a ludicrous pricing situation. The prices of other Tesla models, which are still sourced from the U.S., remain inflated by the surcharges. This means the Model Y, a popular SUV, is now significantly cheaper than the Model 3, Tesla’s entry-level sedan. A quick check of Tesla’s Canadian website shows the Model 3 Long Range All-Wheel Drive starting at $70,772, nearly $6,000 more than the larger and more popular SUV. The sudden price drop was widely discussed by Tesla fans and prospective buyers on X (formerly Twitter), with reactions ranging from shock and excitement to regret for those who bought just a few weeks too early.

Numbers don’t lie.

The fact these cars are no longer imported from the US and are now imported from Germany really shows that Trump's trade war is working /s

The Logic of Trumps Tariffs…

Good news !

Plenty of capacity at the Brandenburg factory to export to Canada

that is only the beginning of this. Countries and trade blocks around the world are realigning their relationships. You‘ll see many new Free Trade agreements like EU / Mercosur The only sad part of it is, the effects will not be all of a sudden, but slowly creep in like Brexit. So the brainwashed MAGA crowd will blame the Democrats

"However, there can never - and I mean never - be a discount on a new car coming out of the factory in pristine condition, where there is no underlying rationale," - Techoking, 2016

Too bad, so sad for Tesla buyers.

Canada could get the unwanted Teslas that can't be sold in Europe or China. Sloppy thirds!

when the truth is a lie, it’ll set you free

Do the right thing

Sarcasm tags ruin all sarcasm

Sarcasm has a certain tone of voice and cadence. The /s just represents that tone of voice. It's like ! or ?. Personally I prefer (!) for sarcasm but reddit seems to have settled on /s

But will anyone buy them?

Good sarcasm is not delivered with a tone of voice, obvious sarcasm ruins the point of being sarcastic. Nobody in here would think you are serious, and by putting it you're doing the equivalent of telling a joke then winking obnoxiously and shouting JOKE!

I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.

A huge amount of communication is non verbal. That's why text communication has so many misunderstandings because it is stripped of all those contextual clues. I'm not going to further reduce the contextual clues

mixed with turds!

Nah, the EU saw the sharpest declines in sales anyway, with some countries up to 60-70% less new registrations. In the end of April, there were articles about teslas piling up in ports / temporary storage areas of ports. That is a damn expensive and meant to be used for short timeframes only. Europe (especially germany) is densily populated and doesn't have acres of empty parking lots everywhere, like the US with their absurd laws to build parkingspace around everything. This screams desparation to me, not clever solution to go around the tariffs.

I feel there are Canadians uncomfortable with financially supporting a Nazi who’s greed is ruining lives all across the planet.

Still would not buy a car associated with a nazi

They don't discount, but the price will change every day based on how many drugs the CEO is on

Nah its mostly the tariffs that Canada put on US made vehicles, made Teslas virtually uncompetitive in pricing and price has been a strong argument for Teslas. You may call out Elons actions but even within Europe, it doesnt hit all markets equally. In Germany there was a huge decline in Tesla sales while in the UK and Norway Tesla is still selling fine.

Yes...let's blame it all on Trump. LOL. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_hitler_nazi_salute/ >Tesla is making a desperate move to stay alive in Canada as its sales suffer from the fallout of Donald Trump’s trade war.

>55% of communication is conveyed through body language, 38% through tone of voice, and only 7% through the actual spoken words That little /s we put represents 38% of how we communicate on this app.

Their sales numbers, recently released, only went down 13.5%. There's not very many people dedicated to democracy in the US; they'd prefer to give tens of thousands of dollars to a guy throwing up hitler salutes than have to change which car they want to purchase.

Every car company is evil in their own way. Right now they're all fighting against stricter emissions regulations, which is not as in people's face as Musk, but the damage is still catastrophic and ruining lives all across the planet. There are no good choices in the auto sector.

Those that bought a few weeks too early maybe shouldn't have bought at all.

I’m gonna go ahead and say promoting Nazism and fascism is worse than fighting emission controls but maybe it’s just me.

Idk, I'm pretty sure throwing the Nazi salute twice with lip biting vigor is a significant factor in the decision to buy a Tesla. Tariffs for sure, being a Nazi isn't lost on everyone.

