My mother do not move more than 100km a day anymore (and even that is a stretch, I think the most she drive is to the beach 25 km away), but 25k€ is a very big investment. She recently bought a second hand electric car for 9k€ and is very happy with it.
There's a bit of a problem that secondhand EVs aren't on the market until a couple of years after someone has bought them new. So there's a bottleneck. In this case all the cheap leasing deals work in favor of the eventual secondhand market.
I was shocked at the thought of having to move "only" 100km a day... we are living in such different worlds. And yes I do commute, but by public transport and less than 30km away and definitely not every day.
I was also shocked reading OP's post, but after thinking about it a bit I came to the conclusion that they didn't meant "100km daily" but more like "having less than 100km range is not an issue because she never drive that much any day of the year".
Having to recharge the car during a single trip being seen as an issue by OP.
Sorry, my command of English slipped up here. She rarely drives more than 10 km daily for her work,and will drive at most 100km in a single day, so she doesn't need range.
I get that it's supposed to be a low speed city car where parking ease maybe matters more, but it's hilarious to see an EV where every newton of drag matters designed like a rounded brick on wheels. In fact most modern cars except for sedans seem to not give two shits about aero anymore which is leaving so much range on the table.
The Topolino is a type approval hack: it's an "electric quadricycle", ie legally a golf cart, and limited to 28mph in the UK and not allowed on motorways.
There's been a few of these like the Renault Twizy, and the limitations make them a gimmick that doesn't sell very well.
Crash safety design features are a decent contributor to cost. I suspect manufacturers think shrinking the frame a bit, removing two doors and back seat won't drop the cost enough to convince people to buy them.
Weirdly enough, when these smaller two seaters show up, they are almost always overprice and getting a four seater, and just not using backseats, are a better deal. E.g. the Microlino is €20K, so why not just get the Citroen ë-C3, it's the same price, with better range?
Mazda and Toyota have dragged a bit on pure-EV designs despite Toyota's excellent hybrids, because they're unwilling to give up on petrol engines. But they seem to be gradually getting the memo.
€25,000 is still pricey. The BYD Atto 1 recently dropped to AU$19,990 in Australia, which is €12,412. I think it will be hugely popular at this price point.
Cars are just more expensive in Europe than in Australia. In Europe, cars are still a bit of a luxury, whereas in Australia, they’re an absolute necessity.
There also higher tariffs and transport cost. Shipping cars from China to the EU can cost up to a few thousand per car. Local production seems less competitive. But the bottom line is that there are now a lot of relatively affordable EVs in the market. The cheapest cars in most markets now include EVs.
For example the Dacia Spring that is selling for around 17K Euros in Germany. And then there are tax rebates, discounts, etc. that are causing some of these cars to be available for a lot less occasionally in some markets.
Markets where EVs have been available in larger numbers for a while now have a sizable EV market. Australia is relatively early with its adoption, so the second hand market is a lot smaller there. The EU as a relatively early adopter has a lot of EVs from 2020 or earlier that are still under warranty and being traded in quite large numbers now. In the last few months these been a very hot commodity as lots of people are feeling the pain of high fuel prices.
All these new small cars will become a large part of the second hand car market in a few years. There will many be millions of them on the roads in a few years. And they last quite long.
Personal vehicles are atypical as a market in that a huge percentage of people buy used rather than new. So when you look at new vehicle price, you have to factor in that the top 20% (not sure about actual percentage) of people are buying new, then corporate entities are financing a huge segment, like maybe 40%, and the rest of us buy used vehicles downstream from them. €25k is barely above entry level in Europe, but it can only be afforded by most people because of this system.
Yeah, these are insane prices considering BYD Seagull (aka Dolphin Surf) cost in China around 9000EUR. It's not great car, but reasonable cheap small basic car, but when it gets to Europe for instance here in Czechia it cost 20000EUR, I fail to see how can anyone justify double price of that car and still think it's cheap.
