I don't see how electric cars can maintain prices in the second hand market when the most expensive part the battery which is 40-50% of the cost. Is cheaper to produce 10% a year on avg.
I don't think the parent is making a point about battery degradation, more that EV technology is advancing much faster than ICE. It's not 10% cheaper to make a petrol engine every year, after all.
Yeah thats my point. A new ev 5 years from now would cost 75% of what a new ev cost today anyway so 2nd hand ev will have a price pressure from new ev.
We are I estimate 7-10 years from when batteries become such small percentage of ev cost to not matter. When you add 10% cost decline for solar electricity every year I think a lot of ice enthusiasts, politicians and car manufacturers haven't realised the hammer that is coming for them.
The original Nissan leaf was launched in the Uk with this model as a choice. I.e. you could buy car + battery or you could buy car for less and lease the battery for 10 years iirc.
The cars purchased on that lease model were punished in their resale values in the Uk, to the point that Nissan discontinued the program.
In Europe, Renault sold the Zoe and others on a battery lease basis, reducing the vehicle cost but with a recurring lease on the battery.
For me, as a used car buyer who wants to buy a car outright (not on finance) that rules it out. I don't want to commit to paying Renault monthly to lease a battery at a price that is more than I currently spend on petrol.
To be fair, that is not very logical on my part, it does not make financial sense for me to go electric as I do so few miles.
Unfortunately, its not that simple. From the car company perspective, all they want is to sell new cars and they are perfectly happy with scrapping the 8-years old EV with damaged battery.
Also, people keep talking about converting batteries to home energy storage but its not that simple to do on your own - in fact its borderline dangerous to do so on your own due to hundreds tricky mistakes you can make that will end up with fire completely burning your home. This will only make sense at industrial scale but that also means it wont be too cheap anymore (not to mention those 8-years old cars which are in good condition, just missing battery that is more expensive than new car).
Also, I do think people are scared way too much by those dying batteries. Some of them will fails, sure, but there are so many gasoline cars with engines which have like 50% failire rate between 90k-180k miles driven. That's also pretty expensive to fix where often the only choice is to buy another engine from crashed car. I assume it might be similar here - 20-30% batteries will fail soon after the 8y warranty and will be replaced by batteries from crashed cars, the rest will work just fine for 15+y
I own Mach-E EV and I am scared. It's a great car, I love it but looking at what tesla is doing to the EV market - both new and used - I can't even fantom how it will look in a few years.
I agree that there is a lot of uncertainty about the longevity of batteries. However, it seems to me that the extra depreciation is driven by price cuts of new electric cars.
The article mentions an "electric car could expect to lose £24,000 in value over three years, while a similarly priced petrol car could lose £17,000" - Naturally, given that the sales price of the EV came down by £7,000 last year alone (i.e. Tesla Y).
That might explain why the low end of the market still seems to overvalue used EVs. I've seen many Nissan Leafs with batteries in terrible shape, maxing out at 30-40 mile range, hold their value. Without much in the way of price reductions for newer models at the low end, the used market doesn't need to compete the same way the high end market does.
Edit: this is in the US. Other comments seem to indicate the opposite in the UK.
This sounds like a temporary blip, Where are these cheap cars? I wanna see 15k used cars in decent shape. How much of this is driven by compliance cars finally reaching the point where few really want them + early models being unreliable?
I can only read the first sentence of that article without signing up, but can attest that in my current car search I am looking at used electric vehicles that have lost two thirds of their value in 3-4 years.
What brands are you looking at? I've been looking at Tesla cars, but they honestly don't seem to have depreciated as much as I would have expected / hoped.
If the car companies offered "good-battery-as-a-service" for a fixed monthly cost, it would scare me less than the prospect of having to buy a new battery for 20K.
Renault tried that with the Zoe, but they've abandoned it now. As I understand it, battery degradation has been less than even the automakers were predicting.
My thoughts:
- though the seller, of course, suffers, but isn't it good for both buyers and also to the transition to EVs?
- also wonder if the (higher) price drop is due to the current EV fleet being mostly premium cars, as any Tesla above Model 3 is.
Models are new, and some manufacturers are unknown to the buyers. Used batteries are an unknown. That means the difference between buying a new car and a used one is bigger in terms of the percieved value to the buyer. If I buy a new ICE car I pay a premium of $5-10k for having the benefit of owning it the first couple of years with hall the warranties. It's peace of mind at a reasonable cost. The cost of that benefit is going to be bigger both in absolute (because of the higher price) and relative terms for BEVs for the foreseeable future. Especially for newer brands like the new chinese players, but also for Tesla which is still young.
