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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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If you consider depreciation and increasing gas prices, getting a 1 or 2 year old EV today is the best financial decision for those having that budget. It will also work for lesser budgets.
Maybe I'm weird, but I never consider depreciation. If the car is worth anything more than scrap value, it's not yet time for a new car.
That’s how you lose a fortune to the sunk cost fallacy
Sorry, what? Can you elaborate on how hanging on to a paid off car and just performing maintenance is a sunk cost fallacy?
But it's the much more environmentally friendly way of owning literally anything.
I drove a 20+ year old car up until I had a kid, and suddenly I started to care about those safety features from the previous 20 years (like airbags and crumple zone improvements).
Then assume straight line depreciation between the car brand new and the car when it is scrap. If a $60,000 car lasts 20 years and you own it the whole time, you can consider the depreciation to be $3000/year if you'd like.
Either way, at the end of the car's useful life you need to be prepared to pony up more money to buy the next one.
If you consider depreciation, that 1 or 2 year old EV today will take a much deeper plunge over the next 5 years than a 1 or 2 year old ICE vehicle, unless something changes rapidly or they change battery warranties to be 15 years or more.
Here in Denmark fuel stations are closing so fast that a petrol or diesel car will soon be more difficult to operate than an electric one. I firmly believe that in the next 5 years, prices for petroleum powered cars will drop like a rock.
I'll start a business importing them then. They're still very popular in most of eastern Europe, including Estonia. We love used cars that have depreciated like rocks here.
I'm glad someone else is talking about EV depreciation, although it is not a popular subject in this community.
I'm still very much pro-EV, and it's undoubtedly the future. But I think not talking about this one negative thing does a disservice to new potential EV buyers.
Unless you are getting an old Nissan leaf, you’re probably going to be fine. Todays EV batteries are so energy dense they undergo less strain than the old versions.
There were 2 problems with early EV batteries. First, they were not actively cooled and could cook themselves to death over time. Today’s batteries have their own climate control.
Second, they were not very energy dense, so when they were being charged or discharged, you were moving a larger proportion of overall capacity in a short amount of time. Batteries do not like that. But as the capacities grew, the instantaneous load on the batteries dropped, so they didn’t have to work as hard to do the same thing. So they weren’t as abused and last longer.
Event first gen Chevy volts are rolling around happily on their original batteries with no noticeable loss in capacity to this day.
So, a couple of things: Personally, never been afraid of degradation much, outside of the old Leafs of course. What's always scared me about EVs is the chance of a sudden battery failure. Less and less of a problem now that individual cells can be replaced on many models rather than replacing a battery pack that costs more than the car (yes, used battery packs are an option, but IMO a bad middle ground between cell-level replacement vs new pack - you don't get the warranty of the new pack or the cheapness of individual cell replacement), but it's still an issue EV owners seem to mind, because there are TONS of 6-7 year old EVs for sale super cheap. Because the battery warranty is 8 years.
And secondly, I wasn't actually trying to say anything about having to be worried about the risk of failure in the parent comment, I was talking about the massive depreciation you take on if you buy a new or lightly used EV (because people are afraid of batteries). Meaning I find it to be a great deal to buy one that's already near the end of that battery warranty, you save tens of thousands vs getting a 2 year old one (which itself is, yes, much cheaper than a brand new one).
I still worry about people like me who drive a LOT. I do about 35-40k miles a year. I don't think I can trust a battery to last through the loan with the kind of mileage I put on.
I can wrench on an ICE vehicle pretty easily to keep it running for a couple hundred thousand miles. I have a used 2004 F150 that's about to hit 600k miles on its original engine.
It’ll be fine. EV batteries don’t just have the failure mode most people expect where it just stops working one day. They lose capaicy over time. Even then, they trends down to settling at 70-80%, not zero.
That's not entirely true. There's still risk of sudden battery failure. Otherwise these guys wouldn't have a business. Fortunately: Those guys do have a business and many others exist. For a couple grand at most you can get many battery packs repaired to their former glory. On a car where the battery pack is easy to remove, it should be fairly cheap assuming they can get cells somewhere (like other dead battery packs). The one in the video was done for 1€ as a joke, but that may very well be the true material cost of repair for an early Tesla battery since their cells are roughly the same as in an e-cigarette, 18650.
