Causality could be reversed here. In markets where technology advances quickly and prices drop, there is very little market for used goods, because why would you buy a 4-year-old whatever when you can get a new one that's twice as good for half the price? You see this in computers, smartphones, TVs, and solar panels (outside of the U.S, where prices are kept artificially high by tariffs). People almost never buy used because there's no reason to. You can just buy new, for the same or lower price, and get something way better.
Instead of threatening to derail the EV transition, lack of resale value might be evidence of the EV transition, particularly when coupled with quickly growing overall sales of EVs globally.
> You can just buy new, for the same or lower price
But, like the article says, new EVs are selling for about twice as much as a 2-year-old used vehicle of the same make and model. That's a very very far cry from "same or lower price".
EV are progressing fast so they lose value quick, like a laptop of the late 90s. Not quite as bad, but in those times, your computer was worth next to nothing in less than a year.
ICE are stagnant. They retain their value because they're not improving at all.
My dad had to make the same decision and he was too vary because of the battery. He talked about his phone and that it doesn't last a day anymore while at 84% health after three years and translated it 1to1 to the car. Its hard to argue with people if they have a reference point but don't understand the differences. I guess most people just want that initial warranty for now. Are there any manufactures that give long warranties on the battery yet?
The last part of OP's statement is the key. In a field that's rapidly advancing technologically, used prices are depressed because the new product is that much better than the used product.
Think back to the early smartphone days - every year phones multiplied in performance, in screen resolution, etc. In that environment a used item is less attractive because you feel like you're missing out on features/capability. This keeps used prices down. Nowadays used smartphones are more competitive because the rate of advancement (that buyers care about at least) has slowed.
For example there's another post later in this thread that points out that the Nissan Leaf has been the same price forever - except the current-gen Leaf has literally double the range of the last one. Effects like this depress used prices.
This entire argument relies on new EV prices declining like other technologies, but this doesn't seem to be the case. E.g. the Nissan Leaf is ~$30,000 and has been for almost a decade. (Guess you could make a case with inflation... but nowhere near the technology price curves.)
It is the case globally. BYD sells EVs starting at $7800 [1][2], and Toyota sells an EV for $15,000 in China [3].
This may also be why Teslas are holding their value better than any other EV. Teslas are usually bought by U.S. consumers, who are forbidden from buying any of the cheaper global EVs by import restrictions. For fleets that buy models that are sold globally, they compete in the global market and are subject to global price declines.
The 2012 Nisan leaf had a 73 mile range. The 2025 leaf has a 300 mile range. 4x range at the same price (~30% less with inflation) is a pretty good improvement.
MSRP of an internal-combustion-powered Civic or Corolla is up 30ish percent in the same time period. The 2025 Nissan Leaf is a lot better than the 2015 model too. Range has nearly doubled for one.
No, you completely missed the point. The new model is still ~$30,000 but it has better range/charges faster/drives better.
That doesn’t really happen as dramatically with gasoline cars. The powertrain and driving experience of a 5 year old gas car isn’t noticeably different than a current one.
If you buy a 5 year old EV you might get one that charges slow, doesn’t have a heat pump, has worse battery chemistry, battery health management, and the list goes on.
Heck, the Leaf is a perfect example because you’re stuck with chademo fast charging charging instead of CCS or NACS. I wouldn’t touch one with a 9 foot pole unless I planned to exclusively charge at home.
Also, don’t take my comment to mean that I think used EVs are a bad choice, many of them can work very well for many years and use cases as long as you are properly informed.
I don't think that's a realistic transaction price for the Nissan Leaf. For most of that decade they were all but giving them away on leases as low as $79/mo. There are probably streaming video channels that cost more than a Nissan Leaf.
What are the ranges across that decade. If the inflation adjusted price is lowering and the main technical limit is improving, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a technology improvement.
Car prices are tough too because how much subsidies, tariffs etc play into it.
But theoretically if you used a US made car you could limit some of that bias.
I'm an upper middle class person who could buy everything new if I wanted, but I still choose to acquire many things used. I have a new TV but my AVR and most of the speakers are second hand. I bought a four year old car. My CPU and RAM are new, but the motherboard and GPU are from FB marketplace. My monitors are new but my desk and office lights are cobbled together. My laser printer is almost twenty years old. I buy a lot of my clothes and almost all of my sporting gear second hand.
I partly don't own an EV because even used they still cost a lot upfront and I'd rather maintain the personal incentive to take mass transit or ride my bike, but when I do eventually go electric, it'll almost certainly be preowned, assuming I can get a reasonable discount off of new.
Depending on how far back you want to look at electric cars you can find them for pretty cheap. Sub $5k versions from 10 years ago were tempting recently when my partner needed a repair on the current (ICE) car. It looked like sub $15k there were many options. For use around the city it would be a good fit, but I ditched the ideas since we're in the process of dealing with partial house rewiring. That might be an update for later.
I don't get your angle; EVs cost more than the comparable car new, cost way more to repair and depreciate faster. More electrical waste, but not cheap to begin with? Cars (in my mind at least) should last 15, 20 or more years; that doesn't seem to be happening here.
EV maintenance costs are way lower. There's hardly non-recycleable electrical waste in EVs. And they absolutely can last 15 years: depreciation doesn't mean they fall apart.
Maybe $30k or $40k are nothing for the average car owner in the USA but that's 3 or 4 times what a small car used to cost here in Europe, even 5 times. Small cars are going extinct or their price doubled because they are transitioning to electric too. The result is that they are selling few EVs and a lot of used combustion engine cars. The EV transition is derailing here because of price, not because of second hand market value.
Exactly. There is such a gap between brand new EV and regular cars that for someone doing 10000km per year it needs on average 8 years before breaking even to account for the price gap. It’s too expensive right now it does makes sense to invest in an EV, except if money isn’t a problem
There's also a whole lot of people without the option of charging at home, especially here in the UK (relying on on-street parking or living in flats)
Green tech is great if you're upper-middle class with a nice big detached home, plenty of space to install solar, a heat pump, and EV charger. But a large percentage of people just don't have a 'compatible home' even if they had the cash available to invest in such tech.
That current EVs just depreciate faster than ICE cars (in the US).
The article's chart is about used ICE vs EV prices in the US...
New EVs are definitely not 2x as good as a few years ago at half the price. Not sure if you've seen the price of new EVs in the US without subsidies.
ICE cars don't have a ~20% range depreciation after 5 years. EVs do. One would expect them to depreciate faster, until there's a solution for that.
That's not really a problem if they depreciate faster if the total operation cost is lower - which it almost certainly is for the Chinese EVs (relevant to most of the world).
The data in the article is kind of all over the place. But also at least one big distortion is that
* these are rental cars, which are used much more intensely than normal used cars
* a big chunk of the (US) stats are Hertz dumping Teslas, specifically. It had to dump 30,000 of them (which is a huge amount of Teslas to just flood the market with all at once); and Tesla specifically has people trying to sell their cars due to the brand of their CEO.
What EVs have 20% range depreciation after 5 years? That seems atypical for any car with modern battery temp management.
Mine is 2 years old, battery still reads 99% health and I regularly exceed the EPA range estimate. I've seen ones with hundreds of thousands of (fast charging!) miles that still only have 10% degradation.
I think it’s hard to draw any conclusions about the auto market. The cost escalations of cars and the bizarro economy have changed the market fundamentally.
The weird gaps of supply in model years because of the pandemic and prices are just nuts. The value of my 2016 SUV has gone up $4000 since last year. EVs are super volatile — my brother has netted profit from trading them. My girlfriend sold her 14 month old Subaru for $1000 under her cost - the pretax value appreciated.
Hard agree. A drunk driver hit our parked 2015 Mazda CX-5. We paid about $27,000 for it in 2016. The car was totaled and we received about $17,000. That figured out to just about $1100 in depreciation per year for 9 years.
Exactly ^^^ This situation reminds me of the 90s with the PC market, where PCs were changing so fast, and getting cheaper every day - I think Weird Al put it best: "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks / But it was obsolete before I opened the box".
What a reference. Thanks for taking me back to the 90s. I have fond memories of memorizing Running with Scissors :)
Yeah, tech for this stuff is moving super fast. It's hard to know what will endure, what will be upgradeable, and what will be cast aside.