Worth mentioning that The Telegraph (also known as the Torygraph) is a zealously anti-EV newspaper. They have a strong conservative bias and routinely publish borderline fake news regarding EVs.
If you have had the misfortune to open the default homepage in MS Edge recently, it is routinely a smorgasbord of anti EV rhetoric from the likes of the Telegraph, Express and Mail.
Someone somewhere is spending a lot of money on promoting those views to the sort of people who don't change their browser or their homepage.
The Conservative Party recently shifted very hard as anti-green and pro-ICE, after one candidate unexpectedly managed to win a race on those issues in London. It's basicaslly their only hope to not be wiped out at the next General Election this year.
>Someone somewhere is spending a lot of money on promoting those views to the sort of people who don't change their browser or their homepage.
The thing about these people is they really don't matter. They are on deaths door anyway and pretty soon they won't be part of the conversation. The important people are the young car buyers of tomorrow. They seem to be quite fond of Tesla and EVs in general.
Thats my point. Yes I acknowledge that they affect today. But they will not affect tomorrow and thats where the thinking should really be because tomorrow is coming really fast!
some portion of Millennials are in their 40s now. The future is definitely EV (and because they still haven't achieved their parents level of status likely left leaning as well)
The article simply says that according to Auto Trader (a classifieds website for cars) electric cars lose 23% of their value the first year. Where's the conservative (slur word) bias in that? Or the bias, for that matter.
I'd say the bias is in a coincidence: The tories have recently changed policies to something that benefits from that kind of story, but isn't really a core, traditional or classic tory policy.
Also, the 23% sounds be a bit misleading. They suggest that it's due to the EVs that were bought. I think it's four factors: The usual drop, plus the reasons they have in mind, plus price pressure from new EVs that are dropping in price, plus price pressure from competition with new EV models (ie. the number of EV models on offers is increasing). Maybe they just forgot to mentiont the last two.
I think it's fair to point out editorial bias as long as it's relevant (in this case I think it is), AND is done consistently (eg. Guardian articles should be called out for their bias when relevant; I have no idea if that is the case with the poster you are responding to here).
Does non-progressive or even conservative bias equal dodgy?
Diversity of thought is the only diversity which really matters. Calling anything which does not conform to your ideology of choice dodgy is not just counterproductive - society needs both conservatives as well as progressives to thrive both when times are good as well as bad - but also simply intellectually lazy. If you never think outside your box you are intellectually imprisoned. You do not have to agree with the 'other side' but it is always wise to try to understand why they think differently from you. Sometimes you'll find that their reasoning actually makes sense, other times you can easily spot where they go wrong.
I don't put much notice into tabloid articles just because the journalistic standards are so bad that its annoying to pick through the misinformation to even figure out what the real argument is.
Battery swap would be a reverse Gresham's law: bad batteries would get withdrawn from service and repacked to maximise range profit.
EV should be redesigned around a common core swappable battery technology. As new battery chemistry comes online make it form factor and plug compatible.
i dont follow, how would it be different? would you mind helping me understand why a swappable battery is different? My impression was they would be the same in actual function
It would sell competitor product to conform. It's build a bigger market logic, but despite Musk patent stance he actually does want to own the business as well as grow the business.
It would have eroded his competitive advantage since he had a car which had 2x the range of his competitors.
It would have set logistic constraints and limit his innovation. You can't build cells into the structural frame if you go with a removable pack.
It would have meant building an economy around pack recharge which is a large initial capital cost.
It would have meant developing and commercialising robotics beyond the capabilities of the time to do autoswap.
> EV should be redesigned around a common core swappable battery technology.
I don't think this is very feasible. Different battery chemistries inherently have different voltages and densities.
So switching battery chemistry might require electronics with a higher voltage rating. And you can't swap in a battery with a very different weight, not just due to suspension but also structure and breaks if the battery is much heavier.
This is the case for the BMW i3 where the 94Ah model can get upgraded to the new 120Ah battery because it was designed with a sturdier frame, but the pre-94Ah models can't because they lack the sturdy frame.
And there might be additional concerns like different cooling requirements etc.
I've noticed a lot of FUD recently with electric cars - a lot of it coming from the same sources.
If I was more suspicious person I would say it's planned rhetoric.
