I continue the mini-series on the US used EV market (#15: best options). Today we’ll meet the Cheapies. See below the fold, which is below the green blurb and the resource lists.
*The term “EV” covers both “pure” battery-electric (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). IOW: if it has an externally-rechargeable battery, it’s an EV.
(ICE stands for Internal Combustion Engine: the outdated technology still driving >99% of vehicles)
Action Resource TableHere’s Sierra Club. Here’s Union of Concerned Scientists. Here’s Friends of the Earth. Here’s Greenpeace. Here’s the EU position. Here’s my own perspective. |
Maybe you are not in a position to get an EV that meets your needs yet. But you surely know someone who is. Find them and help them get it. |
Note YRWV (tl;dr, in very cold winters range can easily be 30-40% below average), and the good news under Don’t Panic I/II. See this diary for recommended EV model lists. |
New EV purchase deals. AND New EV lease deals (that’s how we got our Leaf!). Updated! Best used EV options. |
Don’t nickel and dime your own personal footprint of buying an EV. Every transition has its costs. We’re playing the long game here. It is long, but urgent: we need YOU to join. |
| EVs consumed ~10% of mined cobalt in 2018. And one-third of EVs have no cobalt at all (e.g., Gen 1 Nissan Leafs, most e-buses). But we must do more to curb “artisanal mines” where child labor/slavery is widespread. DRC’s children deserve better. |
Home of the monthly US plug-in sales scorecard — which has become the standard source for US EV numbers. I write there occasionally ;) |
| Current/historical numbers from most global EV markets. The main resource for my annual Top 10 Countries in the EV Revolution series. |
| EV website and Youtube channel with weekly episodes, by tireless EV pioneer Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield. |
| Newer than insideevs, flashier, but very Tesla-dominated. |
| Often takes a deeper dive into technical and academic articles. |
| Youtube channel created and hosted by English actor Robert Llewellyn. |
| Pretty similar to insideevs, but not limited to EVs only. |
| Daily digest in plain-text format, plus a podcast if you like those. |
This probably belonged in the previous diary, but better late than never.
If you (or a friend) are looking for an EV, you need to sit down and have a more focused conversation about what you need and want in a car, and how to balance these with what current new/used EVs can provide for budget you have.
I and most other observers maintain that in the long run, EVs will be the overwhelmingly better technology across almost the entire space of vehicle needs and wants, even from a strict consumer perspective. Within that space, there are already want/need combinations where EVs clearly beat ICE today. And the space represented by these combinations is rapidly growing.
However, if you are a wary consumer then sure, this is an emerging technology and if you’re not early-adopter material you might want to wait a few years and see how things shake out.
Hey, I’m not early-adopter material either. That is why my diary series is themed #Resist. There is a pretty huge tie-breaker at play here, two in fact:
Acting now to mitigate global heating, and Acting now to resist this obscene oil-bought regime currently imposed on us. If you haven’t noticed, the Zombie EPA is literally arguing that we don’t need to conserve oil anymore, and they also want to yank California’s generation-old autonomy on fuel standards.So Yes, in my books in the face of this emergency and this outrage, continuing one’s ICE-status-quo silence does imply complicity and consent. At the very least, if that option is not relevant for you personally right now, you can seek out and inform friends/relatives who can replace their ICE with EV.
Following this tiebreaker, the space of needs/wants where one should consider an EV grows substantially. You can ask yourself for example,
“How about we get an EV that’s good for 355 days of the year, and rent an ICE for the remaining 10?”
This would likely lead to EVs being a better economic choice even without the tie-breaker, but it is an arguably less convenient choice than just sticking with ICE and never having to rent. Now, with the #Resist tie-breakers factored in, the convenience argument falls by the wayside. A slight discomfort now will pay off for our grandchildren, and hopefully before that.
The EVs in the best-value-options diary were all, at the very least, capable of meeting the 355:10 tradeoff described above for many many households. An 84-mile Leaf was our only car for 2.5 years, during which we rented ICE (not counting flight-based vacations far from home) exactly twice for a total of 5 days. With a 100-mile Leaf for the past 2 years, we are about to make our first ICE rental for 4 days, just before returning the lease to get a 150-mile Leaf.