I recently bought a low mileage used EV for relatively cheap. I'm hoping I'll be able to drive the battery into the ground. Then I'm betting that, in 6-8(10?)yrs when I need a new one, there will be better battery chemistries so I can extend the car's life even further.
I don’t think it’s that EVs are getting that much better year-over-year. I think it’s more that people are scared to buy a used EV, because they don’t know how long batteries will hold up and what to look for. To anyone who hasn’t done a bunch of research (most people) it seems much more risky.
You are spot on. New car EV prices are dropping and tech is advancing.
EVs inherently depreciate less; they're simpler, few moving parts. The motor is sealed. Batteries are lasting longer than expected.
So 'depreciate' in the title is misleading. It may be technically true in that they lose resale value, but they are definitely not less road-worthy than a similarly aged combustion vehicle.
I would absolutely buy a second hand Tesla, they're great value. Probably other EVs too.
You're right, but it still sucks that my car now depreciates as fast as my Macbook. I don't think batteries will ever hold their value though, and those things constitute at least $10k of an EV's sticker price.
Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.
If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.
But _why_ would the battery depreciate so much? My 4 year old EV can drive the same distance as it could when it was new. The data we have on EVs just doesn’t support the idea that their range drops a cliff at some point. And if they do, you’re mostly able to have it fixed by swapping the faulty cell module. Which more and more places are able to do. And even when it reaches the end of life, it’s still good for grid applications.
So the way I see it, the EV resale value is really due to two factors. One being that, yes, the typical EV buyer is able to buy new. And the other being knee jerk reaction to used EVs that’s mostly emotion-based.
I expect the resale value become better in some years. And I fully expect end of life EVs costing more than end of life ICE cars, because the battery will definitely be more valuable than a scrap pile.
The EV car market is rapidly evolving which tends to make people skittish about purchases and tend to the latest innovations. I decided to lease my first EV because I figured it would be outdated pretty quickly.
I was wrong. In reality the main innovation driver is the battery. The car is great and EVs are much less maintenance. I think used sales would be better if there were better aftermarket options for batteries.
This really doesn't make sense. Cars have intrinsic value - they can take you from point A to point B. If that's not why people buy them then they're a luxury good, like a Prada bag, so it's kind of silly to talk about resale value.
It's more likely EVs have poor resale value because the batter is the car, from a value perspective. Once the car reaches a certain age, if the battery needs to be replaced the car is essentially worthless. This is also true of ICE cars, but not to the same extent.
Its probably more to do with demographics for EVs. Currently EVs and infrastructure around it cover mostly higher income brackets that do not want to bother too much with used cars, so the market around used cars is fairly small compared to ICE that cover both high and and lower end incomes. If you are in a bottom 50% and need a family car EV is still a significant financial risk. Once EVs cover lower income brackets we will see a much healthier used car market.
Also, tax incentives on new EVs push the used market lower, creating a false sense of depreciation.
I expect the market to reconcile the difference now that EVs subsidizes are ending.
Another possible alternative is that the consumer has to be educated that buying used EVs is not like buying a used cellphone, and that EV batteries do last 10+ years.
They dont seem to actually last 10 years though. Sure, in an old Prius you only care about the battery not being completely shorted out, and the price of battery degradation is slightly worse fuel economy.
However, every time I look at renting a Tesla on Turo, each and every example has reviews with stories about not making 100 miles to the next stop on their trip. These are cars that are only 3-4 years old, not 10.
I think it's also in large part due to the demographics of ev buyers today. Still a lot of wealthy early tech adopters who specifically want the newest thing.
Not yet driven by utility value ( not that cars ever really are, lower end but ICE vehicles are much closer to that)
This isn't car specific, it's new technology specific.
Smartphones aren't getting cheaper and generally aren't getting better for the last 3-5 years. In fact, I hated replacing my 4-year-old perfectly functioning smartphone just because its battery degraded and the charging socket wore out.
The replacement was about 15% more expensive, inflation-adjusted, BTW.
If that were true than the market would value used goods as essentially free, so there wouldn't be a reason to buy anything new. The reason there is not a huge used market for technology is because they are no longer supported or are deprecated on purpose by the producer.
Old cell phones and computers are fine from a performance and features point of view. The lack of support, repairability, and durability affect the resale value more than anything.
Tires, summer and winter, are also very expensive. ICE weighs a lot less and generally have much cheaper tires.
> Instead of threatening to derail the EV transition
Looks like the wish is your thought’s father.
Currently the transition of EVs is a transition of cars from long lasting, repairable items into throwaway e-waste (like TVs, computers and smartphones).
I buy used all the time. It is way cheaper and new things are usually not much better (sometimes new things are worse).
For example a lot of new TVs are worse than old TVs, because new TVs have ads in their UIs, and increasingly new TVs don't even come with remotes anymore.
I'm pretty sure it's a mixture between this and the fact that EVS don't really break down. You have the same amount of them for sale a few years later. Versus gas cars. You have half of them around being parted out. So they do go up in value oddly.
They've pretty much just saturated their own market. Everyone needs a car. Not everyone needs an EV. If you have a garage then yes it makes perfect sense to have an EV. But if you don't and you live in an apartment or you live in a shared house. It's not really going to work for you. People who have their own house don't want old cars. So they basically just have a bunch of older car sitting around that nobody really wants even though they technically do have better value. A $30,000 Tesla and a $30,000 BMW? You'd have to be biased to think that it makes logical sense for the BMW. Sure! It's 40. It's fun but the cost of maintenance. The reliability.... It's not really a family car in the same way. It appeals to more people, but it's not more logical. However, you don't need a garage to charge your BMW. I don't care how fast the car charges. I don't want to go to a charger. I've had my car for 4 years and I've only been to a supercharger twice.
But I fully understand why not everyone has them. Every time I pass by a mechanic shop an oil change place like gas station. I just think of how much wasted time that people use on their cars thinking that it's more convenient.
But but for them in fact it may actually be. Imagine sitting at a charger for 20 mins 2x a week if you drive a lot and use sentry.
Actually EVs break down a lot, more so than ICE or hybrid cars. It turns out that having fewer moving parts doesn't compensate for incompetent engineering and shoddy manufacturing.
I don't think this is true for smartphones anymore, new models bring only marginal improvements to the last ones, and buying a used model in almost new condition allows you to save around 50%.
I purchased an EV this year, my highest priority was range per dollar, and the vehicle I selected happened to be new because of current market conditions. (Equinox EV for under 25k otd after incentives)
Consequently, why are used sellers so out of touch, for cars or anything else? I love the idea of buying and selling used, but people ask too much relative to the new price.
1) A large segment of people make purchase decisions based on payment schedules rather than the total cost of driving or even residual value.
2) Today 2/3 of car loans are are 72 months, meaning that even for lower depreciation rate cars, private sellers are often under water, and may not have the resources to pay off the gap with current market value. [0]
3) Banks have responded with 1/5 new-vehicle loans being 84 months or longer, adding to the problem
4) For around the ~40 years I have been paying attention, private sellers almost always think they should get the dealer price and not the private party price.
There are other reasons, but we are in a situation where it would be amazing of we avoid another 2009 like crash in the market.
If they are out of touch, then the cars aren't selling, right? Because if they are selling for that price, then by definition you are out of touch and the sellers know what the market will bear.
You don't see what sells because it's no longer on the market.
A vehicle that sells in 1mo is on the market 30x longer, seen by 30x more people, etc, etc, than one that sells in 1d and only takes 1/30th as many of them on the market to fill up your FBMP feed.
Now, not a lot of cars are priced to sell in 1d, but also 30d is a comically low upper bound as well. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.
Sellers might be out of touch with your sensibilities but they are not out of touch with their own market. Used sellers ask that much because buyers are willing to pay that much.
It's difficult to decouple your knowledge of how much you paid for something. Even if you intellectually know the fair market value of something is now 0.1x what you paid for it, it can still feel like you're just losing all that money by accepting that price.
That would make leasing the better option because at the end of the lease the leaser has to take them card back....no worry about selling something on one wants to buy.