There's plenty of data now from Nissan, Tesla and others showing that 10 year old EVs still often have at least 80% of their original battery capacity. Needing to replace the battery is not a given.
Right now, looking at buying a used EV, I am more scared that the battery or electrics fail for some reason than I am of their gradual degradation over time.
I don't know how likely that is, but it's putting me off anything other than manufacturer approved used with a solid warranty.
I should mention the Dr. Prius app, which is not limited to the Prius. The Dr. Prius website lists ODB2 readers that are able to access the battery data. Some single-board ODB2 readers can't.
All 2nd hand cars in the UK are currently depressed. Battery 2nd hand have been depressed even during autumn 2022 when 1 year waiting lists for new models (combustion or ev) weren’t unheard of.
For example, a 3 year old Nissan leaf with higher mileage could be had for £15k during that time. A 3 year old higher mileage goes for £7.5k today. The model in question was circa £30k new.
If you’re in the market for an EV in the UK, today your money goes quite a bit further 2nd hand than you might expect. Low mileage Porsche Taycan Performance Pro’s (the 100+ kWh pack) are hovering around 50k at 2-3 years old. More than 60% depreciation.
Mercedes EQC market has been flooded for some reason, you can get a new lease (personal) for under £300/mo on a 3 month upfront/8k miles. Second hand these are trading similarly down like the Taycan.
You’d have to be mad to buy any of these new. A realistically priced lease would be the way to go if you want new but 2nd hand nearly new seems the better choice if you’re willing to wear the risk that these cars don’t have a floor (seems unlikely, even in basket-case-onomics uk 2nd hand car market)
I think that same powertrain is being used across many vehicles - even a full size van. Maybe that will mean cheaper battery replacement in future if there's such a common market for these?
I think the opposite. I've always bought 2nd hand ICE cars in the UK, as the vast majority of people do. Each one between 8 and 20 years old, each perfectly usable reliable cars.
I've looked at the prospect of 2nd hand EVs here and you see most stuff around the 10 year mark the range is in the toilet and a non starter as a main car. Even though the battery tech has improved, it's still on a clock... so even when eyeballing EVs in the ~5 year old bracket, they may be slightly better, but you still have to consider that in another 5 years it's basically going to be unusable and unsellable.
If new EVs get cheap enough (and I mean real cheap to compete with what we are used to in the old and entirely functional 2nd hand ICE market), only then does make any financial sense to most people, they are still not ready for the masses. Either the battery technology has to vastly improve in longevity or some reclaimability of value, or the cost of new one's needs to plummet.
This isn't some crackpot theory you have the burden of debunking, it's well known that EV batteries do not last. Browse autotrader.co.uk for EVs and you will see almost everything around 10yr has a severely deflated range and limited future, that's why some end up being sold at absurdly low prices - because without an entire new battery it's effectively become a milk float.
I'm not saying that is inevitable, but the evidence from simply browsing the second hand market for EVs show that's it's current state. I want to get on the EV bandwagon, but it's not economical enough yet, I understand that's probably not true for most of the HN crowd.
And they will be on NMC batteries. LFP batteries will last longer:
> A key advantage of LFP is its longer life cycle, resulting in less degradation concerns. LFP packs are capable of more than 3000 full recharge cycle counts compared to NMC at around 1000 to 2000 cycles.
That's a clean condition 12 year old, 2 owner car with only 37k miles on the clock. Listed for only £3500. The downside is it has a 100% to 0% range of 50 miles and in real world usage more like 35-ish in good weather. A quick google suggests 15 mile range is not unrealistic in cold weather with heater turned OFF.
What use is that car to the general public? This isn't a fast charging car, after you do your grocery shop you need to plug that back in for 10+ hours.
Let’s call that 90. So not great to begin with. I would never have bought a Zoe or Leaf and I still wouldn’t. But my coworker had one exactly like this as a runaround. He recently traded it in… for another leaf. So clearly ok for some people.
With that capacity it will charge in less than 2 hours. It plenty enough for a secondary runaround car. Can save you tons of money depending your pattern of use.
Yeah, a Tesla... I can only have one if I'm fiscally irresponsible or rich. Everything can be "done right" for enough money, but not done for everyone, EVs need to be for everyone. A Tesla can't compete with the economy of a 3k 2004 ICE car where you don't even have to think about range.
> A Tesla can't compete with the economy of a 3k 2004 ICE car where you don't even have to think about range.