Of course, to each their needs. If you ski every winter weekend at a site 50-100 miles from home and thousands of feet uphill (or visit your ailing grandma 150 miles out in the boonies every weekend), then a 100-mile BEV is unlikely to be a good single car. But besides breaking ties, the #RbPi mindset also asks that you be candid with yourself about your driving needs, vs. what boils down to being only a comfort zone.
Ok, Pep Talk Over, On to the ListThe EVs in the Cheapies list below might fall a bit short of meeting the needs/wants matrix for a middle-class household’s only car. Or not. You’ll be the judge of that. But the classic use cases for these cheapies are:
Low-budget households in urban/suburban settings. One of the cars in a multi-household car (this, btw, describes most multi-driver US households); typically the commute car. Households that drive very little and engage in longer drives very rarely.Despite their limited range, economically these BEVs (yes, all are BEVs) are very lucrative, because you will save both on fuel and on maintenance, and the ICE alternatives they are pairing off against are 7+ years old.
We’d had aging used ICE. It was always very painful, thousands/year in unexpected repairs. Most people are in denial about how much $$ they sink into this motorized hole. Unless you are always magically lucky with used ICE, or have a magical person who does those repairs nearly free (or are that magical person yourself) — assuming no magic, you would save easily ~$2k/year on gas+repairs, with a cheapie used BEV vs. cheapie used ICE. The only potential major exception is having to replace the depleted battery pack of a used Leaf; see my previous diary, and we’ll discuss that more below.
Which means that even if you think you cannot afford replacing your near-worthless ICE clunker with a used BEV, in fact if you intend to keep yours for 3 years, you can actually afford a $5-6k BEV replacement right here and now, just on those running-expenses savings.
Whew. As in my previous diary, only models available in reasonable quantities are shown; models are ordered most to least recommended, based on my own perfectly sound judgment. Here goes:
| Compliance BEV | 6-11 | ~80 | 4 |
| BEV | 5-8 | 50-60 | 2 |
| BEV | 4-8 | 40-80 | 5 |
| Compliance BEV | 6-11 | ~80 | 4 |
Summer 2013 was a sunny time for EVs in the US. The 3 flagship models — Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S — were all selling well and improving specs, and then suddenly all major automakers came out with exciting new EV models.
Within a year, though, it turned out that most these models were just Compliance Cars — made in small quantities and usually sold only in California and maybe a couple other states, in order to avoid paying penalties for not offering zero-emission vehicles. It was all little more than a mendacious charade.
Except for one compliance car — the Korean-built Chevy Spark EV — that was eventually used as a test pilot for the development of the long-range, higher-volume (although still not high enough) Chevy Bolt. The Spark EV caught attention on its own merit, for mind-blowing torque specs. This little baby can fly.
With 82 miles safeguarded by battery TMS for longevity, and an (optional) CCS quick-charge port that originally had precious few compatible charging locations but now has plenty, if 4 seats are enough for you then this is a good buy. I used to see lots of them for ~$6k or less. Now it’s hard to find that price; again, the value of used EVs is not so secret anymore. Still you might haggle asking prices down to that level.
They stopped making Spark EVs once the Chevy Bolt came out, and <8k of them were sold overall. Away from the West Coast you may have a hard time finding even one, and therefore they might cost a bit more; but you never know. Keep looking.
The Funky Midget Tongue-in-Cheek 2014 Superbowl ad showing what you should NOT do with your Smart ED.Next on our list is not a Compliance Car. Smart (owned by Mercedes-Benz) even invested in a Superbowl ad to promote it. But how many 2-seat urban runarounds can you really sell to the American car consumer? Particularly when the EPA range is 58 miles, and when the automaker has never bothered to improve specs since its 2013 launch. Sales peaked at 2500 in 2014, and never got close to that since then. Still, it has been nationally available (more or less; doubt they sold any in, say, Montana), so maybe you can find one near you. Obviously its chief use case is the commute car in a 2-car household; also perhaps a small urban household’s only car, with rentals/borrowing for longer trips.
Leaf Oldies: Buyer Beware… But it can be GoodAt face value, Leaf Oldies should be at the top of today’s list: more car for less money, from the most prestigious nameplate among the four. But besides being slightly older, there’s one big reason why they are so cheap: battery depletion. See the previous diary for general background.