I think a lot of that is economies of scale. The parts needed are not cheap in small quantities, but we finally got to the point that they are popular enough that they are made en masse.
Yeah at the top end there is still a ton of progress, but on bottom end it just recently turned into commodity, to the point they are sold in more general stores.
Hopefully EVs are being purchased to replace existing ICE cars, in which case the falling price is a good thing since it makes them more available at lower price points. Replacing a car with one that is cheaper to run and produces less emissions is usually a good thing.
If people are buying (and storing, and fueling) EVs in addition to their collection of ICE cars, that's probably a separate issue about overconsumption.
My data point: old Kona Electric vs new Ioniq 6.
Acceleration is faster, but not twice as fast. It does charge 40-50% faster though, and that is life-changing.
Not twice the range but 360 mi vs 220 mi is a huge improvement.
More than twice as comfortable, and that’s switching from the top of the line to the base model. Mostly due to better climate controls and a huge amount of legroom.
Both have 5 star Euro NCAP scores. But now the lane keep assist now works at any speed and there are more warnings about cars and other obstacles, so there’s a safety improvement.
And it’s not twice the price: the MSRP was cheaper!
I keep saying that in a few years cars will not be that much expensive than a big refrigerator...
It is scary that if cars get this cheap what it will mean environmentally (they physically can't last that long) and socially (everybody will be able to afford cars, flooding communities who are not built for it)
Sub-Headline from this article: "Plummeting resale values are threatening to derail the world’s transition to electric transportation."
Alternative take: "EVs now easy to afford for the 80% of Americans who don't have $50-90k to spend on an EV!"
This year I bought a 2022 EV with 16k miles. A luxury brand. The sticker price when new was $79,000. I paid $35k. It was an off-lease vehicle so if anyone took a bath, it was the bank. I would never in a million years spend 80 grand on a car but now I have a great EV.
Battery life is not a huge concern. Any more than timing belts/chains, transmissions, etc. can be dauntingly costly repairs for cars with 150k miles or more.
I also have a gas car which I love (spouse drives the electric for a much greater commute) so I'm no EV absolutist. But this whole premise is stupid. EV adoption has had 2 main blockers: 1. only rich people had justification to buy them until recently, and 2. Charging space for people who don't have their own private garage.
Now #1 is no longer a factor. This is a GOOD thing.
Picked up a 10 year old Fiat 500e with 50k miles for $5k as my daughters first car. She and my wife love it. Way more power than the gas model, and a super fun drive.
Fun fact -- three years after the first 500e went on sale, they were going through auction off-lease at $4K (in the US, at least). Ouch! I remember this vividly because a coworker of mine's wife had purchased one brand new for over 30 grand.
My partner bought a used nissan first gen Nissan leaf with 70% battery health for 5k a couple of years ago.
So far it has saved her approx 2k on petrol costs alone.
Then there is maintenance costs....No major issues. Less than 200 per year so far if you exclude the fresh set of tyres we put on it when she bought it.
99% of our journeys can be done in it. It's rare for either of us to need more than 80mi in a day.
It can get a full charge off a standard british plug socket over night too, so we dont have a fast charger installed or anything. Most days we only do 10mi, so it goes for an overnight charge once a week and thats fine.
The result? We have to remind ourselves to take the petrol car out for a spin every 2 weeks just to keep it healthy.
My family bought a used EV this year, car #2 is a 15 year old F-150. It’s the best possible situation I could conceive of. My wife commutes 25+ miles in the EV, I work from home, and we take the truck when going camping or pulling a trailer or whatever.
lol, I was looking at fun cars for my most recent purchase, and Audi E-Trons are available for 50% off if you buy them just a year old. Apparently they stabilize in price after that, but GOODNESS GRACIOUS that's a big dropoff in a single year. It was crazy to see Audi's newest top-of-the-line offering (not their RS offering, to be clear) for the same price as an entry-level BMW M.
FUD about battery life and having to spend over $10k to replace one was a large factor in EV depreciation. Some people assumed car battery life was like that of a cell phone or a laptop, perhaps 3 years. There is increasing evidence that EV batteries with good battery management systems will last 15+ years (see https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/). Once the general population understands an EV will outlast a gas car and needs less maintenance, resale value should improve.
Up to very recently only Tesla had good battery management. Other manufacturers joked around with things like no active battery thermal management, Nissan Leaf finally got one this year lol.
On the other side, I am not going to buy a new EV if it depreciates too quickly. Part of the 'new ride' buyer's consideration is trade-in value when it's time for another one three years down the line.
Yes. Polestar 2 owner here. According to KBB it has held almost all of the value since I bought it. Used. Before that it lost over half from the new MSRP. I bought it for $5K under KBB.
Will need tires but otherwise no maintenance... and no continuing depreciation because it still provides all the goodness it provided when new.
But I hear a lot of myths about EVs and used EVs that seem hard to shake from the mainstream groupthink. One person tried to argue with me that batteries are only good for 100K, and then you're in for a $20K repair. Others worry if you hit traffic, the battery will quickly drain to 0%.
> For Tesla owners in the U.S., their 2023 Model Ys are worth 42% less than what they paid two years ago
I want to suggest that there are recent reasons why Tesla, as a brand, has specifically gotten a bit less popular that are unrelated to the entire EV category. (It's Elon. He's the reason.)
That said, to the extent the result holds true for the entire category, I'd suspect it's because EVs are still fairly immature. It's like "resale value of desktop PCs falling rapidly" back in the 90s, when the field was advancing quickly enough that buying used was genuinely a bad idea.
There are other factors, too. As an owner of a 2023 Model 3, I am acutely aware of them. It's not just image, but prices. The 2023 Model 3 & Y were expensive, and Tesla started slashing the prices in 2024. This absolutely destroyed the resale value for people who paid near the high point.
I suspect people don't really notice this as much because if you are familiar with regular manufacturers you are used to the price (well, the MSRP at least) staying rock steady for a year at a time. Tesla moves their prices around quite a lot by comparison, which can be very detrimental to the used market when it drops quickly.
Yeah, this article says the 2023 price of a new Model Y was $48k, and then in 2024 it was worth only $33k used.
But in 2024 I bought a brand new Model Y for about $33k, after factoring in all the incentives/rebates. So if anything that $33k used price sounds high.
Reality is, prices came down a lot, and also depending on how incentives/rebates are factored in, the "sale price" might be fiction.
Same with other brands too. Back then you saw some companies like Hyundai claiming their EVs were really worth like $60k MSRP, and then turning around and leasing them for $300/month with $0 down. In some states people were leasing brand new EVs for $100/month with $0 down, or less.
Now with the federal rebate gone and states removing at least some of their incentives, the numbers might start to look a little more normal.
This got me curious about tesla prices over time. Turns out someone has a nice spreadsheet of this. I don't know about the accuracy, but it's a cool spreadsheet.
> This absolutely destroyed the resale value for people who paid near the high point
This is definitely true, but it's funny how much hand-wringing is being done about those people, who already bought EVs and really don't need to replace them like 3-4 years into ownership (they might want to for vanity, but if so they're either rich or love wasting money).
"Destroyed resale value" is just another word for "provided amazing prices to a great used market." These "destroyed value" cars are great almost-new cars available at prices competitive with gas cars. In California with horrific electric rates, if I charge my used EV at the "non-peak" time it's like buying gas for my old car at 2.50/gal. In places with much better rates it's more like $1 a gallon. And these are cars that are now available for the same price as a comparable gas car. I'd say this is a huge win for everyone.
The other reason is that Hertz was dumping most of their large inventory of Teslas on the used market. No one wanted those cars as rentals and they cost too much to maintain.
A friend of mine sold their Model S recently because a)Elon and b)their neighborhood where Elon is not popular. They got a Lexus hybrid instead. They were bummed out because they loved the car. They don't tickle me at all - I like his Lexus better - but hey to each is own.
That’s a really L take on their part. Like, I’d probably respect them less if I knew them if they caved like that, and would tell them so to their face.
Not in my neighborhood. I’ve seen strong sales of the new models and tons more used Teslas on the road. The competitive used prices have helped expand their audience tremendously.
has TSLAQ ever been right? Maybe short term but never long term.