I used to think about the range of my diesel regularly since eventually I would need to visit a petrol station. My EV is fully charged every morning and does every journey I’d need to do in a normal day. I think about its range less than my old diesel. As for fiscal responsibility, the EV costs 3p/mile to run.
>> You’d have to be mad to buy any of these new. A realistically priced lease would be the way to go if you want new
> EVs in the ~5 year old bracket, they may be slightly better, but you still have to consider that in another 5 years it's basically going to be unusable and unsellable.
I'm just talking about the cost of ownership. If you want to own from new, it's more expensive to buy these models then sell at X years old than it is to lease from new.
We've seen similar with ICE too though, it's a peculiarity of the current UK market that it can be cheaper to lease a brand new Nissan Qashqai for 3 years than it is to buy a used 3 year old one and sell it at 6 years. That just should not compute but the market is skewed.
Yeah I think we are talking about different price ranges. I'm in the 90% who buys dirt cheap cars <5k which as a result are often very old already, but with ICE that can still result in a completely usable primary car, even with more expensive ICE maintenance it works out way cheaper. With ICE that strategy seems to result in a car with an impractical range, and no alternative at the same price bracket (even for total ownership).
I can't find details about the sources for those used transactions - is it only SMMT members so that would mean excluding all private sales?
You'd have to imagine there are plenty private sales for <5k cars. Or is it relying on change of owner data from DVLA? Maybe - on their data sales pages they talk about sourcing data from DVLA then enriching it.
Assuming for now that it doesn't include private sales, that dataset is already claiming that 20% of the 35m cars changed hands. How many more changed hands outside of that dataset? It's not that half my street changes their cars each year so there aren't that many private sales on top of this i think.
So my best guess is that 90% market is probably max 20% but more likely 5-10%?
1.6m was a severely down year but that's still a heck of a lot of new cars for a country with only 35m cars on the road!
The car is almost brand new, has a realistic 180-200 mile range and a wealth of features. Total cost 12k. It is in warranty for another 60k miles.
This has got to be the cheapest way to get hold of a 50kWh battery right now. It would almost be worth working out how to buy one of these just to pull the battery out of it.
I can’t read the whole article because of the paywall, so I don’t know if it’s mentioned, but I guess a large factor is also subsidies. If you buy an electric car in Canada (where I am) you get a 7k$ subsidy, but only on new cars, which makes used electric cars less interesting. I actually bought a used electric car last week for what I think is a very reasonable price. But the biggest advantage I see in buying a used one is that I can skip the multi-year waiting list.
Oh what a tragedy! It looks as a consumer the worst thing that could happen to you is that you go to buy something and it is cheaper! It undermines consumer confidence!!
Seriously I do not understand why people feed their brain with (mis)information given by obvious antiEV zealots.
Prices went so high, they do correct. This is good for consumers.
Some media are not your friends, they were sold to owners with obvious agendas. It could be "EV are the best"(so our boss could make lots of money selling "clean energy" to the Government, or "EV are the worst"(so our car manufacturer or Tesla short seller owner is happy).
You're missing the point. It's cheaper because there is a lack in consumer confidence in used EVs.
And that can impact the new market as well - people won't buy a new EV if they're going to take a 60% depreciation hit versus 30% on a similar gas vehicle.
I don't see any evidence in the linked article that it's due to a lack of confidence? Could it not be issues like (for example), new models being released at lower price points with better range?
In the UK the tax incentives for Electric cars may be skewing demand towards new Vs secondhand EVs.
I can lease a new EV via my employer's salary sacrifice scheme. I can pay my lease payments from my pre-tax income. There is an additional tax due on cars leased this way in the UK called Benefit-in-Kind tax (BIK). The rate of this tax is fairly high for petrol/diesel cars but for EVs is currently near zero (based on 2% of the car's value).
The problem is that most of the major lease firms that operate these programs for employers only offer new vehicles. Ideally I would like a nearly-new EV. I have escalated and apparently our lease provider (Tusker) are looking at rolling this out in the first half of this year. I currently know of only one other lease firm that offers this option. I suspect is in the interest of lease firms to prop up the value of the used EV market, but this depends also on their margins on new vehicles. I wonder if it would make sense for the tax incentives for used Vs new EVs to be rejigged to avoid incentivising unnecessary new car production?
I recently converted to electric motorbike for my transportation needs, and I don't see this reduction in value occurring in that segment, at all.
In fact, my bike (Bonfire X) has increased in value, since there are battery and motor upgrades available now to make it an even more capable machine.