This doesn’t mean all older Leafs you’ll meet have a half-dead battery. Mild climates are Leaf-friendly; mileage matters of course; and there’s individual variation between cars. But the best Leaf Oldie scenario if you want peace of mind, is to get one whose battery was already replaced. The new battery will be a “Lizard” (see previous battery), with far less depletion. Replaced-battery Leaf Oldies likely merit being at the top of the table, but there aren’t that many on the market I think. Owners tend to keep those for a while longer.
In any case, the Leaf Oldie market is a bit of a Wild West. Be sure to arm yourself with a Leaf-savvy friend, and a LeafSpy app. Here are two opposite examples I just found on Craigslist. The first has a sloppy scam feel about it:
This LA Craigslist 2011 Leaf ad claims “80 miles range” and 14k miles, but clearly shows 4 lost bars which means only ~50 miles average range. The seller obviously knows nothing about Leafs. The mileage looks implausible. Someone possibly messed with the odometer; if so, they might as well have messed with the bars, too, which is doable; but they were Leaf-clueless so they didn’t. That being said, the asking price is only $4200, and armed with the bars/range knowledge and a LeafSpy app, and maybe a little more snooping to understand this Leaf’s past life — and if 30-40 miles are all you need from this car, it may be worth your while and you might be able to get down to $3k or less.The second is the best-case scenario I mentioned:
This Bay Area 2011 Leaf owner’s ad explicitly says the battery was replaced at 61k miles, which can be easily verified. The asking price is accordingly higher: $7500, but (after some negotiating down) is likely worth it. You won’t need to worry about battery replacement for many years.With all this headache, why am I bothering you about 2011-2012 Leafs at all? Because this will be by far the most common Cheapie EV you’ll find, and in certain parts of the country the only one.
On the merits, 2013 Leafs should be set apart from 2011-2012. They had longer original range (84 miles vs. 73), thanks to some efficiency improvement re-engineering that included better regen and less weight. Their battery chemistry is also probably less depletion-sensitive than 2011-2012 (the Leaf driver community considers 2013 a transitional year in that respect). However, there don’t seem to be enough 2013s on sale to have their own entry. Perhaps they do not circulate in the market as much. But you might score a 2013 with original battery still in excellent shape, and $6-8k would be a good price for it.
Last and Least… The Compliance Car that Won’t Go Away Looks creepy to me. Like you can tell its parents didn’t love it.Back in summer 2013 when all those new EVs came out, auto journalists were most excited about the Fiat 500e. The cinquecento is a venerated Fiat flagship, and the 87-mile range was a bit longer than all the rest.
Then the 500e was revealed as the worst type of Compliance Car, when Fiat CEO repeatedly lied that he’s “losing $20k for each one” and annoyingly asked people not to buy them. That, besides ceaseless dissing of the very concept of EVs, which he continued until he mercifully passed away in 2018.
There was always a big gap between words and deeds with poor old Marchionne: even as he was “begging people not to buy it”, Fiat dealers were actually pushing them like crazy, with super-cheap leases and incentives like 12 days of free ICE rental per year (along the 355:10 lines described above). Each year in 2014-2017, 5-6k 500e’s were sold; way more than any other compliance car, and pretty impressive for any EV considering they were only sold in California and Oregon. [aside: They never tried to sell any in Europe; surely not in Italy which has one of the weakest EV markets.]
Nowadays there may be decent numbers of used 500e’s in various corners of the country. I’ve never particularly liked them. The cute dimensions of the ordinary 500 were distorted a bit for the 500e, looking unpleasant at least to my eyes. I also thought people shouldn’t have bought them new, when the automaker so cynically incited against them and against EVs in general. And then there’s Fiat’s overall reliability legacy, which (per my hearsay knowledge having grown up in a country where Fiats are more common) is not good at all.
But as used cars the 500es are fair game (i.e., someone else already committed the error of buying them), and you don’t need to worry about Fiat ICE engine/transmission problems b/c it’s a BEV. For battery longevity they do have TMS. But no quick-charge port, so this is strictly an urban/suburban car.
Whew!No matter what you do, be sure to negotiate, that’s what you do with used cars.
Next time I end this used-EV trilogy with pricier, but worthy options.