> has TSLAQ ever been right? Maybe short term but never long term.
Any rational view of TSLA's business and future prospects suggests that TSLAQ is right, but that the timeline for proving it out may be extended (and there's a saying about that, right? Something about the market staying irrational longer than you can remain solvent). TSLA is a meme stock at this point. I wish it were not part of the S&P500, because I hate to be exposed to that volatility.
But I'm often wrong, so maybe this is yet another example.
It doesn't present any such data. Only this one vague quotation from the manager of Polish vehicle history report website autodna.pl:
"Premium brands consistently retain higher resale value than mass-market brands, for both ICE vehicles and EVs. No one knows what entirely new Chinese marques will cost in the secondary market – for instance, what a 5-year-old Omoda will fetch"
Everything concrete in the article is about how Teslas, specifically, have precipitously declined in value, except for one paragraph about how nobody wanted to buy used vehicles from BluSmart (an Indian company that "collapsed in April amid financial fraud allegations").
Yeah, I’d like to see F150 Lightnings compared with F150s. Model Y vs F150 is such a weird comparison to choose.
Don’t forget to also deduct tax incentives from the original retail price. It’s not surprising that the used market would require that the used price be below the net original price.
Nobody cares about Elon. It's like saying Coca Cola's share price is being determined by children at american universities. It's just delusional.
The reason they are getting killed, is because their products are now worse than the competition. They had a huge lead on everyone for years, then everyone caught up. Now you can get a car with the same range, with a HUD, with massaging chairs, with swivelling 360 seats... or you can get the same tesla car they've been making for 10 years.
While I don’t disagree with your point on lineup and quality (and they’ve cancelled a new car model to work on humanoid robotics‽), I think you’re underestimating the Elon effect.
Basically everyone I am close with is in the demographic Tesla targeted pre-rightening-of-Elon. All of them would’ve considered a Tesla at that point in time.
Now, none would. And of those with Teslas - very satisfied with their cars - none are replacing them with Teslas.
I just bought an Honda Pologue and didn’t even test drive a Model Y or X. We recently got solar installed in our house (also the right demographic for that…) and didn’t even look at quotes for Tesla systems.
Sure, I live in a left wing bubble, but it’s that same bubble that was (enthusiastically) Tesla’s prime demographic ten years ago.
I completely support voting with your wallet. Where the anti-Tesla people lost me was when they decided that anybody who owned a Tesla was nazi/fascist/whatever by extension, and it would be totally okay to abuse them or their car.
Fortunately that has subsided a bit, I haven't heard as much chatter about it in the last few months. And anecdotally, there are still quite a lot of "just got my new Tesla" threads on the Model 3 subreddit -- I think sales totals have still been a disappointment, but they haven't tanked.
The article is making a huge mistake though, comparing apples to oranges.
Resale value of EVs doesn't depend on mileage nowhere near as much as ICE cars. EVs are just much simpler machines and electric motors can do a million miles with no maintenance, and the only maintenance you have is the oil in the differential, which is often simpler because it is single-speed. Compare that to thousand different mechanical parts that all wear out in a ICE engine. Which is why ICE cars resale value is determined by the odometer.
What drives EV resale value is the health of the battery, which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time.
And the anecdotal evidence of a commercial fleet going bankrupt and not getting much for their EVs... Well yeah, would you buy from such a source? I wouldn't. They usually don't follow longevity advice for battery charging, because they have to optimize for time-in-use.
As an anecdote, I bought all my ICE cars second hand, and would usually sell them 3-4 years later just before major maintenance was needed. My EV is now 8 years old, runs like the day I got it and had 1 repair, when the motor that drives the window up and down broke and battery capacity is still the same, or if it changed it's such a small change I didn't notice. I don't expect to sell any time soon, if ever. I expect I will just do a battery swap in 5-10 years.
> What drives EV resale value is the health of the battery, which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time.
The resale value drops much faster than the battery health. Hyundai has been tracking the degregation rates of the batteries in their Ioniq 5 vehicles and they've been holding up surprisingly well. Most of them have >90% battery capacity at over 100k miles. Their data was sparse for 250k miles, but half of them were still over 90% capacity.
In that case, I’ll to cash in on this for my next car! I figured the degradation problem was much worse. My frame of reference is lithium laptop/phone batteries which definitely aren’t doing so hot 5 years in.
The article is comparing 2 scenarios that have other explanations: a fire sale of a large fleet and Tesla which has an image problem because of its leadership.
I’m not saying the article is wrong I’d just like to see broader representation (Chevy bolt, lucid air, etc).
Worse than that, the main vehicle it compares everything to is the Model Y. There may have been one or two things related to Tesla this year, and not other EVs, that might have hurt resale values for some reason...
My battery is starting to get to unacceptable degradation; I have a 7 year old EV and my top battery percentage is 78% of the purchase.
I inquired about a battery swap and it's around $10->12k. I'm seriously considering it in the next couple of years as I see that as buying another 9->10 years of life for my car.
I might grab a used EV instead, though, as the one thing my car lacks is a heat pump, which kinda sucks in the winter.
Your warranty should cover the battery swap. I know my Chevy Volt's warranty is 150,000 miles or 10 years. It may only be 100,000. The length of the warranty depends on whether you live in a CARB state.
If a dealer charges you between $10K to $12K for a swap out, that's the "fuck you for not buying a car that makes the dealership more money" price. Several third-party vendors refurbish and sell EV batteries for much less.
I know what you mean by not having a heat pump sucking. The Volt has resistive heating for wintertime, and it definitely drains the battery. I dress warm and use the seat heaters when I'm driving by myself.
Lithium-ion batteries have fallen in price at least 40% since you bought your car in 2018 (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-ba...). Assuming there's some correlation between that decline and the replacement price you're facing, which is unfortunately not a given, it would be worth it to hold out as long as you can.
We can only dream of a day when battery packs are a standardized commodity, and as easy to change as motor oil. But modern industry is far too extractive.
In the future, it might be worth it to have the interior of an EV refurbished and updated. What I'm really nervous about is the infotainment system, eventually it is out of date but unless you are maybe driving a Tesla, only the original model will work in your car! It would be nice if some of the electronics could be easily upgraded after 10 years. That isn't even counting failure (mine failed and had to be replaced in the first six months, but hopefully that was a product defect that usually hits quickly rather than slowly over time).
If solid state batteries actually come out, they probably won't be retrofitted into existing EVs. That's a bummer, but I guess by the time I'm ready to change cars self driving will be a real thing (the Waymo kind, not the Tesla kind).
Suspension and tires are the biggest items for EVs. The twist is cheap owner can neglect those and keep driving past service window with ripped bushings and clapped out tires until hitting that magic 3 year goal, then you buy used EV in need of 4 of everything.
You can see the tires, at least, so that will just come off the value. And if you turn in a lease at three years with clapped out tires they'll make you pay for new ones.
Tires, brakes, and windshield washer fluid are the only regularly replaceable parts on an EV. My last ICE car, also that age, required oil, tires, coolant flush (100k miles), transmission (100k miles), water pump, thermostat, timing belt, and tensioners. And lots and lots of filters.
So, either you were really lucky with ICE or extremely unlucky with EVs.
Belts, brakes, coolant system hoses, spark plugs, spark coils, various turbine valves if you have turbine, eventually turbine itself, gearbox fluid, oil + filters, fuel filters - shitload of things that need regular maintenance on ICE vs EV
"which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time" would seem similar to "mileage" since both increase in general the passage of time and driving. But yes, driving two cars equal amount of time presumably the ICE will wear down far more than the equivalent EV so the title is quite misleading to those looking at a glance.
I was hoping you would have said that the issue is that article is comparing a $50k SUV to a $30k work truck, and then turning the price drop into percentage drop.
I'd like to see them compare two similarly priced SUVs.
I am sure the ICE vehicle will still depreciate slower, but perhaps not as drastically different.
The buyers of these two vehicles used in the example are very different.
In a situation when we're being told to completely give up on apples (ICE cars) and switch entirely to oranges (EVs), I am afraid we'd have to make exactly the comparison you find so distasteful for some strange reason. They are both vehicles, sorry, fruits, after all.
