Cheapest Used Electric Cars in the USA, Part 2

A couple of months ago, just before the $4,000 used EV tax credit ended, I published an article on the cheapest used electric car options I could find — well, with some limitations. It’s now time to compare those to what’s on the market now.

I loosened up the limitations slightly this time around, and perhaps I will loosen them up more next time. For now, I only selected vehicles fewer than 6 years old, and that had not been in an accident. Also, I didn’t check every model on the market, but focused on 14 models that are cost competitive and fairly popular.

I again used carfax.com for the searches, and searched in my region of Southwest Florida (within 100 miles of my zip code).

You can compare that to my findings from September 30. Here’s the table from that article:

My key takeaway is that prices don’t seem to have changed much, so the loss of the $4,000 used EV tax credit was a big hit and buyers who got their EVs before October arrived were smart to do so. It’s hard to compare well, because of differences in mileage, trim, and model year. However, in the cases where those lined up closely, prices were mostly quite similar to prices at the end of September, or were even higher now. (Note that there was only one Chevy Blazer EV except for a former police model that was really beat up.)

The Chevy Equinox EV options were the most similar in the two cases, and the pricing was almost identical to two months and a week ago.

The Hyundai IONIQ 5 was the only case I noticed where the car had significantly fewer miles on it but was also significantly cheaper. (Comparing the first/cheapest options for both months.)

The Nissan ARIYA is another one with a good price drop. The first option in both months is the same model year and trim with almost the exact same mileage, and the option on the market right now is almost $3,000 cheaper. However, the ARIYA and the IONIQ 5 were really the exceptions that proved the rule, as they say.

The Tesla options were cheaper this time, but they also had far more mileage on them.

So, that’s where we are. If you look carefully, you might find some much better used EV deals on certain models now, but for the most part, the market is the same or even slightly worse than it was at the end of September — and you don’t get the $4,000 used EV tax credit any more….