Rather, China is dumping EVs at a national level. EVs don't generate profits, and entering this market now would only result in huge losses. so under normal business judgment, companies wouldn't enter the EV car market. They can only be produced when subsidies and tariffs are guaranteed to protect them.
Nah. Dumping means unprofitably sold with subsidies making up the difference.
China cancelled subsidies to BYD this year, and last year, those subsidies were 1/3 of BYD profits. Subsidies helped get them off the ground but they were unit-profitable by the time they got to exporting.
Xiaomi never had subsidies at all, their cars were profitable from launch, with 6 month waitlists to buy. Their export plan is to start with Germany first because they're cocky as hell and the cars are really nice.
BYD pricing don't make material sense. Atto 1 appears to be sold at IDR199m in Indonesia, AUD19,990 in Australia, EUR19,990 in EU, and GBP18,500. Normalized in USD, it's 11k, 14k, 22k, 25k respectively. It's clearly set to 19k-25k worth of workers' income, and there is no way that their prices are representative of costs.
The charging situation need to be factored in. Charging at home, it has enough range. Public charging, range buys the likely hood of charging convenience.
in the US, I go to pump twice a week to fill my small car(Miata gang) which gets roughly 38 MPG. Those two trips are maybe 3 minutes max combined.
If I where to go EV home charging instead, I'd need to have it more or less plugged in every night. Which of course isn't a shower stopper especially when fuel savings are factored in.
But in my case the MSRP of my car+ fuel costs+ time/convenience is a slightly better experience than if I had a full EV with it's associated MSRP/convenience.
I look forward to my first EV, cuz I know I'll have a "come to god" moment where I realize how much easier/simpler charging at home is.
It's not the 90s. Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass. Depending obviously on where you are and how often you travel. And also far cheaper than doing the same trip on taxis/uber even just a few days a month.
>Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
True, but it enables you to compare things against those which you can't buy upfront. London Travelcard zones 1-6 is £3264 annually or £313/month, but there's no option to buy multiple years in advance as if you were buying a car outright.
£313/mo is more expensive than the cheapest new car leases, but you wouldn't want to drive a car through London zone 1, and you'd have to pay £18/day in the congestion zone.
Not "anything": if the [capital cost * interest rate] is high enough, that can make things objectively bad regardless of the repayment period.
25k could be either side of that.
Just for the sake of illustration (I don't know current car loan interest rates, I'm not interested in ever getting a car at full price, and this is just about financing costs and not any of the other costs associated with car ownership): if you were to get e.g. an expensive Tesla for 100k and had a 5% loan, you'd pay 5k/year forever without ever paying off the capital.
Here in Germany, the BahnCard 100 costs €3199/year and that gets you nationwide use of all public transport and lets you take your bike with you and get seat reservations; or there's the Deutschland-Ticket which costs €756/year and gets you local public transport everywhere (no reservations, only the slow intercity trains not the express ones, no free take your bike with you etc).
If the car costs more than €756/year, and can do fine with local public transport, and you're one person not a family, at 5% interest the maximum price (of a free-to-run car, so let's assume it is an EV with PV on all surfaces) would be €15,120*, and that's if you own it literally forever.
Two people sharing a car, or a lower interest rate, the threshold changes.
* OK, so I'm assuming there that the Deutschland-Ticket never gets more expensive, so that's "inflation + 5%", but this is all just as an illustration anyway.
I see your point and feel/hope the same cost structures (IE;cheap chinese cars) will eventually get here( here being US for me). It's not like detroit is bustling anymore anyways.
But on that note, chinese companies aren't building a 10k car profitably. Their OEMs have a dizzying array of subsidies and agreements that allow "market friendly price fixing" and protection from going bust. They are very smartly playing a long game that might end up making everyone better off, we'll see.
A EU or US OEM in the same position would just not be possible from the start.
-An existing one IE VW or Ford could leverage massive chains to drive down MSRP, but the public nature of the companies won't allow that for too long.