I think the phrasing was imprecise and they were referring to the transmission and differential. Most EVs use a single-speed gear reduction system - one gear mesh from motor shaft to a compound gear, another mesh from that gear to the ring gear of the differential. In contrast with ICE drivetrains, there is no clutch or torque converter (the electric motor can operate from a standstill), no reverse gearing (the electric motor can operate both CW and CCW), and no synchronizers and dog-clutches (as in manual transmissions), no hydraulic logic and clutches of automatic transmissions, nor the hydraulically operated sheaves found in CVTs. We've been hobbing gears to operate at those power levels for roughly a century.
I think Porsche has done a 2-speed EV transmission and Lucid moved the differential inside the motor and has two-reduction gear sets on either side, but those are both unusual designs.
My EV is 3 years old, but I have no hope of being able to swap the battery every, at least not in any reasonable way. That said, it'll be fine for my use case for at least 15 years, so whatever :)
> As an anecdote, I bought all my ICE cars second hand, and would usually sell them 3-4 years later just before major maintenance was needed. My EV is now 8 years old
I mean, that sounds quite poor on both counts TBQH. I bought a used 2002 Honda Accord in 2004 and drove it until last year with little more than regular oil changes. I expect to get the same kind of life out of the Mazda 3 I replaced it with. Anything less than 10 years out of a car sounds like something went terribly wrong to me.
Yeah I expect to drive my Lightning for at least 10 years. Probably a lot longer since it's a pretty simple body-on-frame truck. I'm secretly hoping that since the battery just hangs between the frame rails, someone will come along in a few years and offer upgrades.
Say the govt wanted everyone to buy more Rubik's Cubes (cause they help you become smarter).
Their plan to do this is not to pay the Rubik's company to make them cheaper, but instead to give everyone $5 spendable on Rubik's Cubes only. The cost of a cube prior to this was $8.
The day that decide that, the Rubik's company ups the price of a Cube to account for this incoming onslaught of buyers and get more profit. They can safely up the price without losing sales because A) everyone wants to get smart and B) The overall cost of a cube is still cheaper than before. You can get a $10 cube for $5, which is less than $8.
More cubes are sold than ever before.
Now the market is flooded with cubes.
Now the govt says "Great! Everyone has cubes. Let the intelligence revolution commence!" So they remove the subsidy.
$10 Cubes are now QUITE expensive, so the Rubik's company reduces the price back to the $8 it was before. But wait a second, now the market is flooded and people are used to paying effectively $5 for a cube.
I think you're right that contributed, but at least the federal EV subsidy was trying to mitigate that effect by also subsidizing used EV purchases. I just bought a used PHEV and got a subsidy right before the cutoff. So the effect might get worse now that the program has ended, though I suppose new EV prices should come down too.
Yeah interestingly, Hyundai recently cut prices on their EVs in anticipation of this. To me, it was confirmation that they had inflated prices in recent years.
Solving them is a question of knowing the algorithm and applying it. It makes you better at pattern matching.
> everyone wants to get smart
In most social situations people want to have fun. They'll intentionally consume substances which reduce their "smarts" in an effort to achieve this more easily. They will lie to your face about this because _appearing_ smart is all they actually care about.
> Now the market is flooded with cubes.
That are lower quality than what was being made prior to the subsidy.
> This is what's happened with EVs.
Inflation also halved the value of money. The story seems simple but it's obviously more complex than a simple analysis would allow for.
The battery uncertainty is real, but I think the bigger issue is information asymmetry.
Looking at actual market data, the spread on used EVs is wild - a 2022 Tesla Model S ranges from $57 to $112k depending on trim/condition (https://cardog.app/tools/valuation/tesla/model_s/2022). That's a $60k spread on the same year vehicle. Compare that to ICE vehicles where the range is typically much tighter.
When buyers can't confidently price an asset, they discount heavily. The depreciation problem might actually be a data problem - we just don't have the standardized battery health reporting and historical comps that exist for ICE vehicles yet.
Obviously we don't have ICE levels of data, but as far as available data that we do have, that battery uncertainty is probably unwarranted. Battery life seems to be dropping much slowly than early estimates predicted (and this is including vehicles with >100,000 miles, and >10 years of driving history). Risk acceptance is not a thing that has one right answer, so I won't try and say that people are wrong for how they are assessing this risk, but I know that I personally had zero compunctions at all when I recently bought a used EV, and just appreciated the price I was getting.
Now is probably the golden age for buying used EVs, because eventually this notion that the batteries are untrustworthy is going to go away (you can argue about whether this will occur because the technology improves vs. people will better realize where it already is, but it will happen).
Not even just the battery (although that probably is the biggest one), but maintenance in general.
If I buy a 5 year old Corolla with 50k miles on the clock, I have a pretty good idea of what maintenance is going to like for the next decade, and I know a mechanic who can do the work.
I have no idea at all what will happen with a comparable Tesla over 10 years.
Everyone likes to focus on the battery, but in my experience with Ford, Honda and Nissan, there's more frequent expensive surprises in gas engine sedans.
Replacing the passenger occupant detection sensor for the airbag system in my 2007 Ford Fusion cost $2K. After a series of other issues with things like the transmission and fuel injector, I ultimately traded it in for $500.
I got a used Nissan Leaf with low mileage for $18K a few years ago and haven't taken it in for anything yet. Battery health is still at 90%, and I could get that replaced for around $6K if I needed to.
I feel a palpable sense of relief that the surprise maintenance bills have stopped.
This is including the Model S Long Range (decent performance, more focused on efficiency) with the Model S Plaid (fastest accelerating street-legal car in the world?). It's really not realistic. The median is $68k, which is probably much closer to the typical price you'd pay.
One nitpick on the article is comparing a passenger sedan or passenger SUV to a light truck like the F150 when you're discussing depreciation is a bad comparison. Light trucks hold their value better generally for a variety of reasons including because the parts that get used are heavier and are more designed to be maintained with lubrication schedules and such. SUVs are not light trucks and have more in common with a minivan or a sedan. A better comparison would be to compare the depreciation of say a Tesla SUV to like a Ford Escape.
"Light truck" is slightly more formal way of saying "pickup truck." And is meant to differentiate the class from commercial trucks like moving vans, dump trucks, and semis.
Smaller pickups like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10 are in the "compact pickup" class. (And unfortunately these are not sold in the US anymore. For those with genuine need, we either have to resurrect some old heap headed for the scrapyard or import them on the gray market from Asian countries.)
You're confusing SUVs with Crossovers. Most sales are crossovers and they are a taller sedan or minivan but SUVs like the land cruiser, 4runner, escalade, or armada are body on frame and built like a truck including being able to tow several tons.
That's not true from a mechanical perspective. Most SUVs use the same frame and parts as trucks by the same manufacturer (which is why they handle so poorly compared to sedans - it isn't just center of gravity)
If you define SUV as body-on-frame, sure. But most people think of crossovers as SUVs, and most are unibody. It's a big umbrella and how it's made isn't how mainstream thinks about buying.
How much is due to the tax credits, at least in the US? Last time I looked, a big chunk of the expected first year depreciation on my F150 Lightning could be explained by the credit. The expected depreciation in the years following tracked very similarly to ICE F150s.
The EV market is just weird, anyway. Manufacturers have to price to what the market will bear, which may have little resemblance to MSRP. So a good evaluation of deprecation has to figure out how to account for that. My Lightning had an MSRP of 72K but I got it for 51K, which was a very normal price that anyone could get. If I evaluate resale based on the MSRP, it looks pretty bad. If I use my out-the-door cost for comparison, it does not look bad at all (compared to any other new car purchase, of course, which are never going to be the most cost-effective choice for an individual).
Yes, you can safely ignore any article about the U.S. EV depreciation where it doesn't mention subsidies, etc.. I recently purchased a 2025 Nissan Leaf and got 42% off the MSRP. So the first 42% depreciation doesn't have an effect for me, the buyer.
Anyone who has comparison shopped new and used Teslas over the last few years can tell you that the price of <1 year old, low mileage Teslas runs very close to the new price minus $7500.
Exactly what I came here to post. I bet if you subtracted $7,500 from the “new” price then the numbers would be a lot more similar.
