Are Second Hand EVs Unsellable?

To save some money, would you buy say a ten-year old petrol-powered car? Probably, if it was in good nick, not too many miles. What about a secondhand phone, say a ten-year-old iPhone? Would you buy that instead of a new phone? I doubt it. So what about a ten-year-old electric car? Would you even consider it, one that’s batteries are or the way out, one that’s range is way less than the modern cars? I also doubt it. So this has become a real problem for the electric car industry. Are secondhand electric cars just becoming giant paperweights sellable only for scrap? Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda recently said that EVs would only ever make up 30% of the global car market. You think he would know. He said. “I think this is something that customers and the market will decide, not regulatory values or political power.” If we look at China as a cautionary tale, lucrative subsidies turned the country into an EV giant, but the lack of secondhand sales produced weed-infested graveyards of abandoned vehicles.