-A new OEM ie "slate trucks" has gone thru this, seeing MSRP jump by 1/3-1/2 simply because decision of the then ruling party changed rebate scenario, as well as global shipping rates skyrocketing.
That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.
* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.
>it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles
If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.
Beware the the "fair". Currently, governments are taking in vast amounts through fuel taxes. That will need to be replaced. It wont be an extra fee at registration. Current politics favors use taxes. As the concept of taxing electricity going into cars is a massive cluster of issues (ie the "smart grid" with differemt rates for different uses) the answer will likely be road pricing: a per-mile fee, which could mean manditory tracking. The transition to EVs as fair market actors is not over. It hasnt really begun.
The UK has stated that the current mileage check within the annual roadworthiness test will supply this data.
A clear weakness is that mileage readings can be altered. This used to matter on a smaller scale: dodgy second-hand sales, but now more or less anyone could be considered as potentially incentivised to interfere.
The mileage must remain a changeable field since the recording component may need replacement, for example, after accident damage or to correct a fault in the assembly that recording memory is part of.
Pure mileage is one option but many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.
Are more central issue is the synergy between fuel consumption and damage to roads. Heavier vehicles do more damage but also burn more gas and so pay more tax, a synergy between cost and revenue. A flat rate based on mileage alone would not marry those to aspects. We would need different rates for difference classes/weights of vehicles.
> many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.
There are people who won't care about this but I think that legibility would be a huge concern here. It's one thing to do $X per megameter, but it's another to start breaking it down into various zones etc
At that point might as well just do congestion pricing in cities.
fuel pump meters can be altered too as well a farm diesel abuses - scofflaws trying to get around paying their fair share will always take some regulatory effort
Do it like taxes, have a low rate for the first X kwhs then increase after. Great aunt Mildred gets to heat her home, your neighbour that has a massive house, EVs, jacuzzi etc etc pays more.
EVs are always going to be an outsized user of electricity, and it's unclear to me why someone's jacuzzi should be heated vat free.
Because the use of a jacuzzi does not burden any public resources. That jacuzzi isn't occupying a space on a road, or adding wear and tear to that road. And you don't need an entire licensing/enforcement infrastructure to regulate who/how/where/when jacuzzis are to be used.
Huge range of efficiency difference between houses. (How did "Insulate Britain" fail so hard?)
I had an actual aunt called Mildred, and she lived in a very old (possibly literally Tudor, not mock, actual) cottage with actual fireplaces and so on.
Her place likely used about 42 MWh/year to heat, compared to my house which is so well insulated that it took a week to notice we'd switched off the heating, in winter, while it was snowing outside.
For 42 MWh/year, you can fully recharge a 100 kWh car battery every day and still have more left over than my house consumes in total.
...and, to be a bit more explicit about it, the worse the efficiency of the house, the more likely that household is to already be lower income. So a tax like that would end up being seriously regressive.
And with solar power becoming cheaper and more common, it's going to be making less and less sense to disincentivize electricity usage.
If we want to preserve and maintain our roads, we might have to...*shock, horror* increase income taxes on the wealthy!
I've seen governments give tax incentives to buy EVs that are then sold 2-5 years later, pumping a secondary market of second hand EVs. Cheaper for the government (they don't pay, they just take less tax).
Another approach is to incentivise middle to high income earners like Australia has done re novated leases on EVs being exempt from fringe benefits tax.
Lower income people aren't buying new cars, they buy second hand.
So be incentivising others to purchase new EVs over combustion, it creates a supply for the second hand market in 5-10 year horizon for those lower income earners. And while subsidies are in place for new models, this further pushes down the price of used EVs.
It'll be interesting what happens to Australias second hand EV market when the subsidies end in 2029.
I agree with what you're saying, I also suspect that governments will tax ics at a certain point, not only to get rid of them but also because they can get away with it because the whole population isn't impacted.
So I'm concerned about a time where the rich have EVs, the poorest haven't, and the government are taxing ics.
I'd like to see some kind of Keighley car standard to get cheaper EVs on the market. Here in Europe we have quadricycles, but the speeds are limited to only make them useful for cities.