In any case, individual buyers shouldn’t worry about it too much. The most financially prudent decision is to keep the car for a long time anyway. My 10 year old Tesla still drives just fine. Its value at the two-year mark wasn’t relevant.
Readit News
Instead of threatening to derail the EV transition, lack of resale value might be evidence of the EV transition, particularly when coupled with quickly growing overall sales of EVs globally.
But, like the article says, new EVs are selling for about twice as much as a 2-year-old used vehicle of the same make and model. That's a very very far cry from "same or lower price".
EV are progressing fast so they lose value quick, like a laptop of the late 90s. Not quite as bad, but in those times, your computer was worth next to nothing in less than a year.
ICE are stagnant. They retain their value because they're not improving at all.
The last part of OP's statement is the key. In a field that's rapidly advancing technologically, used prices are depressed because the new product is that much better than the used product.
Think back to the early smartphone days - every year phones multiplied in performance, in screen resolution, etc. In that environment a used item is less attractive because you feel like you're missing out on features/capability. This keeps used prices down. Nowadays used smartphones are more competitive because the rate of advancement (that buyers care about at least) has slowed.
For example there's another post later in this thread that points out that the Nissan Leaf has been the same price forever - except the current-gen Leaf has literally double the range of the last one. Effects like this depress used prices.
Dead Comment
There's a saying that a new car loses 50% when you leave the lot. It's presumably still true for EVs.
This may also be why Teslas are holding their value better than any other EV. Teslas are usually bought by U.S. consumers, who are forbidden from buying any of the cheaper global EVs by import restrictions. For fleets that buy models that are sold globally, they compete in the global market and are subject to global price declines.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs5h6R2jLUQ
[2] https://insideevs.com/reviews/769113/byd-seagull-good-video-...
[3] https://motorillustrated.com/toyota-launches-15000-bz3x-its-...
That doesn’t really happen as dramatically with gasoline cars. The powertrain and driving experience of a 5 year old gas car isn’t noticeably different than a current one.
If you buy a 5 year old EV you might get one that charges slow, doesn’t have a heat pump, has worse battery chemistry, battery health management, and the list goes on.
Heck, the Leaf is a perfect example because you’re stuck with chademo fast charging charging instead of CCS or NACS. I wouldn’t touch one with a 9 foot pole unless I planned to exclusively charge at home.
Also, don’t take my comment to mean that I think used EVs are a bad choice, many of them can work very well for many years and use cases as long as you are properly informed.
Car prices are tough too because how much subsidies, tariffs etc play into it.
But theoretically if you used a US made car you could limit some of that bias.
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I partly don't own an EV because even used they still cost a lot upfront and I'd rather maintain the personal incentive to take mass transit or ride my bike, but when I do eventually go electric, it'll almost certainly be preowned, assuming I can get a reasonable discount off of new.
Green tech is great if you're upper-middle class with a nice big detached home, plenty of space to install solar, a heat pump, and EV charger. But a large percentage of people just don't have a 'compatible home' even if they had the cash available to invest in such tech.
That current EVs just depreciate faster than ICE cars (in the US).
The article's chart is about used ICE vs EV prices in the US...
New EVs are definitely not 2x as good as a few years ago at half the price. Not sure if you've seen the price of new EVs in the US without subsidies.
ICE cars don't have a ~20% range depreciation after 5 years. EVs do. One would expect them to depreciate faster, until there's a solution for that.
That's not really a problem if they depreciate faster if the total operation cost is lower - which it almost certainly is for the Chinese EVs (relevant to most of the world).
* these are rental cars, which are used much more intensely than normal used cars
* a big chunk of the (US) stats are Hertz dumping Teslas, specifically. It had to dump 30,000 of them (which is a huge amount of Teslas to just flood the market with all at once); and Tesla specifically has people trying to sell their cars due to the brand of their CEO.
Mine is 2 years old, battery still reads 99% health and I regularly exceed the EPA range estimate. I've seen ones with hundreds of thousands of (fast charging!) miles that still only have 10% degradation.
The weird gaps of supply in model years because of the pandemic and prices are just nuts. The value of my 2016 SUV has gone up $4000 since last year. EVs are super volatile — my brother has netted profit from trading them. My girlfriend sold her 14 month old Subaru for $1000 under her cost - the pretax value appreciated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
Yeah, tech for this stuff is moving super fast. It's hard to know what will endure, what will be upgradeable, and what will be cast aside.
I recently bought a low mileage used EV for relatively cheap. I'm hoping I'll be able to drive the battery into the ground. Then I'm betting that, in 6-8(10?)yrs when I need a new one, there will be better battery chemistries so I can extend the car's life even further.
EVs inherently depreciate less; they're simpler, few moving parts. The motor is sealed. Batteries are lasting longer than expected.
So 'depreciate' in the title is misleading. It may be technically true in that they lose resale value, but they are definitely not less road-worthy than a similarly aged combustion vehicle.
I would absolutely buy a second hand Tesla, they're great value. Probably other EVs too.
Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.
If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.
So the way I see it, the EV resale value is really due to two factors. One being that, yes, the typical EV buyer is able to buy new. And the other being knee jerk reaction to used EVs that’s mostly emotion-based.
I expect the resale value become better in some years. And I fully expect end of life EVs costing more than end of life ICE cars, because the battery will definitely be more valuable than a scrap pile.
I was wrong. In reality the main innovation driver is the battery. The car is great and EVs are much less maintenance. I think used sales would be better if there were better aftermarket options for batteries.
It's more likely EVs have poor resale value because the batter is the car, from a value perspective. Once the car reaches a certain age, if the battery needs to be replaced the car is essentially worthless. This is also true of ICE cars, but not to the same extent.
I expect the market to reconcile the difference now that EVs subsidizes are ending.
Another possible alternative is that the consumer has to be educated that buying used EVs is not like buying a used cellphone, and that EV batteries do last 10+ years.
However, every time I look at renting a Tesla on Turo, each and every example has reviews with stories about not making 100 miles to the next stop on their trip. These are cars that are only 3-4 years old, not 10.
This isn't car specific, it's new technology specific.
Smartphones aren't getting cheaper and generally aren't getting better for the last 3-5 years. In fact, I hated replacing my 4-year-old perfectly functioning smartphone just because its battery degraded and the charging socket wore out.
The replacement was about 15% more expensive, inflation-adjusted, BTW.
Tires, summer and winter, are also very expensive. ICE weighs a lot less and generally have much cheaper tires.
There are close to zero shops that will work on the powertrain of an EV. The only exceptions are enthusiasts like Rich Rebuilds, etc.
Looks like the wish is your thought’s father.
Currently the transition of EVs is a transition of cars from long lasting, repairable items into throwaway e-waste (like TVs, computers and smartphones).
And somehow this is more eco-friendly of course.
For example a lot of new TVs are worse than old TVs, because new TVs have ads in their UIs, and increasingly new TVs don't even come with remotes anymore.
They've pretty much just saturated their own market. Everyone needs a car. Not everyone needs an EV. If you have a garage then yes it makes perfect sense to have an EV. But if you don't and you live in an apartment or you live in a shared house. It's not really going to work for you. People who have their own house don't want old cars. So they basically just have a bunch of older car sitting around that nobody really wants even though they technically do have better value. A $30,000 Tesla and a $30,000 BMW? You'd have to be biased to think that it makes logical sense for the BMW. Sure! It's 40. It's fun but the cost of maintenance. The reliability.... It's not really a family car in the same way. It appeals to more people, but it's not more logical. However, you don't need a garage to charge your BMW. I don't care how fast the car charges. I don't want to go to a charger. I've had my car for 4 years and I've only been to a supercharger twice.
But I fully understand why not everyone has them. Every time I pass by a mechanic shop an oil change place like gas station. I just think of how much wasted time that people use on their cars thinking that it's more convenient.
But but for them in fact it may actually be. Imagine sitting at a charger for 20 mins 2x a week if you drive a lot and use sentry.
https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2025-us-vehi...
Anecdote:
I purchased an EV this year, my highest priority was range per dollar, and the vehicle I selected happened to be new because of current market conditions. (Equinox EV for under 25k otd after incentives)
1) A large segment of people make purchase decisions based on payment schedules rather than the total cost of driving or even residual value.