>Their sales numbers, recently released, only went down 13.5%. In a market where, for the most part, sales are rising. Saying they "only" wen't down 13.5% is underselling it because they are used to double digit gains, meaning that they probably missed what they should have sold by \~20%+. In my 30+ years of marketing if I told my CEO that sales were down "only" 13.5% in a growing market, I'd be fired before the end of the meeting. This is the car market, not the VCR market.

Yet driving VW and Porsche is fine they literally hugged real Hitler

VW was completely reconstituted post-WWII by a Brit.

they use the names associated with the nazis

The Beetle was the car that saved VW and that was saved by the British after Germany surrendered because they saw value in the platform. Porsche survived because Ferdinand was seen as an excellent engineer and the car/brand survived because Ferdinand was heavily involved in the post war reconstruction effort. For many years Porsche was just an engineering/ consulting company, but eventually they started building and racing cars again. So it was the post war usefulness and restructuring of the companies that allowed them to survive. If their CEO’s and President’s were goose stepping Nazi’s post war, they wouldn’t have survived.

Not having your CEO go around doing nazi salute in 2025 is a winning strategy, one would tought.

Why didn't the rename Germany then? Guess the whole country is Nazi.

They DID rename Germany During Nazi rule the official name was Deutsches Reich starting in 1943, the regime increasingly used the term: Großdeutsches Reich — meaning "Greater German Reich" Present name = Bundesrepublik Deutschland They did change the name

But CEO literally lying and cheating about emissions on diesel engines and gassing american population in their own "car" gas chambers with polluting diesel engines is ok though lets forgive that

exactly and Tesla will survive for these exact reasons is my point

I agree, jokes arent as funny when theyre spoonfed like that. /s is cringe

Art of the deal

Making jokes broad so everyone understands them can be a double-edged sword. Like how comedies with the best ratings are often less critically acclaimed.

He moved here first before the US, married a canadian, seemed to back up Trump with the 51 state thing. Fuck that guy.

Tesla didn't drop their prices for the Y, they changed where the Ys are being shipped from to avoid the tariffs. We can expect they'll do the same with the 3. The delay is probably tooling to add the nacs port to cars produced in Europe but destined for Canada.

The Volkswagen founded in 1937 by actual Nazis ceases to exist by the end of the war. The Volkswagen that was founded post WW II was a company created by Allied military forces as a precursor to The Marshall Plan to put Germans back to work so they wouldn't be left with a collapsed economy like they had after WW I. Even then the company that exists today only exists and is only named Volkswagen because Ford Motors turned down the offer to just have the factory. This second Volkswagen was completely controlled from its origin by the British until 1948. Ferdinand Porsche, the actual Nazi that originally designed the Beetle in the 1930's, wasn't allowed to run the company or work for it after the war. Granted initially after the war he was in prison in France. The Porsche car company and the 356 design was created by Ferry Porsche, the son, who was never a member of the Nazi party. His father did work with his son once he was out of prison but he was in his 70's by then and not in good health. The post war work to modernize the Beetle before it went into production was technically done by Ferry Porsche because the company was blocked from working with former Nazis like Ferdinand. But the most important thing to know about Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry is they're both fucking dead and aren't running shit.

> There are no good choices in the auto sector. Perhaps not; but there are certainly choices that are *much less bad.*

So does IBM, yet no one would consider the company pro-Hitler 85 years later.

Maybe Elon should have thought about all of this before backing an anti-EV, tariffing lunatic like Trump. Hope he enjoys what he voted for.

I'm in Canada. Anecdotal to be sure, but I have six friends that all bought EVs this year. A few years ago they would have all considered Teslas. This year they refused to even look at them and all bought other brands. The BMW EV our best friends bought is a gorgeous car.

It was mostly the 51st state comments wasn’t it? Sure the rest helped but the sovereignty is the main issue here

Same we bought a BMW EV, so much better and nicer ride than a Tesla. Never will fElon get my money!

I am Canadian. And every time I see a TeZLa, I think, "Swasticar"

Yeah fuck those guys tbh.

Do you drive any German cars? Do you know how those companies came to be?

Ah, that’s so sad….

glad Tesla is having the day the CEO advocated everyone vote for.... so he could gut medicaid, cut school lunches, add 3 trillion in debt and launch rockets faster.