The idea of getting a battery upgrade this year, and thus more power and range, is so appealing. Maybe that's not something thats too viable in automotive products, but for motorbikes it is a true sweet spot.
A lot of interesting comments here about the technology and the bias of the Torygraph, but there's also a fundamental reality of car ownership in the UK to take into account.
The overwhelming majority of the UK's housing stock predates widespread car ownership. There are entire streets of Victorian houses with paved-over front gardens because without that, the residents wouldn't be able to park their cars. Even the post-war New Towns gave fewer than one off-street parking space per house. Parking on the street is not a casual undertaking, either: houses are frequently only as wide as a car is long, so you get just one on-street parking space per house.
The recently-built housing estates often have small car parks near clusters of houses rather than a dedicated parking space right next to the house, and for the houses that do have a garage, garages are built to a standard size from the 1930s, so you can't fit a modern car in it, it's just a storage room.
If you're well off, none of this is a problem:you have a large garden, with a custom built garage that actually fits a car, but there's only so many such people.
The consequence of all this is that there's only so many people who can instal an EV charger at their home. Only so many of those people want an EV at this time. Our housing stock has imposed a limit on the adoption of EVs.
This is us. We own two spaces but there's another house between ours and the car park. In front we have a footpath, not a road. Realistically, home charging is out.
> The average car depreciation will hit hardest in the first year of ownership. Generally, the drop will be around 15-35% in the first 12 months. And that will continue to rise up to 50% or more over three years.
Year 1: 15-35% depreciation. 65-85% of the original value.
Year 3: 40-60% depreciation. 40-65% of the original value.
Year 5: 60-70% depreciation. 30-40% of the original value.
Year 8-10: 80% depreciation. 20% of the original value.
Oh no, standard depreciation within the expected range! How will we cope?
> Research from Auto Trader said there were “unsustainable levels of depreciation” in the electric car market, with used prices of battery-powered vehicles dropping by 23pc in the last year alone.
Is this because some of them are new models, and the average age is increasing? One article like this made mention of the Model X as one of the highest depreciation. It’s basically no longer sold in the UK (you can get one but the steering wheel is on the wrong side) so therefore the only cars on the market are getting older with no new ones to keep the price up.
> Campaigners have said motorists will continue to find electric cars too expensive without government subsidies, which ended in 2022, or other incentives such as cuts to VAT.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadMost likely in the future you will buy or lease the car. But you will never buy the battery only lease it.
When the battery is fubar the manufacturer will recycle or resell for utility storage and replaces your battery pack.
Much like Auto companies went into Financing business to boost sales they will likely go into Battery management businesses to boost sales.
I can't see another way for long term.
We are I estimate 7-10 years from when batteries become such small percentage of ev cost to not matter. When you add 10% cost decline for solar electricity every year I think a lot of ice enthusiasts, politicians and car manufacturers haven't realised the hammer that is coming for them.
The cars purchased on that lease model were punished in their resale values in the Uk, to the point that Nissan discontinued the program.
For me, as a used car buyer who wants to buy a car outright (not on finance) that rules it out. I don't want to commit to paying Renault monthly to lease a battery at a price that is more than I currently spend on petrol.
To be fair, that is not very logical on my part, it does not make financial sense for me to go electric as I do so few miles.
The longer they can charge you with the same battery the more money they make.
Kinda like iPhones and their battery level when you get AppleCare. If it drops below 80% in the first 2 years you get a new one for free.
Also, people keep talking about converting batteries to home energy storage but its not that simple to do on your own - in fact its borderline dangerous to do so on your own due to hundreds tricky mistakes you can make that will end up with fire completely burning your home. This will only make sense at industrial scale but that also means it wont be too cheap anymore (not to mention those 8-years old cars which are in good condition, just missing battery that is more expensive than new car).
Also, I do think people are scared way too much by those dying batteries. Some of them will fails, sure, but there are so many gasoline cars with engines which have like 50% failire rate between 90k-180k miles driven. That's also pretty expensive to fix where often the only choice is to buy another engine from crashed car. I assume it might be similar here - 20-30% batteries will fail soon after the 8y warranty and will be replaced by batteries from crashed cars, the rest will work just fine for 15+y
I own Mach-E EV and I am scared. It's a great car, I love it but looking at what tesla is doing to the EV market - both new and used - I can't even fantom how it will look in a few years.
Edit: this is in the US. Other comments seem to indicate the opposite in the UK.
