The Cheapest Used Electric Cars I’m Finding – CleanTechnica

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I’ve written updates on used electric car deals a number of times throughout the years. However, I’ve decided I want to do something a little more regular and methodical to track how this market is changing. With growing options, I had to really narrow down the parameters and what I’m collecting, but I’m still hopeful this will be useful and I’m concerned it’ll also be too big of a task down the road. We’ll find out.

Before getting into it, let’s just note that today is the last day to buy a used EV in the USA and get the $4,000 tax credit. There is, of course, fine print on this matter, and I wrote about that here (based on what the IRS has shared). Also, three weeks ago I wrote about some top used EV options I could find that qualified.

Once I got going in this new used EV tracking system, I realized I needed to set certain key parameters in order for it to not be too wieldy and wild. Here are the things I decided need to remain consistent (though, more may be added or changed the first few times I do this):

• I’m using carfax.com for the searches. If someone has a strong case to make that I should use a different site (carvana.com, carmax.com, autotrader.com, etc.), let me know. I believe I found our used BMW i3 on CARFAX 7 years ago and I was quite happy with that process and car, so that’s what I’ve used here.
• I’m sorting the cars by price from low to high, and then logging the data for the two or three cheapest options, but…
  • I’m excluding vehicles that have been in an accident or have other damage, since those are odd cases and I think most people would ignore them.
  • I’m excluding cars with 50,000+ miles.
• As far as the models I’m choosing to log, it’s models with an MSRP under $60,000. I may change this to under $50,000.
• I’m not including models that were released less than two years ago, since the natural, ongoing used market is not really ripe for them yet. (Though, I snuck the Chevy Equinox EV in here….)
• The car has to be less than a decade old.
• At the moment, I’m not including discontinued models.
• Even with everything above, this list isn’t actually comprehensive — there are some other models that, technically, I should include.
• I’m just searching in my region — Southwest Florida within 100 miles of my zip code.
• I’m logging price, miles driven, and the year + trim of the vehicle. Naturally, you really have to dig into options, trims, and changes from one model year to another to decide what you think is good and sensible for yourself. Should I get more specific in these kinds of matters? I don’t know.

Here are options I found today using these parameters:

I think in the future I’ll just share a Google Sheet logging these. This is just a starter and I’m curious for people’s thoughts and ideas on this.

Looking at the table above, are there any exceptional deals that jump out at you? Any interesting notes? Something that jumped out to me is the Volkswagen ID.4 can be had for much lower used than new compared to other models. Perhaps due to sub-par infotainment? Any other factors at play there?