Why do second-hand electric cars seem so cheap?

18 comments

1. On Facebook marketplace? That place known for being a bit scammy?

2. Those are all scams which will steal your deposit

3. The ones you are looking at are “first gen” electric cars. Poor range, poor performance, slow charging and limited battery life.

   Around the £10k range is where you start getting into cars that could reasonably replace an ICE vehicle. Something like a Nissan leaf or Renault Zoe.

   But, if you can deal with a 50-80 mile range, a first gen electric car could be a good choice for you. Especially over a £3k ICE vehicle. If you can deal with that range then you’re probably not doing enough miles to make battery degradation a concern either.

4. I’d love to see examples of this. On autotrader there are 135 electric cars below £6k. All of them at least 6 years old, the vast majority with 40,000+ miles.

   There are over 10,000 petrol or diesel cars at the same price point. There are more ICE cars available under 5 years old or with under 20,000 miles than there are electric cars total.

5. Another reason electric cars can be cheap is if the battery is leased rather than bought outright. If you own the car but not the battery, it’s a harder sell.

6. My Tesla was 55k new. Less than 2 years later it’s worth 35k. That’s a loss of about £800 a month in depreciation. But at least I’m saving £200 a month on ‘fuel’ eh.

   Sobs

7. You don’t mention the brand, but if they are Renault they might be cars which have the battery under a lease agreement. The older ones used to when people were concerned about the lifespan of the batteries, but that didn’t turn out to be a real concern, so now when you buy the car you buy the battery (and it’ll probably come with an 8 year warranty for memory on the battery)

8. Because they are crap

9. >Marketplace

   Yeah

10. There’s a glut of supply and not much demand, with about 70% of EV purchases being on business leases, with not much private market demand, once the lease has expired & is renewed for the business customer, dealers just don’t have the market of private buyers wanting an EV.

11. Cos it’ll cost you upwards of 2k to replace the battery so you can get more than 20 mile

12. The battery will be on its way out and will be over £10k to replace

13. At that price range they will be

    * Renault Twizzy (nobody wants them)
    * 1st Gen Nissan Leaf (terrible range, nobody wants then)
    * Scams

14. Are the batteries knackered?

15. Many manufacturers are struggling to sell brand new ones and reducing the prices/ better deals. This is having a knock on to the second hand market.

16. Because their batteries are screwed

17. Cos they are crap ?

18. There are a few reasons, electronics lose value, EV’s are not the future, rechargable batteries lose capacity, and it might just be a scam targeting EV lovers.