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202311013531800
The car is almost brand new, has a realistic 180-200 mile range and a wealth of features. Total cost 12k.
I'd happily look at a Model Y, but out of my budget
My thoughts: - though the seller, of course, suffers, but isn't it good for both buyers and also to the transition to EVs? - also wonder if the (higher) price drop is due to the current EV fleet being mostly premium cars, as any Tesla above Model 3 is.
Still, manufacturers need to make it easy to swap out batteries.
Indeed! Are there any features in any electric cars that provide on-demand a detailed description of the state of the currently installed battery ?
Someone somewhere is spending a lot of money on promoting those views to the sort of people who don't change their browser or their homepage.
Coincidence? I think not.
The thing about these people is they really don't matter. They are on deaths door anyway and pretty soon they won't be part of the conversation. The important people are the young car buyers of tomorrow. They seem to be quite fond of Tesla and EVs in general.
some portion of Millennials are in their 40s now. The future is definitely EV (and because they still haven't achieved their parents level of status likely left leaning as well)
How about some actual criticism of the text in the article itself?
Also, the 23% sounds be a bit misleading. They suggest that it's due to the EVs that were bought. I think it's four factors: The usual drop, plus the reasons they have in mind, plus price pressure from new EVs that are dropping in price, plus price pressure from competition with new EV models (ie. the number of EV models on offers is increasing). Maybe they just forgot to mentiont the last two.
Typical car depreciation:
> Year 1: 15-35% depreciation. 65-85% of the original value.
Seems that this is bang in the middle of expected depreciation of any car.
Diversity of thought is the only diversity which really matters. Calling anything which does not conform to your ideology of choice dodgy is not just counterproductive - society needs both conservatives as well as progressives to thrive both when times are good as well as bad - but also simply intellectually lazy. If you never think outside your box you are intellectually imprisoned. You do not have to agree with the 'other side' but it is always wise to try to understand why they think differently from you. Sometimes you'll find that their reasoning actually makes sense, other times you can easily spot where they go wrong.
EV should be redesigned around a common core swappable battery technology. As new battery chemistry comes online make it form factor and plug compatible.
It would have eroded his competitive advantage since he had a car which had 2x the range of his competitors.
It would have set logistic constraints and limit his innovation. You can't build cells into the structural frame if you go with a removable pack.
It would have meant building an economy around pack recharge which is a large initial capital cost.
It would have meant developing and commercialising robotics beyond the capabilities of the time to do autoswap.
I don't think this is very feasible. Different battery chemistries inherently have different voltages and densities.
So switching battery chemistry might require electronics with a higher voltage rating. And you can't swap in a battery with a very different weight, not just due to suspension but also structure and breaks if the battery is much heavier.
This is the case for the BMW i3 where the 94Ah model can get upgraded to the new 120Ah battery because it was designed with a sturdier frame, but the pre-94Ah models can't because they lack the sturdy frame.
And there might be additional concerns like different cooling requirements etc.
I don't know how likely that is, but it's putting me off anything other than manufacturer approved used with a solid warranty.
For example, a 3 year old Nissan leaf with higher mileage could be had for £15k during that time. A 3 year old higher mileage goes for £7.5k today. The model in question was circa £30k new.
If you’re in the market for an EV in the UK, today your money goes quite a bit further 2nd hand than you might expect. Low mileage Porsche Taycan Performance Pro’s (the 100+ kWh pack) are hovering around 50k at 2-3 years old. More than 60% depreciation.
Mercedes EQC market has been flooded for some reason, you can get a new lease (personal) for under £300/mo on a 3 month upfront/8k miles. Second hand these are trading similarly down like the Taycan.
You’d have to be mad to buy any of these new. A realistically priced lease would be the way to go if you want new but 2nd hand nearly new seems the better choice if you’re willing to wear the risk that these cars don’t have a floor (seems unlikely, even in basket-case-onomics uk 2nd hand car market)
I think the opposite. I've always bought 2nd hand ICE cars in the UK, as the vast majority of people do. Each one between 8 and 20 years old, each perfectly usable reliable cars.
I've looked at the prospect of 2nd hand EVs here and you see most stuff around the 10 year mark the range is in the toilet and a non starter as a main car. Even though the battery tech has improved, it's still on a clock... so even when eyeballing EVs in the ~5 year old bracket, they may be slightly better, but you still have to consider that in another 5 years it's basically going to be unusable and unsellable.
