Category: Analysis

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I’m about a week into trying to buy a used EV.  I’m typically working from the listings provided by Edmunds.com, for a 25-mile radius around my ZIP code, here in Vienna VA.

It has been an education. 

Good news is, I haven’t spent any money yet.  Bad news is, I’m not sure I’m any closer to getting a used EV.

Maybe a change of focus is in order.

As of this last round, my best candidate is a two-year-old Chevy Bolt, with 20K miles on it, for a net $16K. 

 

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First stop:  Used EVs, $10K and under.  What did I learn?

1:  The Leaf dominates this market segment.  By that I mean, most of the vehicles for sale are used Leafs, 2011-2016 models.  Never saw a 2017 listed.  And, on paper, the Leaf SV has better specs than the common alternatives in this market segment (Chevy Spark, Smart for Two, and Ford Focus).

2:  A used Leaf will tell you how much range it has lost, right on the “gas gauge”.   The same gauge will give you a snapshot of the range, subject to a lot of random variation.  But the bottom line is that if the seller posted a picture of the dash, showing that gauge, you can immediately weed out the ones with a lot of range loss.  I went through this in detail in recent posts on this topic.

3:  That’s handy, because the “Recharge.com” estimates of battery range provided in used car ads can be wildly inaccurate.  I got interested in a car because it had a Recharge.com range of about 110 miles.  Until I saw a picture of the dashboard, and found that the actual range was closer to 60 miles.

4: There’s a real “market for lemons” aspect to the used EV market.   By that I mean that used Leafs offered for sale around here had experienced an average of 8 percent per year range loss.  That’s about twice the typical range loss for this make/model/age.

Not that the used gas car market doesn’t suffer from the same thing.  But here, you can quantify the degree of adverse selection with a single, objective number.

Two things brought my search in this market area to a screeching halt.

5:  The best range I could find, on a used Leaf in that market segment, was 60-ish miles.  And upon reflection, that doesn’t really cut it if you want an all-season, all-Metro-area car, that will last you some years.  Highway travel reduces range.  Cold (and for the Leaf) warm temperatures reduce range.  The Leaf uses an obsolete CHAdeMO fast-charging plug that will become increasingly hard to find as time passes.  And that range is going to continue to degrade.

I could  see myself owning a car that I would hesitate to take half-way around the DC beltway, in the winter.  At which point, it’s no longer a fully-functional car, and has started the slow slide to becoming a glorified neighborhood electric vehicle.

6:  But the biggest problem is that some Leafs get temperamental as they age.  After reading enough accounts, it’s pretty clear that some well-used Leafs  can no longer deal with high-power/high-current-flow events, such as highway speeds, long uphills, or regenerative braking.  For those, you have to “baby” the vehicle, and otherwise live within its limitations.  Understand, this is for a car in excellent repair.  It’s not something that’s fixable, short of replacing the battery pack.

In hindsight, I see hints that other used EVs suffer from the same current-limiting issue as they age.  I suspect the extreme examples I found in older Leafs are due to the small battery pack.  Cars with larger initial range (e.g., Tesla) seem to manifest the same issue as a pronounced “loss of oomph”, rather than a car that will shut down if you push it too hard.

 

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A new focus:  New EV under $30K?

Near as I can tell, in this market segment, by MSRP, you’ve got the Chevy Bolt, and the Nissan Leaf.  Both cars are about the same size, and both cars are about the size and weight of a Prius Prime.  So I suspect I’d be comfortable driving either one.

Source:  Fueleconomy.gov

Of these, on paper, the Chevy Bolt appears to be a much better choice.  First, the Bolt has a much higher range (~260 miles) than the Nissan Leaf in this price range (~150 miles).  (You can get a Leaf with more range, but it costs another $8K or so.)  Second, the Bolt has the modern CCS fast-charging socket, while the Leaf retains the obsolete CHAdeMO plug.  Third, the Bolt has (I think) a battery temperature management system, while the Leaf (I think) remains passively cooled (which a certain E. Musk described, circa 2010, as “crude”).

All together, this makes the 150-mile Leaf close to unusable for long-distance driving, certainly in summer.  Charging heats the battery.  The car responds by slowing the rate of charge.  Apparently, a mid-summer highway trip in a Leaf is just an excruciating experience.  This, per a YouTube presentation of a West Virginia Leaf owner who filmed his three-day trip from West Virginia to Florida.

Whereas the Bolt, in theory, would get me from Vienna VA to (e.g.) Ocean City Maryland (174 miles) without a recharge.  Not possible in the Leaf.  Per the diagram below, the Leaf’s one-way range limit is just slightly larger than the Bolt’s round-trip range limit.

There are other functional differences.  For example, the Bolt only has resistance electric heating, not the more-efficient heat pump that can be had on the Leaf.

But the Bolt has two big problems.

Fire.

The first problem with the Bolt is its checkered history.  GM ended up recalling every Bolt ever made, 2017-2022. 

There were … not battery fires, per se, but fires in the high-voltage battery compartment.   (A lithium-ion battery fire is all-but-impossible to put out.  Once that starts to burn, the car (and whatever the car is parked in) is toast.  These were events that charred some of the interior, so, for sure, it wasn’t the Li-ion battery that outright caught fire.  But the batter was the source of the heat that charred the battery compartment.)

Per the NHTSA, there were two fires out of a population of 78,000 cars, up to 2020.  Three more such fires occurred after 2020, out of a larger population of vehicles.  In the end, GM recalled all of those (2017 to 2022).

Reading further across several sources, the problem arose in cars with bad battery modules, where the owners charged the car to 100%.  GM’s interim guidance was, in effect, don’t do that.  Don’t charge to 100% (and don’t run the battery down to zero).  Initially, GM agreed to replace all of those batteries, then they backtracked, and offered a software fix to monitor for the presence of those defective modules.  Basically, they modified the software so that the car’s software would raise a red flag if that car had one of the “bad” batteries.