2) Today 2/3 of car loans are are 72 months, meaning that even for lower depreciation rate cars, private sellers are often under water, and may not have the resources to pay off the gap with current market value. [0]
3) Banks have responded with 1/5 new-vehicle loans being 84 months or longer, adding to the problem
4) For around the ~40 years I have been paying attention, private sellers almost always think they should get the dealer price and not the private party price.
There are other reasons, but we are in a situation where it would be amazing of we avoid another 2009 like crash in the market.
[0] https://www.edmunds.com/industry/press/underwater-and-sinkin...
Math.
You don't see what sells because it's no longer on the market.
A vehicle that sells in 1mo is on the market 30x longer, seen by 30x more people, etc, etc, than one that sells in 1d and only takes 1/30th as many of them on the market to fill up your FBMP feed.
Now, not a lot of cars are priced to sell in 1d, but also 30d is a comically low upper bound as well. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.
3D printers!
Yeah at the top end there is still a ton of progress, but on bottom end it just recently turned into commodity, to the point they are sold in more general stores.
Deleted Comment
People buying new EVs might be bad for environment though.
If people are buying (and storing, and fueling) EVs in addition to their collection of ICE cars, that's probably a separate issue about overconsumption.
Does it go twice as fast? Does it have twice the range? Is it twice as comfortable? Is it twice as safe?
That's the premise. Is that the actual reality?
Solar panels do degrade, but its not anywhere near "rapid". Go look at the lengths of warranties on panels these days
It is scary that if cars get this cheap what it will mean environmentally (they physically can't last that long) and socially (everybody will be able to afford cars, flooding communities who are not built for it)
Deleted Comment
Alternative take: "EVs now easy to afford for the 80% of Americans who don't have $50-90k to spend on an EV!"
This year I bought a 2022 EV with 16k miles. A luxury brand. The sticker price when new was $79,000. I paid $35k. It was an off-lease vehicle so if anyone took a bath, it was the bank. I would never in a million years spend 80 grand on a car but now I have a great EV.
Battery life is not a huge concern. Any more than timing belts/chains, transmissions, etc. can be dauntingly costly repairs for cars with 150k miles or more.
I also have a gas car which I love (spouse drives the electric for a much greater commute) so I'm no EV absolutist. But this whole premise is stupid. EV adoption has had 2 main blockers: 1. only rich people had justification to buy them until recently, and 2. Charging space for people who don't have their own private garage.
Now #1 is no longer a factor. This is a GOOD thing.
Thank you "Plummeting Resale Values"!
So far it has saved her approx 2k on petrol costs alone.
Then there is maintenance costs....No major issues. Less than 200 per year so far if you exclude the fresh set of tyres we put on it when she bought it.
99% of our journeys can be done in it. It's rare for either of us to need more than 80mi in a day.
It can get a full charge off a standard british plug socket over night too, so we dont have a fast charger installed or anything. Most days we only do 10mi, so it goes for an overnight charge once a week and thats fine.
The result? We have to remind ourselves to take the petrol car out for a spin every 2 weeks just to keep it healthy.
A car you buy new and sell after a short amount of time or not many miles driven is going to cost you.
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There's about a dozen such offers on that one site that I checked and that's just Teslas.
Will need tires but otherwise no maintenance... and no continuing depreciation because it still provides all the goodness it provided when new.
But I hear a lot of myths about EVs and used EVs that seem hard to shake from the mainstream groupthink. One person tried to argue with me that batteries are only good for 100K, and then you're in for a $20K repair. Others worry if you hit traffic, the battery will quickly drain to 0%.
Dead Comment
I want to suggest that there are recent reasons why Tesla, as a brand, has specifically gotten a bit less popular that are unrelated to the entire EV category. (It's Elon. He's the reason.)
That said, to the extent the result holds true for the entire category, I'd suspect it's because EVs are still fairly immature. It's like "resale value of desktop PCs falling rapidly" back in the 90s, when the field was advancing quickly enough that buying used was genuinely a bad idea.
I suspect people don't really notice this as much because if you are familiar with regular manufacturers you are used to the price (well, the MSRP at least) staying rock steady for a year at a time. Tesla moves their prices around quite a lot by comparison, which can be very detrimental to the used market when it drops quickly.
But in 2024 I bought a brand new Model Y for about $33k, after factoring in all the incentives/rebates. So if anything that $33k used price sounds high.
Reality is, prices came down a lot, and also depending on how incentives/rebates are factored in, the "sale price" might be fiction.
Same with other brands too. Back then you saw some companies like Hyundai claiming their EVs were really worth like $60k MSRP, and then turning around and leasing them for $300/month with $0 down. In some states people were leasing brand new EVs for $100/month with $0 down, or less.
Now with the federal rebate gone and states removing at least some of their incentives, the numbers might start to look a little more normal.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPVarLD...
This is definitely true, but it's funny how much hand-wringing is being done about those people, who already bought EVs and really don't need to replace them like 3-4 years into ownership (they might want to for vanity, but if so they're either rich or love wasting money).
"Destroyed resale value" is just another word for "provided amazing prices to a great used market." These "destroyed value" cars are great almost-new cars available at prices competitive with gas cars. In California with horrific electric rates, if I charge my used EV at the "non-peak" time it's like buying gas for my old car at 2.50/gal. In places with much better rates it's more like $1 a gallon. And these are cars that are now available for the same price as a comparable gas car. I'd say this is a huge win for everyone.
Jan 2023 was when prices were slashed, and the $7,500 tax credit came in.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/06/ev-sales-slump-hertz-dump-ta...
has TSLAQ ever been right? Maybe short term but never long term.
Any rational view of TSLA's business and future prospects suggests that TSLAQ is right, but that the timeline for proving it out may be extended (and there's a saying about that, right? Something about the market staying irrational longer than you can remain solvent). TSLA is a meme stock at this point. I wish it were not part of the S&P500, because I hate to be exposed to that volatility.
But I'm often wrong, so maybe this is yet another example.
"Premium brands consistently retain higher resale value than mass-market brands, for both ICE vehicles and EVs. No one knows what entirely new Chinese marques will cost in the secondary market – for instance, what a 5-year-old Omoda will fetch"
Everything concrete in the article is about how Teslas, specifically, have precipitously declined in value, except for one paragraph about how nobody wanted to buy used vehicles from BluSmart (an Indian company that "collapsed in April amid financial fraud allegations").
Don’t forget to also deduct tax incentives from the original retail price. It’s not surprising that the used market would require that the used price be below the net original price.
> A U.K.-based study found 3-year-old EVs lost more than half of their value compared with 39% for gas cars.
so the difference isn't so stark as the F150 comparison
I’m so glad I managed to sell mine during Covid frenzy for $74k lol, in 2021
I’ll never buy a Tesla again. Only Ferrari and Mazda for me.
The reason they are getting killed, is because their products are now worse than the competition. They had a huge lead on everyone for years, then everyone caught up. Now you can get a car with the same range, with a HUD, with massaging chairs, with swivelling 360 seats... or you can get the same tesla car they've been making for 10 years.
Basically everyone I am close with is in the demographic Tesla targeted pre-rightening-of-Elon. All of them would’ve considered a Tesla at that point in time.
Now, none would. And of those with Teslas - very satisfied with their cars - none are replacing them with Teslas.
I just bought an Honda Pologue and didn’t even test drive a Model Y or X. We recently got solar installed in our house (also the right demographic for that…) and didn’t even look at quotes for Tesla systems.
Sure, I live in a left wing bubble, but it’s that same bubble that was (enthusiastically) Tesla’s prime demographic ten years ago.
All the power to the people who love their Teslas, you do you.
Fortunately that has subsided a bit, I haven't heard as much chatter about it in the last few months. And anecdotally, there are still quite a lot of "just got my new Tesla" threads on the Model 3 subreddit -- I think sales totals have still been a disappointment, but they haven't tanked.
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Resale value of EVs doesn't depend on mileage nowhere near as much as ICE cars. EVs are just much simpler machines and electric motors can do a million miles with no maintenance, and the only maintenance you have is the oil in the differential, which is often simpler because it is single-speed. Compare that to thousand different mechanical parts that all wear out in a ICE engine. Which is why ICE cars resale value is determined by the odometer.