>high income earners like Australia has done re novated leases on EVs being exempt from fringe benefits tax.
UK did somethin like that with ZEV Mandate. Salary Sacrifice, almost zero BiK, 100% tax writeoff, no road and luxury tax. All this resulted in flooding the market by luxury 100K pound German EVs, which all ended up on second hand marked 2-3 years later when leases ended breaking depreciation records.
France does this. It's called social leasing and is offered for those with low income but reasonable work related mileage.
It could be argued that just returning the tax money to the people (and/or reducing regressive taxes) is a fairer approach as it gives money to those who cycle or take public transport as well as those who switch to EVs.
Govts could do a lot of things. They could require employers to offer remote work (like during COVID) or provide free charging. Its a lot easier for big corporate buildings, mostly shared by many corps, and have a parking garage to add chargers. They also can negotiate aggressively with utilities and just get EVs charged for free. 20%+ of solar is curtailed anyways, which is only going to increase. Or they can add solar panels. Businesses in every country have tons and tons of incentives and subsidies for all kind of things. Govts have absolutely no problems giving incentives to businesses. Its only when regular people get a tiny benefit for a limited amount of time, everyone kicks up a fuss ..
Enjoy the overnight cheap electricity while it lasts. The only long-term strategy is investment in solar and batteries – use your temporary savings the government is giving you to invest in solar etc. Some governments are signalling that we have a role to play in electricity infrastructure investment...
Governments are only temporarily letting you get away with not paying the 0.35-0.80 EUR tax on each litre of petrol/diesel. UK is steaming ahead with a per-mile tax on EVs and hybrids, for example.
My mother gets motability and has an ev so where does this fit in between the standard model where middle classes buy ev vehicles and poor people buy used ice vehicles
Motability is a leasing scheme, and for complicated reasons the manufacturers (especially Stellantis) are offering cheap lease deals.
In the case of Stellantis I believe this is driven by "compliance" requirements - the need to sell a certain percentage of EVs to avoid being fined by the EU. So they're not especially great EVs, but once they go to the lease firm they're counted as "sold". Someone may take a loss on the depreciation later, but not the driver.
A special consideration for Motability is that PIP recipients aren't allowed to save up for anything, so whatever vehicle they have has to be on finance.
> PIP recipients aren't allowed to save up for anything
That's incorrect.
Some PIP recipients are also in receipt of means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit for example, which has a £6k capital disregard, and a reduction of benefits between £6k and £16k, and no entitlement over £16k. (Also I'm sure there are PIP recipients who work and receive no other benefits)
There surely are PIP recipients who would end up with savings of over £6k if they did not spend their PIP on anything else, and Motability is a legitimate way to spend it, in the eyes of the DWP.
idk how is it that HN articles often match whatever currently obsesses me. I'm going to buy an EV next year and i'm looking for a 2nd hand one exactly in this range.
86 comments
[ 15.3 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadHaving to recharge the car during a single trip being seen as an issue by OP.
https://www.craigslist.org/search/area/sfbay?auto_make_model...
this is fine for people just bumbling around town
Where are the runarounds for people who don't need to lug around kids or baggage?
There's been a few of these like the Renault Twizy, and the limitations make them a gimmick that doesn't sell very well.
Ah so that's where the Fiat Multipla designers went after getting fired.
Mazda and Toyota have dragged a bit on pure-EV designs despite Toyota's excellent hybrids, because they're unwilling to give up on petrol engines. But they seem to be gradually getting the memo.
For example the Dacia Spring that is selling for around 17K Euros in Germany. And then there are tax rebates, discounts, etc. that are causing some of these cars to be available for a lot less occasionally in some markets.
Markets where EVs have been available in larger numbers for a while now have a sizable EV market. Australia is relatively early with its adoption, so the second hand market is a lot smaller there. The EU as a relatively early adopter has a lot of EVs from 2020 or earlier that are still under warranty and being traded in quite large numbers now. In the last few months these been a very hot commodity as lots of people are feeling the pain of high fuel prices.
