The thing is all cars these days have a much larger lease footprint than they used to, so that would mean fewer cars to be on the second hand market until some point where people take an upgrade, at which point a lot of cars turn up on the market at the same time, and I suspect much like mobile phone rentals, they want you to trade up as the maintenance costs increase etc. Brian
Anecdatally, a big bar is the fact that unless you have not just the dedicated charging point at home, but also the off road space to use it, you are going to be dependent on having to spend hours (a) looking for and (b) charging your shiny EV. Neither of which fits in with the time- poor lifestyle needed to pay for the beasts.
One of our directors has a Tesla. He's retired with all the time in the world to faff around charging.
There *is* a place for EVs in society. But this isn't it. And much like the laws of physics, you can't really buck the laws of nature generally.
Not what happened here in Oz with used cars. The price of those has risen dramatically, essentially because of the very significant delay in getting your new car delivered after you have ordered it due to very significant shortages of semiconductors.
Not clear what has happened to the price of used EVs here, I don't know of anyone stupid enough to own one yet.
Lots here have solar panels but it isnt clear how many use them to charge their EVs for free. That's obviously only feasible if you mostly work from home and most don't do that.
I haven't found that the maintenance costs increase with my now 17 year old petrol Hyundia Getz tho the mandatory timing belt swap isnt cheap. Not anywhere near that yet with mine.
Judging by some of the Youtube videos I've been watching lately both the second hand car and smaller commercial vehicle market prices in the USA have been high in Autumn and run up to Xmas.
It's not about used EVs but Teslas specifically. Neither of the points above hold for them: battery longevity is excellent for Teslas (90-95% capacity at 10 years plus) and Tesla haven't released a new model for several years, so latest-and-greatest doesn't really apply.
The article is citing data from the US where EV supply has been very limited. Typically Americans buy new cars from dealer stock, whereas since the pandemic supplies have dried up and dealers have had enormous markups. To get an EV requires ordering one and waiting months. People have been ordering them and then reselling them on delivery at a markup. That artificially inflated the 'used' prices. As supply chain woes have eased, delivery times have reduced and such flipping is less attractive.
As well as other EVs becoming old enough to enter the used market, another factor is that Musk's antics at Twitter have devalued Tesla, both from a shareholder point of view (investors don't have confidence in Musk running Tesla well and not being distracted) but also tarnished Tesla as a luxury brand (Tesla was always erratic on things like aftermarket service and supply of spare parts and any uncertainty doesn't encourage confidence). That means fewer people are willing to consider a Tesla as their next car, which depresses used prices.
Those are both market bumps and nothing to do with EVs per se.
Theo (whose car is 16 and still worth more than I paid for it 6 years ago, so the UK used market remains crazy)
Thanks. I was aware of the Tesla issue of owners turning away from the make because of Musk’s recently expressed political views, from a business news report a week or two ago.
The item I referred to was another business news report on the radio, but it was only a day or two ago and was addressing the UK car market.
As I said above, the reasons for this slump in the value of second-hand EVs weren’t known to the interviewee, so remain somewhat speculative.
Given that all second-hand car prices shot up over the past couple of years (wbac/cinch/cazoo stitching up the market) it's inevitable they will come back down sooner or later ...
I don’t know about falling 2nd hand prices, we bought a new PHEV in June
2020 and part exed. It in September this year and the invoice showed 0% depreciation after 2 years. Now it could be just a paper figure as it is not unusual to have invoices that show whatever you want figure wise but according to the invoice we sold it for the same price as we bought it. The car was a real pandemic purchase having done less than a years motoring in over two years.
The industry at the moment, isn't mature enough to draw any "final conclusions".
As far as I'm concerned, the governments of the world will have to step into this industry eventually, to knock some sense into it.
You must be able, in future, to buy third-party battery packs. You might notice, that first world countries are trying to encourage domestic battery cell production, so that no dominant suppliers can hold everyone else for ransom.
The industry is being given free rein at this time, to at least get started at production. But things cannot stay this way, because it will stall the economy (and... shudder... no tax monies).
The car companies are not going to make their "cheap version", unless some policies are in place. To coerce them to do so. Like, opening up the after-market parts industry to make a tiny improvement on price of things. As long as all the parts in a BEV are "serialized" and only the dealership can "perform a wedding", prices will remain sky-high.
I would like to see a dealership sell "BEV-without-pack" and no battery warranty, at a considerable saving. Then the customer can price around for an after-market pack (with warranty).
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The tyres on BEVs can wear out faster than on ICE cars. An example was something I saw in some comments, where a Tesla vehicle wore out its tyres in only 4000 miles.
So if you were wondering why there isn't a lot of 1000HP "tyre chirping" out on the streets, that's the reason :-)
The Acura NSX was an example of an ICE car with the same problem. Premature tyre wear (about the same tyre life as the Tesla example). And I believe there may have been a small class action by car owners about it. The one at my dealership here (the NSX demonstrator), had been driven by the staff at 180km/hr, out on the local road, to give you some idea why the tyres might not hold up well :-)
Is that because the tyres were fitted to a BEV, or because the manufacturer specified high-grip tyres? When I used to go on motor rallies, we changed to high grip tyres, which had about one third of the life of the standard tyres we had been using, but would hold on to the road as if the car was running on rails.
It’s because the drivers drove like numpties. My first set of tyres on my EV lasted 32,000 miles. It’s not hard to make tyres last but it’s really easy to scrub a set to nothing quickly with all the torque available in an EV.
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