If new EVs get cheap enough (and I mean real cheap to compete with what we are used to in the old and entirely functional 2nd hand ICE market), only then does make any financial sense to most people, they are still not ready for the masses. Either the battery technology has to vastly improve in longevity or some reclaimability of value, or the cost of new one's needs to plummet.
If you don’t have evidence to back this up, stop saying it. Some people are stupid enough to believe it at face value.
I'm not saying that is inevitable, but the evidence from simply browsing the second hand market for EVs show that's it's current state. I want to get on the EV bandwagon, but it's not economical enough yet, I understand that's probably not true for most of the HN crowd.
Sure, some people say this and others spread it.
I’m sure there are a bunch of older leafs and Zoes on Autotrader with no thermal management.
Meanwhile, let’s look at what happens when you do batteries properly:
> By ten years of age, cars were down to 82.5% of the original capacity.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/study-real-life-tesla-battery-d...
And they will be on NMC batteries. LFP batteries will last longer:
> A key advantage of LFP is its longer life cycle, resulting in less degradation concerns. LFP packs are capable of more than 3000 full recharge cycle counts compared to NMC at around 1000 to 2000 cycles.
https://zecar.com/resources/what-are-lfp-nmc-nca-batteries-i...
That's a clean condition 12 year old, 2 owner car with only 37k miles on the clock. Listed for only £3500. The downside is it has a 100% to 0% range of 50 miles and in real world usage more like 35-ish in good weather. A quick google suggests 15 mile range is not unrealistic in cold weather with heater turned OFF.
What use is that car to the general public? This isn't a fast charging car, after you do your grocery shop you need to plug that back in for 10+ hours.
But, did they have poor ranges to begin with? The model you picked has a 24kWh battery which is pretty small. Let’s look at what it was originally:
https://ev-database.org/uk/car/1019/Nissan-Leaf-24-kWh
> Real Range: between 55 - 125 mi
Let’s call that 90. So not great to begin with. I would never have bought a Zoe or Leaf and I still wouldn’t. But my coworker had one exactly like this as a runaround. He recently traded it in… for another leaf. So clearly ok for some people.
There is a chademo fast charger socket on some models but not clear if this is present on these 24kwh models?
> > By ten years of age, cars were down to 82.5% of the original capacity.
> https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/study-real-life-tesla-battery-d...
Yeah, a Tesla... I can only have one if I'm fiscally irresponsible or rich. Everything can be "done right" for enough money, but not done for everyone, EVs need to be for everyone. A Tesla can't compete with the economy of a 3k 2004 ICE car where you don't even have to think about range.
I used to think about the range of my diesel regularly since eventually I would need to visit a petrol station. My EV is fully charged every morning and does every journey I’d need to do in a normal day. I think about its range less than my old diesel. As for fiscal responsibility, the EV costs 3p/mile to run.
> EVs in the ~5 year old bracket, they may be slightly better, but you still have to consider that in another 5 years it's basically going to be unusable and unsellable.
I'm just talking about the cost of ownership. If you want to own from new, it's more expensive to buy these models then sell at X years old than it is to lease from new.
E.g. VW ID Buzz - circa £5-£15k cheaper lease than purchase on a £66k EV, good treatment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdHlZLcGquk
We've seen similar with ICE too though, it's a peculiarity of the current UK market that it can be cheaper to lease a brand new Nissan Qashqai for 3 years than it is to buy a used 3 year old one and sell it at 6 years. That just should not compute but the market is skewed.
I know you're saying that as a turn of phrase, not meaning it literally but just because it's fun thing to speculate on...
Just how big is that market?
If there were 35m cars on the road in 2022 (according to UK gov) and there were 1.6million new cars sold in 2022 vs 7 million used car transactions in 2022 (according to SMMT https://www.smmt.co.uk/category/vehicle-data/used-car-sales-... )
I can't find details about the sources for those used transactions - is it only SMMT members so that would mean excluding all private sales?
You'd have to imagine there are plenty private sales for <5k cars. Or is it relying on change of owner data from DVLA? Maybe - on their data sales pages they talk about sourcing data from DVLA then enriching it.
Assuming for now that it doesn't include private sales, that dataset is already claiming that 20% of the 35m cars changed hands. How many more changed hands outside of that dataset? It's not that half my street changes their cars each year so there aren't that many private sales on top of this i think.
So my best guess is that 90% market is probably max 20% but more likely 5-10%?
1.6m was a severely down year but that's still a heck of a lot of new cars for a country with only 35m cars on the road!