All these new small cars will become a large part of the second hand car market in a few years. There will many be millions of them on the roads in a few years. And they last quite long.
The BYD Dolphin Surf is 20K Euros in Belguim. This is the same care as the Atto 1.
Presumably it's European duties designed to drive up the price of cheap Chinese electric vehicles that is the difference.
Apparently the EU has tariffs of up to 36% on Chinese electric vehicles.
https://www.byd.com/cz/konfigurovat/dolphin-surf.html
Sounds like saving EU car companies at all cost paid by EU customers who are not interested in saving them.
China cancelled subsidies to BYD this year, and last year, those subsidies were 1/3 of BYD profits. Subsidies helped get them off the ground but they were unit-profitable by the time they got to exporting.
Xiaomi never had subsidies at all, their cars were profitable from launch, with 6 month waitlists to buy. Their export plan is to start with Germany first because they're cocky as hell and the cars are really nice.
I'm reminded of the tesla semi graph (near bottom of article):
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/4740/tesla-unveils-next-ge...
US diesel: $0.50 and $0.80 per mile
US electric: $0.20 and $0.25 per mile
For example the VW Polo starts at 25K but if you want the bigger battery, its 35k.
If I where to go EV home charging instead, I'd need to have it more or less plugged in every night. Which of course isn't a shower stopper especially when fuel savings are factored in.
But in my case the MSRP of my car+ fuel costs+ time/convenience is a slightly better experience than if I had a full EV with it's associated MSRP/convenience.
I look forward to my first EV, cuz I know I'll have a "come to god" moment where I realize how much easier/simpler charging at home is.
8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
£313/mo is more expensive than the cheapest new car leases, but you wouldn't want to drive a car through London zone 1, and you'd have to pay £18/day in the congestion zone.
25k could be either side of that.
Just for the sake of illustration (I don't know current car loan interest rates, I'm not interested in ever getting a car at full price, and this is just about financing costs and not any of the other costs associated with car ownership): if you were to get e.g. an expensive Tesla for 100k and had a 5% loan, you'd pay 5k/year forever without ever paying off the capital.
Here in Germany, the BahnCard 100 costs €3199/year and that gets you nationwide use of all public transport and lets you take your bike with you and get seat reservations; or there's the Deutschland-Ticket which costs €756/year and gets you local public transport everywhere (no reservations, only the slow intercity trains not the express ones, no free take your bike with you etc).
If the car costs more than €756/year, and can do fine with local public transport, and you're one person not a family, at 5% interest the maximum price (of a free-to-run car, so let's assume it is an EV with PV on all surfaces) would be €15,120*, and that's if you own it literally forever.
Two people sharing a car, or a lower interest rate, the threshold changes.
* OK, so I'm assuming there that the Deutschland-Ticket never gets more expensive, so that's "inflation + 5%", but this is all just as an illustration anyway.
- The battery and motor ecosystem is dominated by Chinese companies. These will happily build EU factories. Embrace and learn.
- Market size is not too much of the problem.The Chinese market is a lot larger, but not ten times.
Perhaps regulatory capture in the EU by large established players is a big part of the problem?
But on that note, chinese companies aren't building a 10k car profitably. Their OEMs have a dizzying array of subsidies and agreements that allow "market friendly price fixing" and protection from going bust. They are very smartly playing a long game that might end up making everyone better off, we'll see.
A EU or US OEM in the same position would just not be possible from the start. -An existing one IE VW or Ford could leverage massive chains to drive down MSRP, but the public nature of the companies won't allow that for too long. -A new OEM ie "slate trucks" has gone thru this, seeing MSRP jump by 1/3-1/2 simply because decision of the then ruling party changed rebate scenario, as well as global shipping rates skyrocketing.
That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.
* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.
https://www.craigslist.org/search/area/sfbay?auto_make_model...
If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.