It IS increasingly rare with newer EVs, but it's a failure mode where the dealer will tell you to fuck off and pay anywhere between 20 and 70 thousand unless in warranty and for some manufacturers (Mercedes) the warranty terms have been updated to say that if the battery is more expensive than the residual value of the car, warranty will only cover it up to the value of the car.
All lithium-ion cells die one day. Majority will live a long happy life, but lifetime is not predictable on an individual level, only on the level of hundreds or thousands of units. I used to refurb laptops. I have the most experience with Macbook batteries, which I find to be very high quality for a laptop battery. I've tested at least a thousand of those, maybe 2-3 thousand.
Apple says 1000 charge cycles is what one should last - if you manage to get over 1000 cycles within the warranty period and it drops under 80% capacity, bad luck, you're not getting a warranty replacement. If it's under 1000 cycles and within the warranty period, it's covered. I've seen one or two that had above 80% capacity on as many as 2800 charge cycles. Many that were over 1000 but still good, many that had dropped barely under 80% in 200, 500 or maybe 1500 cycles... But I've also seen a couple that were in double digit cycle count and had <=30% capacity left. Usually those were also swollen.
It's just impossible to predict longevity on a single battery pack with proper accuracy.
You'll need to show data for that. Depreciation is not linear. The first year is worst and then not so bad.
You can look up used car prices yourself. But sure.
2 year old E-Tron for 65k
5 year old E-Tron for 25k
That 5 year old one is starting to look like a pretty good bargain already. The 2 year old one not so much.
I can find you tons more pairs for EVs that have lost a ton of value going from 1-2 to 5-6 years old if you still don't believe me, but we'll have to discuss my hourly rate if I'm going to be working for you.
In 2003 I bought a 1993 Mercedes for 5% of its sticker price, inflation-corrected. 80K Km, new-looking. Everyone warned me about maintenance costs but the '93 was a rugged beast. Family road trips and multiple moving days and a lot of mileage. I was prepared for some expensive repairs due to money saved in purchase costs but got through another 10 years no problems, other than the 4matic AWD computer which just turned it into a solid RWD until I bought a used replacement.
Gaming the ripe time to pick a used model really depends upon design and manufacturing, but the sweet spot for reliable brands seems to be 5-10 years.
In 2019 I bought a 2003 Mercedes for somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of its sticker price, I guess pretty close to 5 if inflation is accounted for. Maybe even less.
It had 380k km on the odometer, but it had been through Lithuania so some of the modules showed 700k km when interrogated. Previous owner also told me that there's no way the 380k km is original.
I did have to do maintenance on it, but the only thing that really let me down was the steering rack. It failed and then a reman replacement unit failed too. Only reason I got rid of the car, otherwise I'd still be driving it. Bulletproof engine and transmission.
Bulletproof is just the beginning. A British car show did a multipart series of segments trying to ruin a w124 model, a 300te seven-seater 'station-wagon' and I think the cannonball ended it.
Lots of great features. The memory-adjusting drivers seat, third row, flat deck when seats were down that's just long enough to sleep on, the cargo cover, the crazy stable 5-point suspension and self-leveling system, sensitive AWD drive, skookum quiet sunroof, great wipers, wood trim, and ultra rugged mb-tex seat fabric. Also relatively safe, for the time.
Logistic curves tell us that there soon will come a time when ICE cars are basically stranded "assets". And I dare to say that time is closer than most think.
I got a new 2025 ID. BUZZ for 63k a few weeks back. Any EV with that many seats is expensive and hard to find on our used market here. I think that was a decent price considering initially it retailed around 90K
My sister has my old leaf and 2 kids. The leaf is the household car. The grocery getter. The child fetcher. When they announced the buzz she wanted one so goddamn bad. It’s the return of the minivan in electric form. Exactly what she wants but alas cannot afford.