FWIW, the used-car market appears unconcerned, as those Bolts sell on a par with the lower-range Leafs.  Here’s my crude summary, below.  With either car, accounting for the different tax credits for new and used cars, buying a two-year-old Bolt or a two-year-old Leaf would only save about $4500 off the new car MSRP.  (But see below, there are no Bolts available new MSRP).

FWIW, there appears to have been has only been one known Leaf battery fire in the U.S. in the entire history of the car.

That said, I’m not too concerned about the fire risk.  First, I avoid charging Li-ion batteries to 100%, because it shortens their life.  Two, this will be housed on an ancient detached garage, so if it burns, it’s not going to take my house with it.

Bolt:  Unobtainium near MSRP

Just to be sure I’m not hallucinating, this is what Chevy says:

Near as I can tell, those prices are a complete fiction.  At least in this area.

I don’t know whether my local Chevy dealers have figured out a way to collude on prices or not, but every one, in my area, has chosen to mark the up the Bolt by roughly the same amount, about $6000 over MSRP.

What a coincidence.

There’s one dealer within 250 miles that claims to have one, at a more reasonable markup over MSRP.  But upon investigation, that’s vaporware.  They’ve ordered one from Chevy and are pre-advertising it.

There’s a second dealer that claims to offer some at just over MSRP.  But upon inspection, that’s the price after you’ve paid them roughly a $5000 down-payment.

In short, the lowest actual asking price for the base-model Bolt, that I have run across, within a roughly 500-mile radius of my home, is about $33K.  Which translates to $25,500 after Federal tax credit.  Plus the usual fees, taxes, and so on.

The rest of the low-end new market.

To put a cap on it, per Tesla, today, the cheapest model available in my area is a Model 3 for $51K, with a range of just over 300 miles.

To put a floor on it, based on the cheapest hybrid:  A new Toyota Corolla hybrid gets 50 MPG (per EPA) and can be had around here for $25K asking price.  Buying that car, instead of an EV, would add about 0.4 tons C02 to my annual carbon footprint, assuming 3000 miles a year, and assuming Virginia’s electrical generation averages 0.65 pounds C02/KWH.  Around here, a new Toyota Prius looks like it’s almost unobtainable for anything near MSRP.  I’d probably be looking at $36K to buy a new Prius in this area.  At the very bottom end of new-car prices, a new Nissan Versa can be hand for $18K, and gets about 35 MPG.

What is the middle door for?  Only she knows.

Lightly used EV?  Leaf is a poor value.  Used Bolt avoids the current new-car-dealer surcharge.

For the Leaf S, if I were willing to roll the dice on a two-year-old used car with 20K miles, I could save a whopping $4.5K.  That small savings is due in part to the different tax credits for new ($7500) and used (up to $4000) cars.

For the Bolt, the used market appears to avoid the current high dealer markups on new Bolts.  There, under the same conditions (two years old, maybe 20K miles), I would save more like $10K, relative to actual current new Bolt asking prices.  I don’t know whether that reflects the fact that these cars were recalled.  But as far as I know, the 2023 is no different from the 2021, it’s just that GM installed the new software from the get-go.

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To summarize

I’m making progress.  I think.

Looks like a new or lightly used Chevy Bolt is the sweet spot, so far, for me.

There’s probably nothing in the $10K-and-under used EV market that I want.  All the cars in that segment started out with small battery packs.  I believe that, as the car ages, those small batteries make the car sensitive to even a few weak battery modules.  There’s too high a chance that now, or in a few years, I’ll end up with a temperamental vehicle that can’t be trusted to do normal all-around driving.

The only new EV available for under $30K asking price, around here, is the Nissan Leaf S.  That has some known drawbacks (no battery cooling, obsolete fast-charging port), and apparently is really not practical for any sort of summertime road trip, due to the extreme charge times with a hot battery.

A Chevy Bolt, with the current ridiculous dealer markup, but after the Federal tax credit, costs about the same as the cheapest new hybrid cars.   For example, it’s about the same as the base model Toyota Corolla, which gets 50 MPG EPA.  So, in the sense of avoiding carbon footprint, it costs me nothing to choose the Bolt over a new hybrid.

(Not shown, there’s also the Ford Maverick hybrid truck which would, in theory, cost about that much.  But those are also more-or-less unobtainable at reasonable markup in my area.  Those get 37 MPG, and have all the the functionality of a pickup truck.)

Cheaper than that, and the only available new cars are non-hybrids, with what appears to be a maximum gas mileage of around 35 MPG.  Of which the Nissan Versa is an example.  But now, still in the early stages of our global warming disaster, I’d say that the last thing I want to do is cause yet another straight-gas car to be created. 

The upshot is that if I refuse to buy anything less efficient that a hybrid, I might as well get a Bolt EV.  With the tax credit, the Bolt costs about the same as the cheapest hybrid.

And then, the question is whether I want to save maybe $10K by gambling on a two-year-old used Bolt.

Go up another $10K to $15K, and you have your choice of new EVs.  But just as a matter of taste, I find none of them to be any more appealing than the Bolt.  Some are modestly larger.  Some have (I guess) more prestigious names than Chevy.  None materially exceeds the range of the bolt, until you hit the $50K bottom-end Tesla.

Das Bolt von Barbie, only available in Germany.

The Bolt is a risk, due to a history of rare battery overheating during full charge.  In theory, GM addressed that.  In practice, you aren’t going to know for sure.  Certainly, the market has not shied away from the Bolt.  Even used Bolts are pretty fully-priced.  And I don’t think GM fixed the issue at any basic level, they just installed the newer software on the new Bolts at the factory.