A clear weakness is that mileage readings can be altered. This used to matter on a smaller scale: dodgy second-hand sales, but now more or less anyone could be considered as potentially incentivised to interfere.
The mileage must remain a changeable field since the recording component may need replacement, for example, after accident damage or to correct a fault in the assembly that recording memory is part of.
Are more central issue is the synergy between fuel consumption and damage to roads. Heavier vehicles do more damage but also burn more gas and so pay more tax, a synergy between cost and revenue. A flat rate based on mileage alone would not marry those to aspects. We would need different rates for difference classes/weights of vehicles.
There are people who won't care about this but I think that legibility would be a huge concern here. It's one thing to do $X per megameter, but it's another to start breaking it down into various zones etc
At that point might as well just do congestion pricing in cities.
Do it like taxes, have a low rate for the first X kwhs then increase after. Great aunt Mildred gets to heat her home, your neighbour that has a massive house, EVs, jacuzzi etc etc pays more.
EVs are always going to be an outsized user of electricity, and it's unclear to me why someone's jacuzzi should be heated vat free.
I had an actual aunt called Mildred, and she lived in a very old (possibly literally Tudor, not mock, actual) cottage with actual fireplaces and so on.
Her place likely used about 42 MWh/year to heat, compared to my house which is so well insulated that it took a week to notice we'd switched off the heating, in winter, while it was snowing outside.
For 42 MWh/year, you can fully recharge a 100 kWh car battery every day and still have more left over than my house consumes in total.
And with solar power becoming cheaper and more common, it's going to be making less and less sense to disincentivize electricity usage.
If we want to preserve and maintain our roads, we might have to...*shock, horror* increase income taxes on the wealthy!
Lower income people aren't buying new cars, they buy second hand.
So be incentivising others to purchase new EVs over combustion, it creates a supply for the second hand market in 5-10 year horizon for those lower income earners. And while subsidies are in place for new models, this further pushes down the price of used EVs.
It'll be interesting what happens to Australias second hand EV market when the subsidies end in 2029.
So I'm concerned about a time where the rich have EVs, the poorest haven't, and the government are taxing ics.
I'd like to see some kind of Keighley car standard to get cheaper EVs on the market. Here in Europe we have quadricycles, but the speeds are limited to only make them useful for cities.
UK did somethin like that with ZEV Mandate. Salary Sacrifice, almost zero BiK, 100% tax writeoff, no road and luxury tax. All this resulted in flooding the market by luxury 100K pound German EVs, which all ended up on second hand marked 2-3 years later when leases ended breaking depreciation records.
Harry Metcalfe video about this scheme from 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwUDR8WTTKQ
It could be argued that just returning the tax money to the people (and/or reducing regressive taxes) is a fairer approach as it gives money to those who cycle or take public transport as well as those who switch to EVs.
Enjoy the overnight cheap electricity while it lasts. The only long-term strategy is investment in solar and batteries – use your temporary savings the government is giving you to invest in solar etc. Some governments are signalling that we have a role to play in electricity infrastructure investment...
Governments are only temporarily letting you get away with not paying the 0.35-0.80 EUR tax on each litre of petrol/diesel. UK is steaming ahead with a per-mile tax on EVs and hybrids, for example.
In the case of Stellantis I believe this is driven by "compliance" requirements - the need to sell a certain percentage of EVs to avoid being fined by the EU. So they're not especially great EVs, but once they go to the lease firm they're counted as "sold". Someone may take a loss on the depreciation later, but not the driver.
A special consideration for Motability is that PIP recipients aren't allowed to save up for anything, so whatever vehicle they have has to be on finance.
That's incorrect.
Some PIP recipients are also in receipt of means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit for example, which has a £6k capital disregard, and a reduction of benefits between £6k and £16k, and no entitlement over £16k. (Also I'm sure there are PIP recipients who work and receive no other benefits)
There surely are PIP recipients who would end up with savings of over £6k if they did not spend their PIP on anything else, and Motability is a legitimate way to spend it, in the eyes of the DWP.