What are EVs worth five years on? Not much, shows China’s used car market

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

China’s used car dealers have set an expiry date for electric cars.

About four out of five used car dealers in China refuse to accept a fully electric vehicle older than five years, over worries about battery life and replacement costs, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook. A three-year-old EV in China now resells for about 45% of its original price, down from almost 55% in 2023, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association.

China has been the world’s largest EV market for a decade and now has 44 million of them on its roads. This makes it the first country where EVs are aging in large numbers. Yet its dealers can’t reliably price a used EV, because there is no agreed way to measure the health of its most expensive part, the battery, according to industry experts. The countries that have imported Chinese EVs will face the same valuation problem as the cars turn five.

“Exporting the car is the easy part,” Bill Russo, founder of the Shanghai-based advisory firm Automobility, told Rest of World. “Building the ecosystem that supports its second and third owner is much harder.”

Chinese carmakers exported more than 2.5 million EVs last year, twice the previous...

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