What drives EV resale value is the health of the battery, which is influenced more by recharge cycles and straight up passage of time.
And the anecdotal evidence of a commercial fleet going bankrupt and not getting much for their EVs... Well yeah, would you buy from such a source? I wouldn't. They usually don't follow longevity advice for battery charging, because they have to optimize for time-in-use.
As an anecdote, I bought all my ICE cars second hand, and would usually sell them 3-4 years later just before major maintenance was needed. My EV is now 8 years old, runs like the day I got it and had 1 repair, when the motor that drives the window up and down broke and battery capacity is still the same, or if it changed it's such a small change I didn't notice. I don't expect to sell any time soon, if ever. I expect I will just do a battery swap in 5-10 years.
The resale value drops much faster than the battery health. Hyundai has been tracking the degregation rates of the batteries in their Ioniq 5 vehicles and they've been holding up surprisingly well. Most of them have >90% battery capacity at over 100k miles. Their data was sparse for 250k miles, but half of them were still over 90% capacity.
I had trouble finding the original video, but the data is included in this summary: https://youtu.be/s3DMd0e4loQ?t=17s
I’m not saying the article is wrong I’d just like to see broader representation (Chevy bolt, lucid air, etc).
I inquired about a battery swap and it's around $10->12k. I'm seriously considering it in the next couple of years as I see that as buying another 9->10 years of life for my car.
I might grab a used EV instead, though, as the one thing my car lacks is a heat pump, which kinda sucks in the winter.
An EV maker that sells parts at inflated prices including the battery will get less and less customers.
As those customers look at catalog prices for important parts including the battery before buying an EV.
Random web page on the topic:
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/costs-ev-battery-repl...
Another listing price:
https://evshop.eu/en/13-batteries
Note the used LFP 55 kWh tesla pack at $4140 so ... $75/kWh.
If a dealer charges you between $10K to $12K for a swap out, that's the "fuck you for not buying a car that makes the dealership more money" price. Several third-party vendors refurbish and sell EV batteries for much less.
I know what you mean by not having a heat pump sucking. The Volt has resistive heating for wintertime, and it definitely drains the battery. I dress warm and use the seat heaters when I'm driving by myself.
We can only dream of a day when battery packs are a standardized commodity, and as easy to change as motor oil. But modern industry is far too extractive.
In my previous vehicle I replaced the transition, engine, brakes, etc. but I sold it once the interior wasn't "nice" anymore.
This aspect does track between EVs and conventional vehicles.
If solid state batteries actually come out, they probably won't be retrofitted into existing EVs. That's a bummer, but I guess by the time I'm ready to change cars self driving will be a real thing (the Waymo kind, not the Tesla kind).
Suspension and tires are the biggest items for EVs. The twist is cheap owner can neglect those and keep driving past service window with ripped bushings and clapped out tires until hitting that magic 3 year goal, then you buy used EV in need of 4 of everything.
So, either you were really lucky with ICE or extremely unlucky with EVs.
A lot of charging is influenced by convenience and lifestyle rather than miles, for example:
People charge at work from 68% to 75% because is convenient.
People always draining the battery because they don't have charging at home.
Commercial EVs being charged based on loading/unloading schedules etc.
...
I'd like to see them compare two similarly priced SUVs.
I am sure the ICE vehicle will still depreciate slower, but perhaps not as drastically different.
The buyers of these two vehicles used in the example are very different.
Another market failure to adequately assist us in making the best choice.
In a situation when we're being told to completely give up on apples (ICE cars) and switch entirely to oranges (EVs), I am afraid we'd have to make exactly the comparison you find so distasteful for some strange reason. They are both vehicles, sorry, fruits, after all.
It's fine to compare ICE and EV.
It's not fine to be shoddy with data.
I think Porsche has done a 2-speed EV transmission and Lucid moved the differential inside the motor and has two-reduction gear sets on either side, but those are both unusual designs.
ICEs have MANY wear-out-fast parts (where "fast" is relative) requiring lube, and lube itself suggests the risk of frictional degradation.
Do you expect it will be an OEM part or a remanufactured battery?
I mean, that sounds quite poor on both counts TBQH. I bought a used 2002 Honda Accord in 2004 and drove it until last year with little more than regular oil changes. I expect to get the same kind of life out of the Mazda 3 I replaced it with. Anything less than 10 years out of a car sounds like something went terribly wrong to me.
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Say the govt wanted everyone to buy more Rubik's Cubes (cause they help you become smarter).
Their plan to do this is not to pay the Rubik's company to make them cheaper, but instead to give everyone $5 spendable on Rubik's Cubes only. The cost of a cube prior to this was $8.
The day that decide that, the Rubik's company ups the price of a Cube to account for this incoming onslaught of buyers and get more profit. They can safely up the price without losing sales because A) everyone wants to get smart and B) The overall cost of a cube is still cheaper than before. You can get a $10 cube for $5, which is less than $8.
More cubes are sold than ever before.
Now the market is flooded with cubes.
Now the govt says "Great! Everyone has cubes. Let the intelligence revolution commence!" So they remove the subsidy.
$10 Cubes are now QUITE expensive, so the Rubik's company reduces the price back to the $8 it was before. But wait a second, now the market is flooded and people are used to paying effectively $5 for a cube.
This is what's happened with EVs.
Solving them is a question of knowing the algorithm and applying it. It makes you better at pattern matching.
> everyone wants to get smart
In most social situations people want to have fun. They'll intentionally consume substances which reduce their "smarts" in an effort to achieve this more easily. They will lie to your face about this because _appearing_ smart is all they actually care about.
> Now the market is flooded with cubes.
That are lower quality than what was being made prior to the subsidy.
> This is what's happened with EVs.
Inflation also halved the value of money. The story seems simple but it's obviously more complex than a simple analysis would allow for.
Looking at actual market data, the spread on used EVs is wild - a 2022 Tesla Model S ranges from $57 to $112k depending on trim/condition (https://cardog.app/tools/valuation/tesla/model_s/2022). That's a $60k spread on the same year vehicle. Compare that to ICE vehicles where the range is typically much tighter.
When buyers can't confidently price an asset, they discount heavily. The depreciation problem might actually be a data problem - we just don't have the standardized battery health reporting and historical comps that exist for ICE vehicles yet.
Now is probably the golden age for buying used EVs, because eventually this notion that the batteries are untrustworthy is going to go away (you can argue about whether this will occur because the technology improves vs. people will better realize where it already is, but it will happen).
If I buy a 5 year old Corolla with 50k miles on the clock, I have a pretty good idea of what maintenance is going to like for the next decade, and I know a mechanic who can do the work.
I have no idea at all what will happen with a comparable Tesla over 10 years.
Replacing the passenger occupant detection sensor for the airbag system in my 2007 Ford Fusion cost $2K. After a series of other issues with things like the transmission and fuel injector, I ultimately traded it in for $500.
I got a used Nissan Leaf with low mileage for $18K a few years ago and haven't taken it in for anything yet. Battery health is still at 90%, and I could get that replaced for around $6K if I needed to.
I feel a palpable sense of relief that the surprise maintenance bills have stopped.
Smaller pickups like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10 are in the "compact pickup" class. (And unfortunately these are not sold in the US anymore. For those with genuine need, we either have to resurrect some old heap headed for the scrapyard or import them on the gray market from Asian countries.)
By number the median SUV is some sort of crossover or compact SUV built on a platform the OEM also builds sedans on.
The EV market is just weird, anyway. Manufacturers have to price to what the market will bear, which may have little resemblance to MSRP. So a good evaluation of deprecation has to figure out how to account for that. My Lightning had an MSRP of 72K but I got it for 51K, which was a very normal price that anyone could get. If I evaluate resale based on the MSRP, it looks pretty bad. If I use my out-the-door cost for comparison, it does not look bad at all (compared to any other new car purchase, of course, which are never going to be the most cost-effective choice for an individual).
In any case, individual buyers shouldn’t worry about it too much. The most financially prudent decision is to keep the car for a long time anyway. My 10 year old Tesla still drives just fine. Its value at the two-year mark wasn’t relevant.