Tesla sales are so abysmal in Canada that Elon Musk has made the drastic choice to dramatically lower the price of the new Model Y as it attempts to climb out of the hole.
As Electrek reports, a Model Y in Canada now costs $65,ooo CAD ($47,465 USD), which is a cool $20,000 CAD cheaper than it was just a few days prior.
We'll get into the hows and whys in a second, but first some backstory. Earlier this year, after Trump raised the specter of tariffs against its northern neighbor, Canada moved to impose its own 25 percent counter-tariff on all American cars, as retribution to the second-time president, who's also agitated the Canadian public by claiming he wants to annex the country, straining the historical allyship between the neighbor nations and causing that country's residents to view the US as an "enemy."
Caught in the middle of this foolhardy trade and culture war was Tesla, which raised the price of the Model Y in Canada to $84,990 CAD from $64,990. As Electrek notes, that price hike brought the cost of the car up to the equivalent of about $61,500 USD, a figure $20,000 USD higher than the long-range all-wheel drive version in the states.
As one might guess, nobody in the Great White North wanted to spend that much on a vehicle that had been cheaper ahead of the tariffs, and that's without getting into Musk's then-bromance with Trump — and thus, Tesla's sales cratered. In late March, Electrek reported that company sales dropped a whopping 87 percent in the province of Quebec, which theretofore had been considered an important market for the electric vehicle-maker.
Given all that context, it undoubtedly came as a shock for Canadians to learn that Tesla had slashed the Model Y price so significantly. It appears that the cost drop stems from the company sourcing its Canadian Model Y deliveries from its German Gigafactory — but as Gizmodo flagged, that model is the only one that's seen any price reductions in Canada so far.
Looking through Tesla's pricing on its Canadian website, one can now see that the Model 3, conventionally its cheapest vehicle, now runs for just under $71,000 CAD — nearly $6,000 more than the larger Model Y costs under the new pricing scheme. This is likely due to those cars still being shipped from the US, which makes them subject to Canadian counter-tariffs.
Reading between the lines, this dramatic new sales gambit suggests that Tesla is not only aware of how bad things are for the company in Canada, but also that it's willing to do something crazy to try to turn the ship around.
Given that Musk recently tweeted that "Canada is not a real country," it seems downright preposterous that he's chosen to switch it up this much — but then again, global Tesla sales have declined so significantly thanks to Musk's asinine politics that it's no wonder it wants to recoup.
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