The funny thing is, Tesla used to import some vehicles from China, until we matched the US in tariffing Chinese made EVs at 100%.

DO you know what year it is?

Both can be wrong.

This is what I think, there must be a lot of Nazis out there. So sad. I guess most people are struggling and if you can get a lease for 299 model 3 vs a 399 ionic, they are going with the model 3.

They can keep them out of Canada, no matter how low priced. We don’t want Nazi stuff here. 🖕Better alternatives exist.

Renault has one that looks really good — the batteries are manufactured in Poland by South Korean company LG, too.

Today in Great Oxymorons of History…

I disagree, without it you don't know if you are reading a derailed person or sarcasm. Approximately equal probabilities nowadays

His maternal grandparents the Haldemans were Nazi-supporting white supremacist conspiracists who moved to SA after WW2 because the segregated US wasn’t racist enough for them…

And hell, Ford himself was a white supremacist conspiracy theorist who bought a media company to push old Russian propaganda hoaxes and more, because he was convinced that The Jews had started WW1 and were responsible for everything wrong in the world…including candy bars not tasting as good as when he was a kid, no joke.

Ports and shipping companies do NOT mess around when it comes to charging fines for unclaimed containers— or even refusing to do further business with manufacturers/resellers, when it comes to the logistics companies, which is probably the explanation for those weird open-air WankPanzer graveyards we’ve seen.

“WankPanzer” is a popular nickname for the Cybertruck now

lol

\>But the most important thing to know about Ferdinand Porsche and his son Ferry is they're both fucking dead and aren't running shit. Or helping to implement fascism in 2025.

Fuck the ones buying now too.

Today in Great Morons of History.

More whattaboutism from idiots. Embarrassing.

yep Tots & Pears

Yeah- it’s not about the price . Elbows up.

That's a great point, thank you soooo much for making it.

For me it was the Nazi salute about 2/3 and the 51st state 1/3. I was considering a Y as my next vehicle but now the Ionic5 and Prologue are top of my list. I also canceled my Starlink within a week of the salute (Ordered cell internet the day after and canceled as soon as my new modem arrived)

Hmm a car company founded by Nazis over 80 years ago and no ties to Nazis today or a car company owned and run by a current Nazi. Yep not seeing your point here.

But this is about Canada specifically. Where Tesla registrations are down like 60-70% YoY.

can they make a profit with that discount?

It's been years since I took cost accounting but there is no way Elon Musk's smoke and mirrors financial gymnastics can show a profit. "Let's start shipping automobiles from Germany instead of Texas and cut the price by 25% or more. That will shore up our bleak financial outlook and impress investors. Okey dokey.

Sigh. I missed price parity with the USD. Want a $43,000 EV?

Space at the nation's ports are going to become even more at a premium as these tariffs really start digging into the container shipping industry. Soon we'll see fleets of idle vessels anchored at the sea buoys, loaded to the max with empty containers.

Trump has always threatened tariffs. He tried to do this in his first term but was blocked by more sensible people. Musk backed Trump 💯%. Musk was either too dumb to remember this or was too arrogant and thought he could win a WH fight on this. Tariffs and their bizarre effects are 100% on Trump but Musk enabled Trump and is now paying the price.

Gee, I remember Musk seemed to support Trump in his run for Pres.

Selling for free right? Buy 1 get 2 CARS for FREE!?!!?

Trump wants a 3rd term

MGGA?

I agree!

I agree!

I agree!

So sorry to hear that, Tesla… This. Heart. Gesture. Goes. OUT! To. You. TWICE!

The #MUSKINGS Will continue

Ahhhhh that makes sense

I don't think many people in Trumps orbit (read that: in his cult) understand the full damage these drug fueled "policies" are going to do. It actually makes me feel bad for Tesla...and that's quite an accomplishment.

Ah, so since none come out in pristine condition, this does not apply.

When you figure their original projects were for VAST increases each year....like 20 to 40% or more, being down is a big deal.

Isn't the US Dollar worth 10% less since Dump took office? That might hurt bring from the EU also if any transactions are tied to dollars.

This is not desperate. Desperate is selling it for 75% off.

Yup. It’s not such a fast one to one that the average citizen will realize what is happening and will open the doors to blaming who’s convenient. And I assume the dems will not market the blame as well as the other side.

Today in Great Dur Dur of HisDury.