Tesla Canada must reimburse insurer Intact C$161,700 for a 2020 Model X that burned on a Montreal street while still under warranty, after the Quebec Superior Court refused to reopen a judgment Tesla had let go by default. The ruling, by Justice Ian Demers, was reported by TVA Nouvelles on 8 October 2026 and picked up by Drive Tesla Canada and Electrek.
The fire
Sacha De Santis was driving the Model X through Montreal's Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough at about 1 a.m. on 5 March 2023, his partner beside him. Shortly after they turned on the heating they smelled smoke inside the cabin. They stopped, took their things and got out. Within about five minutes the car was engulfed, and it was declared a total loss. "It could have gone really badly. We were lucky," De Santis told TVA Nouvelles.
Montreal police concluded that year that the fire was not criminal. Intact paid De Santis C$161,700 for the write-off and then did what insurers do with a loss they think belongs to someone else: it sued Tesla Canada to recover the money. Its case was that the car sat inside Tesla's basic vehicle warranty of four years or 80,000 km, the same term Tesla sells in Europe, and was about three years into it. An expert report filed with the court put the fire's origin on the passenger side of the dashboard and called a premature electrical failure the probable cause.
The defence that was not one
Tesla did not contest the claim in time, and Intact obtained a default judgment in June. Tesla then asked the court to retract it, and to do that it had to show a defence worth hearing. What it offered, through an employee on the record, was that vehicle fires are "generally" associated with misuse or deliberate damage.
Justice Demers rejected the application. Tesla, he wrote in Electrek's translation, had not raised "the slightest serious" defence and had made its claim "without relying on any data whatsoever". The default judgment stands, and with it the C$161,700.
| Step | What happened |
|---|---|
| 5 March 2023 | 2020 Model X burns in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Montreal; total loss |
| 2023 | Montreal police find no sign of a crime |
| June 2026 | Intact obtains a default judgment against Tesla Canada |
| October 2026 | Justice Demers refuses to set the judgment aside; appeal period still open |
Two caveats belong next to that. The decision is about whether Tesla gets a second chance to argue, not a trial finding on what started the fire; the expert report was never tested by cross-examination. And the deadline to appeal had not expired when the ruling was reported. Tesla Canada did not respond to Le Journal de Montréal's request for comment, and Intact declined to comment.
The data Tesla has and did not bring
Tesla publishes fire statistics. Its vehicle safety report counts roughly one Tesla fire for every 140 million miles driven between 2012 and 2024, against one every 17 million miles for the average US vehicle on NFPA and Department of Transportation data, and it notes that its own count includes fires it did not cause, such as arson. None of that was put before the court, and none of it answers the only question the court had: whether this Model X caught fire because of a defect while under warranty. The one expert report said it probably did.
Why a Montreal fire matters in Europe
The sum is small for a company of Tesla's size. The reasoning is not. Tesla's position was that a car fire under warranty is the owner's problem until proven otherwise; the court's was that an assertion is not evidence. European owners hold the same four-year, 80,000 km term, and the question Justice Demers asked, where is the data, is the one any court would ask. TeslAnt has followed Tesla in consumer courts before, most recently the Norwegian Supreme Court's battery-throttling ruling in April; the Quebec pattern, a technical claim from Tesla and a judge asking for what is behind it, is familiar.