> Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent.

I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.

Set the goalposts and we can discuss it. If we're talking new cars, I think >$30k is for the affluent. If you want to consider used cars, maybe they become more attainable, but the supply is tiny (literally 50x as many used IC focuses as used electric focuses near me) and there's still a premium for the equivalent car (~20% from what I see).

I can buy a 2013 electric Focus for $13k. I can buy a 2012 BMW 328i for $14k. Are BMWs also affordable now?

> Are BMWs affordable now?

A 5 year old base 3-series has always been affordable, unless you include maintenance and the price/availability of parts.

Older BMW's have relatively high maintenance costs which is a real issue.

Not sure about that Focus, but electric cars have vastly fewer moving parts which should help quite a bit.

Older electric cars eventually need a complete battery pack replacement which is not a trivial cost. I don't know what the lifespan of the battery pack in a Focus is, though.

On an older focus that's not nearly the issue vs longer range electrics it's ~23 kWh * $150/kwh ~= 3,450$ and dropping.

I know people that spent that much just replacing a BMW's transmission. Yea, not free but everything else should be cheap so maintenance costs are likely to be far less over the next 5 - 10 years.

To be clear, I'm not actually advocating that used BMWs are affordable.

Edit: I do wonder how many of these "cheap" electric cars will ever have a replacement battery pack. When your car value drops below $5000, are you really going to spend $3000 (guesstimate including labor) to replace the battery?

Sure, I just meant if the TCO is around 1k/year higher on the BMW they are not really equivalent options for most people.

Anyway, this might change if they are more common, but for now used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

> used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.

Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.

This is complicated by the dramatic drop in new batters.

If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.

In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.

I just bought a 2015 Nissan Leaf that just came off lease with 20k miles on it for $12000. I financed it for the credit bump and the monthly payment is $240 a month. That is about $80 more a month than I was paying on gas and full coverage insurance is about the same as my old car (2007 Accord).

It has a 70k warranty on all major systems and 2 years of road side assistance. Which reminds me I can remove that from my insurance coverage and save about $15 a month.

I was spending over $1000 a year maintaining my old car so for the same or less expense I now have what I consider a much nicer car and modern features. It's also a lot more fun to drive.

I find it interesting that these electric cars are dropping so much and value in the first three years. More than half. And that's on dealer resell, not the trade-in value. Last time I bought a three-year-old car, the dealer resell price was about 75% of the original retail.

From what I understand it's partially because of the uncertainty of unproven technology, and partially because a lot of people bought them for the tax breaks.

Nissan didn't (and still might not) have active cooling in their batteries and was seeing high failure rates in states like Arizona. Because of this, Nissan ended up extending battery warranties to 8 years / 100,000 miles. Basically if there is anything wrong with the battery or it's capacity drops below 9 bars (starts at 12), then Nissan will replace it.

Combined state and federal deductions on EVs were up to 50% of the purchase or lease price of a Leaf and could be deducted over several years. This combined with annual fuel savings when gas was $4 a gallon meant people could drive a new car for little more than the cost of insurance since Nissan was including free charging at qualified stations for 2 years. So a lot of Leafs were bought or leased and being dumped on the market now that all the incentives are drying up.

Absolutely agreed with all of this, and well done on the analysis--you backed out my back-of-the-envelope numbers.

Gas has been ~$2 where I live for a very long time, and you're right, I'm closer to 5 than 10k miles, and much of it is city.

I don't travel much though. :-)