Fun thing to explore.
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202311013531800
The car is almost brand new, has a realistic 180-200 mile range and a wealth of features. Total cost 12k. It is in warranty for another 60k miles.
This has got to be the cheapest way to get hold of a 50kWh battery right now. It would almost be worth working out how to buy one of these just to pull the battery out of it.
Seriously I do not understand why people feed their brain with (mis)information given by obvious antiEV zealots.
Prices went so high, they do correct. This is good for consumers.
Some media are not your friends, they were sold to owners with obvious agendas. It could be "EV are the best"(so our boss could make lots of money selling "clean energy" to the Government, or "EV are the worst"(so our car manufacturer or Tesla short seller owner is happy).
And that can impact the new market as well - people won't buy a new EV if they're going to take a 60% depreciation hit versus 30% on a similar gas vehicle.
We are at the same stage as smartphones back in 2010. A year old smartphone was very outdated and hence worthless.
Nowadays you can sport the same phone for 3-5 years without missing out anything important.
But the non-swappable batteries create a need to buy a new phone anyway.
I can lease a new EV via my employer's salary sacrifice scheme. I can pay my lease payments from my pre-tax income. There is an additional tax due on cars leased this way in the UK called Benefit-in-Kind tax (BIK). The rate of this tax is fairly high for petrol/diesel cars but for EVs is currently near zero (based on 2% of the car's value).
The problem is that most of the major lease firms that operate these programs for employers only offer new vehicles. Ideally I would like a nearly-new EV. I have escalated and apparently our lease provider (Tusker) are looking at rolling this out in the first half of this year. I currently know of only one other lease firm that offers this option. I suspect is in the interest of lease firms to prop up the value of the used EV market, but this depends also on their margins on new vehicles. I wonder if it would make sense for the tax incentives for used Vs new EVs to be rejigged to avoid incentivising unnecessary new car production?
In fact, my bike (Bonfire X) has increased in value, since there are battery and motor upgrades available now to make it an even more capable machine.
The idea of getting a battery upgrade this year, and thus more power and range, is so appealing. Maybe that's not something thats too viable in automotive products, but for motorbikes it is a true sweet spot.
I imagine I've got years of upgrades ahead of me.
The overwhelming majority of the UK's housing stock predates widespread car ownership. There are entire streets of Victorian houses with paved-over front gardens because without that, the residents wouldn't be able to park their cars. Even the post-war New Towns gave fewer than one off-street parking space per house. Parking on the street is not a casual undertaking, either: houses are frequently only as wide as a car is long, so you get just one on-street parking space per house.
The recently-built housing estates often have small car parks near clusters of houses rather than a dedicated parking space right next to the house, and for the houses that do have a garage, garages are built to a standard size from the 1930s, so you can't fit a modern car in it, it's just a storage room.
If you're well off, none of this is a problem:you have a large garden, with a custom built garage that actually fits a car, but there's only so many such people.
The consequence of all this is that there's only so many people who can instal an EV charger at their home. Only so many of those people want an EV at this time. Our housing stock has imposed a limit on the adoption of EVs.
This is us. We own two spaces but there's another house between ours and the car park. In front we have a footpath, not a road. Realistically, home charging is out.
From the article:
> Electric cars lose as much as half of their value after just three years on the road
https://motorway.co.uk/sell-my-car/guides/car-depreciation-g...
> The average car depreciation will hit hardest in the first year of ownership. Generally, the drop will be around 15-35% in the first 12 months. And that will continue to rise up to 50% or more over three years. Year 1: 15-35% depreciation. 65-85% of the original value. Year 3: 40-60% depreciation. 40-65% of the original value. Year 5: 60-70% depreciation. 30-40% of the original value. Year 8-10: 80% depreciation. 20% of the original value.
Oh no, standard depreciation within the expected range! How will we cope?
> Research from Auto Trader said there were “unsustainable levels of depreciation” in the electric car market, with used prices of battery-powered vehicles dropping by 23pc in the last year alone.
Is this because some of them are new models, and the average age is increasing? One article like this made mention of the Model X as one of the highest depreciation. It’s basically no longer sold in the UK (you can get one but the steering wheel is on the wrong side) so therefore the only cars on the market are getting older with no new ones to keep the price up.
> Campaigners have said motorists will continue to find electric cars too expensive without government subsidies, which ended in 2022, or other incentives such as cuts to VAT.
So which is it? Too expensive or too cheap?